Fear and Loathing in the Mess Hall Complex

Flynnhustler writes: "Our upstart videogame culture site, Robot Street Gang, has just posted a new story by seasoned videogame writer Peter Olafson. The story, Stuck, is a first person account of Olafson's tortuous attempts to beat the PSOne game Alien Resurrection. If you've ever read his Game Theory columns in the New York Times or his oft linked San Jose Mercury-News piece about gaming after Sept. 11, you know that Olafson takes a very personal approach to the exeperience of gaming."

Comments

Sure gaming is personal

[phyberop]

sure its personal, I know of a person that got all dressed up in black, and held a funeral for Aerith in FF7 when she died.
Gaming plays a major part of peoples recreation these days, cant expect it not to affect some people :)

Alternate "War Game With Intelligent Enemies" Link

[titus_groan]

is here

Perfectionist Players

[albamuth]

I think a lot of people play through FPS games in a way that smacks of perfectionism, ie: "leave no enemy alive, no ammo ungathered." I observed a friend of mine creeping through Half-Life, saving after just about every kill they make, meticulously reloading if they "used up too much ammo/health". I can't stand this style of playing. I used to be like that myself, then I realized I should be having fun, not getting stressed out about virtual bullet conservation.

I recently purchased and played through System Shock 2, which is quite a difficult game, actually (even on "Normal") and I realized that instead of the casual, "kill some but run from most" style I was used to, I was lapsing into the perfectionist mode.

However, thinking about it more lead me to conclude that the difficulty of the game forced you to save after every successful deed, as if it was part of the game design or something. After a while, hitting quick save and quick reload became reflexive, and the loading bar became the majority of my game experience.

The problem with FPS, I think, is giving the player far too much control and leaving almost nothing up to chance. I mean, in a RTS no saved game plays out the same -- the little critters or machines don't move/die/kill exactly the same each time, so it's not like you can blame yourself. However, the RTS is built for twitchy people, and twitchy people alone dominate the Counterstrike servers.

That being the case, I think that's why the cheating struck him as wrong. He wanted to prove his skill to himself. Cheating in a RTS game would mean something else entirely, but in a FPS it's like your not really playing. Everything feels cheapened.

I totally forgot what my point was, actually. -1, braindead.