MASH reviews the online game Sissyfight

Sissyfight: Winning Isn't Everything

I sometimes long for the good ol' days of grammar school when I could voice a sudden visceral reaction to another kid without repercussion. Like the other day - I admit it, I know it's wrong and I should be shot for it - I was watching the season premiere of "The Real World" and I had an immediate negative reaction to that one guy with the dark hair. I hated him the moment I saw him. If there's love at first sight, why not hate at first sight? Anyway, I proclaimed my abhorrence of him loudly and my roommate looked at me in horror. How could I hate him when he's only been on screen for two minutes and said all of ten words?

I can't believe that I'm the only one who makes these snap judgments. And for me, that's what grammar school was all about. I remember when a snap judgment caused a human tug of war over me between Tina Baker and my twin sister against that meany Tamara Tully. It just warms my heart thinking about it.

Now we can all return to that innocent and cruel world with Sissyfight, an on-line game where you can scratch, tease, taunt and grab your uniformed opponents till your heart's content, all in the name of destroying other little girls' self-esteem. You can hurl extremely rude and offensive taunts at your tiny little girl schoolmates when they do something bad to you, or even when they don't! Friendships are forged just as quickly as malicious ire. I started playing about a month ago and although I haven't been that successful at winning the games, it does help me vent my real life frustrations. And all manner of people are playing; you're just as likely to walk into a game of people discussing on-line web mergers as 'N Sync.

Sissyfight is won when all but two girls have lost their self-esteem points. The key to a good game, I find, is the making of alliances. This allows your girls to gang up on fellow players. If you make friends and pick on all those in opposition, you can kick some major ass.

The first thing you need to do at Sissyfight is create your character. You can pick your skin tone, face shape and hairdo. The most popular do by far is the two braids, which we all had as little girls (well, at least all of us who were little girls). Some players choose to make themselves overly ugly by selecting the pinched-faced, scary-eyed, green-skinned, mohawk look. Trust can be sealed on your appearance alone, so choose wisely.

Here are the fabulous things you can do:


Scratching: Truly a liberating experience, seeing your little girl scratch another. Too bad the scratch marks don't stay for the rest of the game. Scratching subtracts one point from self-esteem points. Watch out though, you are bound to get beat up for scratching.
	Grabbing: Can be a nice seemingly non-offensive alternative to scratching. You can feign protection of a friend or yourself and chances are the grabee won't retaliate. If you grab someone you can stop them from scratching someone else or from licking their lolly, which restores some of their self-esteem points.
Teasing: You need at least two to tease someone - this is where your alliances come in. Teasing can be very effective but is rarely successful because it's so hard to enact in unison.
Tattling: Everyone gets two chances to tattle, but if two girls tattle at the same time they both lose three points without the others being harmed. If you're tattled upon, you lose three points. By cowering, however, you can cleverly avoid any point subtraction.

	Cowering: By cowering you can avoid most attacks except a tease and a multiple attack. If more than one person attacks you, you only avoid one offense by cowering. The rules have just changed and now you can lose self-esteem points for cowering too much!
	Licking your lolly: You can restore two lost self-esteem points by licking your lolly but you can only do it twice in one game. And licking does not prevent others from successfully attacking you. Lick cautiously.

Technically there are strategies to winning that, when followed, yield a certain amount of success. But when you're actually playing and the little girl you just made friends with gets scratched, the rules go out the window. I tend to protect my tiny friends at all costs; it can be a very emotional bonding experience. Now, wouldn't that just thrill the hearts of our elementary school teachers?

--Kate Murphy, a.k.a. Mimsy May

is located at www.sissyfight.com