Finding New and Unintended Ways of Playing Games

Ronald Diemicke writes "World of Warcraft players sometimes hang out in front of Ironforge and dance. Fallout 3 players seek out new and elaborate ways of destroying their avatar. Brawlers in Smash Brothers have an itchy pause finger, ready to catch any humiliatingly hilarious screengrabs. The thugs running rampant in Grand Theft Auto are putting Evil Knievel to shame by using a full assortment of vehicles to pull off some incredible stunt work. Personally, I like to collect and move things. My favorite is making piles of bodies in any game that lets me move them around. Ever catch yourself doing something in-game that isn't exactly part of the game, or just something really dumb?"

Comments

I like to get the first post on news forums

[MrRTFM]

instead of reading articles, it is more fun to be the first to comment on it without knowing what I am talking about

Dumb AND obsessively repetitive...

[choovanski]

When I was introduced to (pre-WOW) Warcraft I would annihilate a level by _almost_ completing it. For example, if a requirement was that I needed three buildings to clear the level I'd only build two. Then I'd put the peons to work chopping down every tree, emptying every mine, sucking up every last bit of oil... Once there was nothing more that could be done to rape the landscape THEN I'd move on to the next level. Don't ask me why, it wasn't exactly fun sitting there waiting for them to finish. I just had the urge to take it ALL... I think I was meant to be an upper level executive instead of an admin. :P

Re:Dumb AND obsessively repetitive...

[DNS-and-BIND]

This is just a symptom of hoarding disorder. Likewise the article in the summary. For whatever reason, some people just can't feel good without FINISHING. A Warcraft level is finite, the real world much less so. What would happen if the completion counter on GTA3 (or whatever game) only went up to 99% and never 100%? Imagine the groaning and gnashing of teeth! And if the reason was revealed as "some developer with a subversive sense of humor made it so nobody could get 100% complete?" Oh, my, there would be blood. The real krovvy kind, not the kind that turns to green when you hit the parental guidance icon.

Re:Dumb AND obsessively repetitive...

[pbhj]

You feel threatened by the potency of a male figure in your life, probably your father.

If I were Freud I'd say you want to sleep with your mother too, but I'm not.

Re:Dumb AND obsessively repetitive...

[Hurricane78]

I did the same in pretty much every game. I have to kill every monster, collect every powerup, and do everything possible. And I can tell you the causes of this with a very nice example. (I have forgotten the details, so I will fill in my own.)

There is an old movie, where there is a imminent nuclear explosion. And the women in the household, just starts to clean everything in the house to total perfection. Because her mind can't stand the "chaos". She feels the extreme urge to order that chaos. So instead of running to a bomb shelter, she dies ironing shirts in the living room.

Find out what gave you the urge.

