Internet cafe, you say? No, we call it an internet club. In my opinion, calling it an internet cafe makes it sound like a place that serves light drinks and/or food for people to come and hang out, which is, by the way, the case in many European countries such as France. You typically see internet cafes that serve a beer and have large screen TVs placed in front of sofas or couches to let people play video games on PlayStation or Xbox while sipping their beers. In the Middle East, where I have grown up, we have internet clubs. An internet club is a place that unites casual and sometimes even professional gamers together for one single purpose: to play video games! It’s a well-established culture around here. Internet club is not a place you go to have a beer and play chill PS/Xbox games with a controller, although there are many internet clubs that also provide that option for people, as well. However, the core of what an internet club is is a room packed with cutting-edge computer hardware to play (mostly competitive) video games in ultra-high FPS, low lags, no slowdowns due to fast internet, and maxxed out toxicity levels. Don’t get me wrong, such internet clubs also do serve light beverages and sandwiches, but almost no one goes to these places to eat or drink; you usually just buy soda or something to stay hydrated in between the intense moments of your gaming experience.

Yeah… It is true that there are also a few people coming to an internet club to watch a movie or just surf the web casually, but this is fine since they are in the minority. Most of the guys are like-minded toxic gamers, add or take. By using “maxxed toxicity” or “toxic gamers” I don’t want to scare anyone who hasn’t had the honor to experience what it is like to go to an internet club. The toxicity among even casual gamers like me is often a myth. I mean, yes, it does exist and may make you angry and hate the experience of multiplayer gaming, but if you haven’t learned to love the feeling of uttermost hatred, then playing competitive multiplayer games may not be for you. You should be able to improvise, adapt, and overcome the toxicity by being even more toxic sometimes. Mastering this requires mastering one’s own control over one’s emotions and IQ levels. It is a hard thing to do because being toxic to untoxisize other toxic players sometimes requires lowering your IQ while maintaining high emotional intelligence (EQ) to not get burnt in the flame you lit.

You may light the flame by being toxic to other players online, but the burn won’t have a physical smell in the club. So, no one sitting in the internet club will really know about what you have done or how toxic you have become. What does (or at least used to) have a real smell in internet clubs is the smell of burning cigarettes. Ah, that smell that our generation grew up breathing into our lungs… that smell that to our cloths and made our parents become suspicious of us for smoking cigarettes outside… that smell that helped us get an inch closer to catching a lung cancer from the young ages… My descriptions of this feeling, which I have right now, do nothing but fall short of explaining the feeling well enough. I am like a kid whose tongue got caught up in between explaining how good a nostalgic feeling of the smell of a cigarette that others constantly smoked around you can get, and mentioning how bad it is for your health, even worse than the people smoking them cigarettes. I still go to internet clubs, but the consistency has been fading away due to the life matters one should deal with growing up. Sometimes it is the memories of good old times that we reminisce about that make us appreciate the culture we have been a part of.

These places that we call internet clubs are really more like esports clubs or esports cafes, but I’ll probably continue calling them internet clubs until the end of my non-profit casual gaming career. Not because of my inner gamer toxicity, but because the reader – you – are probably as dumb as yo mama, who strikes oil when she wears high heels because she so fat. Did you reckon the drop in the IQ while maintaining a moderately stabilized EQ during the insult? I did it just for illustration purposes, so please do not take the insult seriously. To close it up on a good note, I will end it with this song.