Another game that I’ve had some appreciable experience with is Counter-Strike: Source.

Appreciable though my experience was, I cannot say I appreciate its community.

In fact, it’s one of the most abject communities that I know of.

Kill an enemy once, you’re lucky. Kill him twice, you’re cheating.

I’ve never seen so little sportsmanship in a game. Be it public servers or proper matches, there’s always an idiot to make provocative remarks. It seems to be one of the unwritten laws of the game.

The only reason I stuck around with the game for so long is because of the gameplay itself — addictive, with a lot of possibilities, and fostering teamwork to no limit.

Considering the importance of real-time information, it’s very common to use voice chat to communicate with your teammates. Usually, you would use a third-party program such as Mumble, Ventrilo or TeamSpeak to communicate with your friends during the game. Actually speaking with your teammates really gets you closer to them, and as such I found it easier to make close friends on CS:S compared to other games.

Back in the days, there used to be a website where you could play matches with random players assigned to each team. It was a good way to meet new people, and that’s incidentally how I made friends with some British players. We would play other games too and have a lot of fun in each other’s company.

A month ago, after a year-long break of gaming, I picked up Counter-Strike: Source again. I decided to capitalize on the size of its German community to find German friends to play with. Those I came across were surprisingly friendly and fun to play with, and lately I’ve been practicing my spoken German that way.

The thing is, when playing with strangers on CS:S, you should try your best not to feel self-conscious. Just be outgoing and upbeat, just like you would in real life, and say whatever goes through your mind. Censor yourself as little as possible. Of course, you don’t always need to talk a lot, but judging by my personal experience, people usually find you interesting for the mere reason that you speak — more or less fluently — their language. And as far as the actual games go, most of the time all you need to do is inform your teammates of the location of the enemies and how many they are. Trust me, before long you’ll get the hang of the prepositions “to the right,” “to the left”, “at the top,” “at the bottom”, “above”, “below”, “behind”, “in front of”, and the rest. Because you constantly hear your teammates reporting in, you quickly pick up on the names of the different spots, as well as certain idioms (“bloody hell!”).

Of course, you can come across friendly players just as you can distant ones. So far I’ve been for the most part lucky, but should something go wrong, depending on the circumstances, you can either blame the other person for being a jerk or blame yourself for adopting the wrong attitude. A good thing about online interactions is that it’s maybe a bit easier to separate your attitude from your identity, your “true” self. Should things go awry, it’s better not to take things personally but rather learn from it.

If you plan on buying CS:S to practice your French, I’d say it’s a brave but sound bet. In fact, five years ago I met a Swede on a French server. He was so confident that I only realized mid-game that he had a funny accent and sometimes had trouble expressing himself. In spite of that, he had been playing on French servers for a long time and was casually working his way to fluency. He’s as inspiring as he is adorable, and he has since become a close friend of mine. (And guess what: today’s his birthday!)

His French was good but not terrific either, so it really shows that anyone can fit in provided they have the right attitude – nobody wants a “dead cat” in a game. (But you don’t necessarily have to be the life of the party either.)

The bulk of the CS:S community comes from Germany and France, and, to a lesser extent, the U.K. and Spain. French players also have a relatively popular website, ridiculously named LeetGamerz, where you can play CS:S games with random people. The vast majority of them are beginners, so your skill doesn’t matter too much there; but then again, if you’re good, people will want to play with you even more.

All this being said, if you plan on playing with French players, you should beware of latency problems. If you don’t live in Europe, it will be nearly impossible for you to play properly with European players because of the delay.

Another caveat is that the CS:S community is nowhere near as active as it used to be, so maybe you’ll want to buy the more recent version of the game instead, called Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. You’ll find a lot more players there, and you will also be able to organize matches on other websites, such as ESL.

Whatever your choice may be, multiplayer video games are a great way to put your language abilities into practice while having fun. You’ll make friends that speak your target language, and that’s in my opinion the best kind of practice you can ask for.

You might be interested in the article I wrote about my experience with Rainbow Six: Lockdown and its far lovelier community.