I have a well-proven method to find it: When you are doing the "landscape raping", stop for some seconds, and concentrate on the bad feeling that that gives you. Try to do as much as possible to strengthen that feeling. (Create congruence.) Like adding other things to the situation (or removing them). Jump right in the middle of the feeling. And get it to the absolute maximum.
Yes, it will hurt. and your subconscious will fight it tooth and nail. Which is why it's much easier, when you have someone who can keep you on that path, while not bringing in his own (possibly twisted) influences. Also it means that you have to be in an environment, where you can really act out the stuff. It must be OK, even if you flip out, destroy half the room, do "perverse" things, or cry like a baby. (Shame is the natural enemy here.)
This usually re-activates old (=weak) neural associative pathways, that once were created when the original source of the problem happened. Which means those old things suddenly pop up and reappear in your mind.
Now beware that more often than not, there are many steps to re-activate, and the first thing is usually not the original source. Which means that you can only be sure to have reached the real source, when after a long time, you still don't get to a next step. Which is unrealistic, because it takes very long. But prepare for your first "final source" to not actually be the final one, and having to do the whole thing even deeper, when you find out that it's still not really solved. (These intermediate "sources" usually are re-traumatizations that added something to it. Often they also are *partial* "final sources", because there is more than one final cause.)
Anyway... when you have reached that final source/cause, you usually see a huge range of things in your life, that are very twisted, and have nothing to do with how you thing it would make sense to react. WRITE THEM ALL DOWN! (In a tree-like mind-map. I recommend paper, or the FreeMind mind-mapping software [open-source]) This again is a process where you have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for those "twisted" things. To really get them all.
Once you have that map of your not-so-rose-colored glasses, you can start to re-train yourself. Which means that every time you get to such a situation, you (usually) automatically notice that what you would do now, is something that makes no actual sense, but only in the context of that "twist". So you do what you *actually* think makes sense.
This again is a hard process, because you fight against age-old habits. So reward yourself generously, get as much mental strength / love from your loved ones as possible, and just expect it to hurt to fight it, until you are over the top of the mountain (a more accurate description than "out of the woods"). And don't let this stop you. :)
It will take time to re-train yourself. And the stronger the new impressions, the more you learn, and thereby the faster it goes. But keep your personal balance between "too hard" and "too easy", to keep the acceleration at a maximum. It's no help when you get completely off the "road" because you were too fast.
Allright. Good luck. And try it with a professional, if needed. (Just beware that most professionals actually can *also* get to a level where it's too much for them. They are only human, even if they are trained to stand it. But that is their fault, and you do not have to take this into consideration. If needed, find a better/stronger/stabler one. After all, you're paying for it.)

Explorer

[omnilynx]

I'm not sure if this really counts because often it fits in with the intent of the game, but I like to completely explore everything. Especially if there's a map that gets filled in as I explore; I will happily criss-cross a bare desert if it's the last uncharted corner of the map. It really clues you in on the quality of the game: the best games are the ones where the designers stuck all sorts of cool little things away in corners for people like me to find. The worst games are the ones where none of the doors open but the ones you need to reach the next story point.

Re:Explorer

[WinterSolstice]

Same here - for me, it's part of why Ultima stood so far above the rest.

I get any game, doesn't matter what, and I'm always trying to hop onto buildings, fall off maps, find new KOS zones, etc. Usually long before it makes sense for my character to be in a zone or area, I'm there. Sneaking around, harassing NPCs.

Oblivion is one of my all time favorites for exactly this reason. I've explored probably every inch of that game. Right now, I'm visiting and taking screenshots all over LOTRO, though there are less hidden wonders than I'd like (the river basin with two opposing waterfalls is funny, though. Where's the water *go*?)

Re:Explorer

[bertok]

That's why I stopped playing WoW.

My strategy has always been the same: I liked to find the ultimate 'combo' and push my character far beyond what the original designers intended. For example, in WoW I played an Alchemist Paladin - the theory being that by using Paladin shields and spells, I could survive just long enough in high-level zones to pick some uber herb, make uber potions, and then use said potions to turn myself into the Ubermensch. I could pull it off too. I was able to go into zones 10 levels above me, and walk out with bags full of herbs. I did things like jump off cliffs on low-level zones into corners of high level zones while shielded, so I would be able to pick the one herb that was there out of range of any monsters. I carefully waited for patrols of elite mobs to wander past, and I'd carefully sneak past them into high-level zones.

My strategy would have worked, except that Blizzard put in totally artificial limits into the game, so that if you did manage to cleverly set your character up like that, it wouldn't actually do you any good at all. The best strategy (in terms of efficiency) by far was always to grind roughly equal level mobs while doing boring quests (kill X of Y mobs). That pissed me off. The game actively forced you to play in a boring, linear, repetitive manner. Creativity was not only discouraged, but in many cases virtually impossible.

I'm sure they did it to prevent 'twinking', or 'exploiting', or whatever, but it made the game deadly boring for me. I much prefer games like Nethack, where you can find a wand of wishing after playing the game for 3 turns, and still die four turns later. (Yes, it happened to me. I now know that I shouldn't wish for artifacts that blast the wielder with their power when picked up if I'm still at level 1.)

Re:Explorer

[dhasenan]

No, you need a non-trivial reward *not related to gameplay*. An exceptionally beautiful scene, for instance. Or an old woman sitting on her front porch with fifty times as much dialog as a typical character, just talking about her life and the things she's seen and the places she's been.

