Virtual Suicide Bombing

Clive Thompson plays Halo 3 online. Because he has a life, and does not spend 10-20 hours a day on line, his skills, and his power are limited.

However, he has found a way to even the scales:

....

Whenever I find myself under attack by a wildly superior player, I stop trying to duck and avoid their fire. Instead, I turn around and run straight at them. I know that by doing so, I'm only making it easier for them to shoot me -- and thus I'm marching straight into the jaws of death. Indeed, I can usually see my health meter rapidly shrinking to zero.

But at the last second, before I die, I'll whip out a sticky plasma grenade -- and throw it at them. Because I've run up so close, I almost always hit my opponent successfully. I'll die -- but he'll die too, a few seconds later when the grenade goes off. (When you pull off the trick, the game pops up a little dialog box noting that you killed someone "from beyond the grave.")

It was after pulling this maneuver a couple of dozen times that it suddenly hit me: I had, quite unconsciously, adopted the tactics of a suicide bomber -- or a kamikaze pilot.

....

What is interesting here is that the dynamic is pretty much identical to those of an insurgency. While the stakes are clearly less, no one is actually dying, the power dynamics are the same, and so are the resulting tactics.