The Psyche of a Gamer - Part 1
Submitted by Mardas on Wed, 30/01/2008 - 01:26
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"I am Mardas. I am a Cypriot male and therefore I am all knowing. No one's opinion is of any significance other than my own (and my mother's) and I know best even when it comes to things I know nothing about."
Anyone that read my previous post will be aware that I have been spending some time with Geometry Wars on my DS Lite lately. With each round I played my life expectancy started going up. Then suddenly and as if by Divine intervention a thought started brewing in my head. I started intracranially tinkering about with how the game would play had the controls been switch around a bit.
I realised this thought process starts happening in every gamer's brain as they start to get comfortable with there virtual surroundings and start thinking of ways to improve the experience. An alternative theory could be that we are looking for flaws in the game to prove our individual superior intellect.
It's almost as if gamers are the link between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. After all, individually, we are convinced we possess greater learning and thinking capabilities. We are also of the general opinion that we are better than your average Joe six pack, or to localise the phrase your average Toouli six okaes tsamarela. Yet we still exhibit those brute animal traits of survival and derive pleasure in the occasional bludgeoning of things to death when they disagree with us, at least whilst being in the modern version of the Pleistocene epoch that is known as Xbox Live (online gaming).
As I already mentioned previously, you control the movement of your ship with your right thumb using the D-pad and your direction of fire by touching the stylus on the particular part of the screen you want to aim your projectiles towards.
With my uber intellect now physically causing my head to swell I came to a logical conclusion. I, a disgruntled treasury dealer by day and gamer by night, was right and the professional game designers were blatantly wrong.
Swapping the functionality of the stylus to control the path my ship followed would increase its manoeuvrability. The ripple effect then being staying alive for longer. However that would mean a trade off in firing accuracy as my left, by now biotic, thumb would have to aim the projectiles by using the inferior D-pad.
Genius right? Or is it?
to be continued ...
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i know what you mean about
i know what you mean about that intellect and superiority thing. I remember playing Sensible World of Soccer on the PC 24hours a day. The game was too easy and i just started making rules for myself. Have to go past the goalkeeper to score. Once that became too easy i switched to cannot score from inside the area. Too easy? Then i decided to score just after i go past the halfway line. After a while i mastered that.
Then i switched my strikers with defenders and so on and so on..........
I am really disappointed that
I am really disappointed that I never got into Sensible Soccer like you. Every time you mention it sounds that you had such a great time with that game. I guess it serves me right for not buying a PC back in the day.
Its funny the different ways we come up with ideas to keep yourselves entertained. I remember the old school football arcades am I used to make myself score only from the half way line for the first two rounds to challenge myself.
What happened with me in Geo Wars was more of me trying to find a better way to play the game than finding it too easy. But eventually I did stopped using certain drones as it was getting too easy and I felt as if I was cheating.