It has to be something you can't take with you, but there should be a reward.

Designing a SIMS home-improvement

[Announcer]

I've used The Sims (1) to create some rather nice and pseudo-realistic drafts of some ideas my wife and I have for an expansion/remodel of our house. It worked quite well, despoite the limitations of this version of the game. Just create some random Sim, plop him on the property, pause the game, use the "rosebud;!;" cheat to rack up the Simoleans, and go to town.

I also used it to create sketches of a future radio station facility:
http://www.wphafm.org/concept

All done with The Sims (1)

I would like to try this with the Sims 2, seeing it provides much more flexibility and realism for such things. For now, though, those are my major "out-of-game" adventures. ;)

Re:Designing a SIMS home-improvement

[Anachragnome]

I seem to recall an interview with Will Wright that mentioned that he was told that he was tasked with making a program to do exactly what you described, but to also test design efficiency of floor-plans. The end result became "The Sims". He was essentially tricked into making a game.

So no surprise that you ended up using it for exactly that, designing buildings.

Did you actually use the sims in the game to test floor-plan efficiency?

Re:Designing a SIMS home-improvement

[johncadengo]

Really? I had no idea.

I'd always thought the point of Sims was to build elaborate swimming pools, take out the ladder, and watch your sims drown to death. Or my other favorite, surround the sims with four walls but no exits. And watch them starve. If I were feeling generous that day, I'd make a window or paint the walls.

Heh heh heh.

Re:Designing a SIMS home-improvement

[Anachragnome]

Jeez, a little imagination please.

Try taking two Sims (or better yet, many!) with opposing personalities, then bricking them into a room with nothing but a toilet and an espresso machine.

"Get the fuck out, asshole. I need to take a leak!"

"Really? You sure you just don't want another Caramel Machiatto ?"

It's the only way I've actually made a Sim I didn't control kill another Sim (gotta love them neighbors!). It takes about 10-15 fist-fights, but eventually one takes a permanent dirtnap. I even had BOTH Sims fall asleep in the middle of one of them fist fights once because there was no bed. Ball of Fury, then pow!, interrupted script and two Sims sleeping in puddles of piss.

The funniest part is watching the "totally surprised" reaction of the Sim that did the killing when the Grim Reaper shows up.

"Oh sure, it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt!"

sims

[Anonymous Coward]

I always found it amusing to try to get straight female sims into lesbian relationships.

You could get them to be best of friends and then ...

Never worked, but it was fun trying.

These guys...

[Xtense]

...have absolutely nothing on the admins of it-he.org

Read their Ultima sections.

Reeeead them.

Pro Roping

[Gunslinger47]

The roping community from Worms: Armageddon and World Party abuse the ninja rope in ways the developers certainly never anticipated.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQeNMD95lrE

...

/msg xOaPxJacky wiptistean
PACK: !Piles, AFR, CBA, KTC
gl+hf

StarCraft with nothing but the most useless units

[crucifer]

I actually finished SC and BW campaigns doing nothing other than zerglings for zergs, zealots for protoss and firebats for terran (marines are too powerful; so I decided to go for firebats). The entire game was quite easy even with this unit choice handicap. But when I arrived at the last mission of the expansion pack of BW. It was hell. The mission is as follow : You need to kill 3 overminds; each one with a special ability : 1- Your entire base is surrounded by invulnerable sunken colonies. The only way to reach that overmind is through a very long path of invulnerable sunken colonies. 2- Once ever 2-3 minutes a boss ultralisk would spawn and attack your base. That ultralisk takes only 1/2 HP damage per firebat hit, has 800HP and kills the firebat in a single hit. 3- Guardians and mutalisks attacks. Pretty hard to kill guardians with turrets since they have bigger ranger than turrets. I spent 8 hours in that single mission. I mined almost every last mineral of the map (some I couldn't reach because I could not build shuttles). t was absolutely awful, but I couldn't stop there. I HAD to be able to say I finished the entire game building nothing but the most basic units of the game.

