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The Motivation:Personal Gain
The Example:Call of Duty 3
The Crime:
Breathing heavily, you lean against a crumbling tombstone and begin reloading your Army-issued Thompson submachine gun with trembling, dirt-caked hands. Mortar rounds pulverize the earth and rock around you as Nazi tanks draw closer to your very vulnerable position.
War is hell, but at least you're not alone. Ducking and weaving across the French cemetery to save you is a military medic, syringe in hand. Suddenly, however, the syringe is a gun and the medicine is a dose of deadly lead. You're down.
But wait, he's healing you after all! Expressing gratitude, you turn to face the battle anew... only to receive another incapacitating bullet in the head for your trusting naivete. How many times must a man be asked to die - and live, and die again - for his country?
Shoot, heal, shoot, heal, shoot, heal. In Call of Duty 3, the medic class soldier can get quite the life-giving, life-taking racket going. Successful team rescues provide valuable multiplayer points, thousands upon thousands of which are necessary if you want to climb the ranks or unlock all the Achievements. When there just aren't enough broken bodies on the battlefield to pad that score, it can be awfully tempting to start creating them yourself.
The motivation is pure and simple selfishness. Killing a teammate here appears to benefit the player; thus, the means justify the rewarding ends. The player doesn't necessarily want to mow down his or her comrades... but incentive has seemingly been offered to do so. Admirable? No. Understandable? Kinda, yeah.
Actually, the "Doc" Achievement requires that you get 10 heals without a team kill, and the points received from any heal aren't enough to justify the ones lost from friendly fire. Those facts aren't obvious at first, though, so rather than calling your killer a "psychopath," try "n00b" or plain old "stupid" instead.
