As a product of an oddly eclectic Christian upbringing, I’ve encountered quite a bit of radical stuff during my Sunday school classes.  One of the things I’ve always had problems with, however, is the principle of turning the other cheek.

Not that it made  sense to me at the time. For me, not retaliating was the ultimate excuse for being a doormat. Turn the other cheek? Yeah, right. I’d rather do the eye for an eye thingy–even in an MMORPG.

I got my first taste of PvP combat in CCR’s Rising Force Online. That was my first and my last massive scale PvP game. While it was fun at first, the prospect of enduring repeated backstabbing by higher level players got to me after a while.

To make a long story short, I eventually mellowed out, PVP-wise. While I still log onto the game, I tend to use it as an over-glorified chatroom these days.

Strangely, the specter of potential PvP refused to leave me alone. An editor of mine recently assigned me to cover the local launch of a new PvP-based game called Rohan Online.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the game, this is how the Rohan Online revenge system works: whenever someone KOs you, that player character’s name will conveniently appear on your hit list. You may then choose to be instantly teleported to that character’s location (more specifically, behind that character’s back) so that you may exact your  revenge.

The trade-off is that if you ever get to repay him or her, your character’s name will then appear on your foe’s hit list. That way, the cycle of vengeance can go on indefinitely.

This was one of the points that I brought up during the Q & A portion of the launch. Since I was in a bit of a weird mood at the time, I asked the question that some small, inner voice had been prompting me to ask for the past hour.

“Does Rohan Online give you any incentive for not exacting revenge on someone who has backstabbed you?”

The game’s marketing manager looked at me as if I’d grown another pair of eyes.

After he’d recovered, he told me that there was no real reason for not getting revenge. The best thing a player could do, he said, was to “make friends with your former enemy and then go out and backstab someone else together.”

It sounded like a strange way to turn the other cheek. Satisfied, I held my peace for the rest of the launch event, fully intending not to play this game at all.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Rohan Online has the potential to be a good game–for PVP enthusiasts, that is. The local marketing head of Rohan Online here gave a good presentation, but it wasn’t enough for me to get out of my “no PvP” comfort zone.

You see, I’d discovered something even more satisfying than exacting revenge: that of making other players your friends even before they have a chance to become your enemies.

I learned this principle from some of the nicest folks I’d ever met online, and this has brought about a total paradigm shift.  After all, I very well know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a backstab. Why should I do the very thing I hate to someone else, especially when there are better alternatives available? Easy? No. Ultimately satisfying? Definitely.

Maybe there’s something to turning the other cheek after all.