Interesting Discussion

[Hojima]

I've never really realized how subconsciously evil I am until this topic was brought up. I'm usually a care-bear when it comes to online play, but when it comes to computers, I'm a total dick. For instance, in Spore I would pay all my allies to fight against each other in an effort to start a mindless massacre. In Oblivion, I would kill a whole town by using command humanoid to gather them, then casting a giant frenzy spell to start a mindless massacre (you can start to see the trend there). Then in other strategy games, I like to destroy everything except their main base. Then I build up a massive army of the strongest artillery, surround it, and then blast the bajesus out of it.

Re:Interesting Discussion

[sopssa]

Its fun to be a dick. In games its easier and theres no consequences in it and in single player games you wont be ruining anyone elses game either.

This is partly why I love physics games too. Its fun to build, destroy, smash and do something unexceptable to see the results. Physics games probably fit this category the best because they're made to play around with.

Sometimes I also dont want to get into some epic story but just have a bit of fun. Good physics engine + Good and responsive AI and the fun begins.

Re:Interesting Discussion

[sam0vi]

That reminded me of the times I played Lemmings in my 386. Whenever i got bored or frustrated I would just put two lemmings in "guard" mode right where they came out into the level, and after getting them all packed into the 3 or 4 pixels left between the guards, I would hit the suicide button and watch all of those lemmings blow up. It was like fireworks! Pretty fireworks!

Re:StarCraft with nothing but the most useless uni

[DNS-and-BIND]

WTF dude? Why did you 'HAVE' to do this? In another age, you would have been a bomber aircrew with a singleminded determination to esacpe a Nazi prison camp (the real kind, not the Wolfenstein 3D kind.) Or you would have been a crusader with the determination to wipe out all Christians from the Holy Land. Or you would have been a crewman on a British frigate, determined that Spain should not have hegemony of the seas. What happened to us, such that our best and brightest waste their talents on imaginary worlds instead of the real one?

Fallout 1: Pacifist

[Filip22012005]

I finished Fallout 1 without a single kill. Turns out the developers had thought someone wanted to do that. There were experience rewards for sneaking or finding peaceful solutions in almost every quest. It is with that mindset that I started playing Fallout 3. I was disappointed...

Apple II Stock Trader

[Bones3D_mac]

A neat trick I used to do with the Apple II was to put two machines side by side on the same power bar, switch both machines on then flipping on the power bar, causing the machines to boot simultaneously. Next, I'd load up a Stock Trading game on both machines and start playing.

Why do this, you ask?

Well, the Apple II uses a very simple random number generator that is always the same sequence from the moment the system powers up. So, by booting two machines simultaneously, it put the random number generators on each system in sync with one another.

In terms of the Stock Trading game, this meant I could use one machine as a sort of crystal ball, allowing me to see into the game's future, and then use the generated results to only buy up stocks that were going to increase in value and sell off those that would decrease.

As long as the machines booted up simultaneously, this always worked.

Re:Apple II Stock Trader

[NuGeo]

How the hell did you get a hold of Goldman Sachs' secret trading algorithm!?

Re:StarCraft with nothing but the most useless uni

[DMUTPeregrine]

So instead of single-mindedly killing fake people it's better if he single-mindedly killed real people? Perhaps not such a bad change after all, eh?

JC Denton, Interior Decorator

[WoodenTable]

In Deus Ex, I occasionally rearranged the furniture in rooms for no particular reason. I can only imagine the reactions later: "Oh my god, my ammo and credit chits are all gone! And... someone has swapped my desk chair with the sofa from the break room. And my microscope is now on the corner table..."

I gave myself bonus points for the one time I did it while a guard was patrolling the room. I wonder if there's some sort of term for this in psychology.

I also have a riot occasionally setting up Team Fortress 2 engineer-buildings in ridiculous places, such as completely submerged in a lake.

And don't even get me started on Dwarf Fortress. How long do you want to bet a dwarven settlement, constructed entirely of soap, can survive on a diet consisting solely of horse meat and beer?