I used to take gaming very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that almost a year in college was spent on an inverted nocturnal schedule that involved heavy doses of Wolfenstein, Age of Empires (AoE), and Medal of Honour. I don't play as much anymore, and most of my gaming is reduced to whatever I can run on my android tablet and occasionally my PSP. At this very moment, however, I can't even tell you the exact location of my PSP, because that's how long it has been since I last used it. It's been a different story on the tablet however, and I've been trying out that classic amongst games, Tetris. A far cry from the days of souped up computers and endless hours.
It got me wondering, though. What was all that gaming in aid of? Did it really help me, other than to entertain? I pondered over this question a lot, and one by one, some of the lessons started coming back to me. It might sound a little corny as I go ahead with this post, but it turns out there were valuable lessons for me in gaming. Unsurprisingly, most of it came from my AoE buddies, since that's the game I played the most. It also helped that I played against people I knew and met on a daily basis - close college friends.
It's easy to pick out the low hanging fruit first - years of time spent on various flight simulator games helped me on my journey to becoming a pilot. It's fun trying to barrel roll an airliner in MS FSX, but it's even more fun and useful trying to fly a plane as it should be flown. I will not go so far as to say that the skills translate directly into flying an actual plane, but the usefulness, especially on matters procedural, certainly cannot be discounted. But on further thought, it struck me as less valuable than what the others taught me.
Blackmartyr - an AoE buddy - taught me the importance of winning. There are some people with an intense focus on winning, and he was one of those guys. Even if he was taking a beating, he would do everything he could - sometimes even ethically questionable stuff - to ensure that his team wins. It did not come from an innate evil nature, though. Sometimes you run into people whom you just cannot admit are better than you. For him, in such situations, victory was a good way of proving a point to himself.
On the opposite side, RhythmSage taught me to enjoy the game. Win or lose, at the end of the day it was just a game, and the important thing was to have had fun playing. She's one of my closest friends to date, and this nature is more of a reflection of her true self, since she's generally regarded as a happy and cheerful person. We'd be on the same team, and would've just suffered a bad loss, and I'd come out of my room whining about it while she would just be calm, happy and chilled out about the whole thing. It would annoy me initially since I thought she wasn't taking this seriously enough, but eventually I picked up that skill a bit, though at far less than the ideal level a temperamental guy like me should have. In fact, she seems to have picked up more of my crankiness than she probably should've.
C and S (I no longer remember their in-game names) taught me to take pride in my work. They were obsessed about getting their armies to march in perfect formation, and those armies were usually an intimidating sight with swordsmen marching into your territories in neat little squares and laying siege to the place. They had put a lot of effort into raising those armies, and they'd be damned if the armies were gonna look shaby. It did not matter if their armies were bulldozing the enemy unchallenged, or taking a proper hiding themselves, they were always neatly organized and beautiful to look at. Of course, on the flip side they also taught me not to obsess on one particular aspect among many, since quite often their focus on neat armies let to their being distracted from the tactical details of battle.
The last, and most important lesson came from the improbably named decaLODA. A close confidante of many years, he taught me in our AoE games to not stop fighting. You may be down to your last penny and being attacked from directions you didn't know existed, but you cannot stop fighting. When we started playing this game, one of the more skilled and powerful players named Aghust used to take on six or seven of us at a time and beat us all. Most of us would get dejected halfway through and resign from the game, but not decaLODA. He would keep fighting until he was down to the last villager, whom he would hide in a faraway corner of the game map and get him to build a multi-layered stone wall around himself. Aghust would eventually discover the villager, and turn his trebuchets against the wall and painstakingly knock a hole in them, at which point DecaLODA would kill his last villager, forfeiting the game. He may have lost, but he made life hell for his enemy until the very end. It took me a long time to digest this, but it was probably the best thing I ever learned from playing computer games.
Perhaps all that time wasn't wasted after all..
Showing posts with label gaming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gaming. Show all posts
Tuesday, 14 May 2013
Tuesday, 13 November 2007
On gaming names.
I renewed my credentials as a gamer yesterday. Got myself a brand spanking new PSP. That's Playstation Portable, for the uninitiated. While that automatically elevates me to levels of coolness you can only dream about, i decided to shed some light on gaming names, or handles, so that you can at least get a historical perspective into how all this coolness came to be.
Each gamer has a different policy. Some have the same handle for all the games the play. Some have a different handle for different games. And some run through names like toilet paper. Unless you were Sheryl Crow, in which case you would take much longer with a roll. I fall into the second category, I have a handle per game. And i'll tell you briefly about those.
The least dramatic of the lot is the one i'll start with. scarface. yeah, pretty normal, with allusions to violence and gore if you think hard enough. but the story behind that name starts in diu. where sonam kazi and i were trying our darnedest best to play real life NFS on two 50cc lunas. Of course, real life games, as i mentioned in the previous post, have no 'damage off' function, so i crashed and ended up with a cut on my temple (close enough to the eye to be sinister-ly cool). Of course, the game continued, even with one of my eyes swollen shut with blood in it. I started playing Medal of Honor Allied Assault right after that, and decided to honor my partially successful attempt at transcending the borders of gaming by adopting the handle 'scarface', as the scar from the wound was all i had to show for the effort.
Everyone remembers their first time. At multiplayer gaming that is. We had just started on the NFS Porsche version, and no one really knew who was playing with what handle. I decided to take advantage of that, and joined in with the name of mahajan, which was the name of a rather unpopular (then, at least) character on campus. And, well, not to boast, but in ten minutes time i was winning all the races. To add insult to injury, i never revealed my name as long as possible, and the rest kept thinking that it was the unsavoury mahajan that was rubbing their noses in the dust. Of course, soon as everyone came to know it was me, i quietly changed names. To what, i dont remember.
The one that stuck, as usual, is the one thats not really interesting. Unless ur into the same things as i am. 'Marshal Ustinov', the Age of Empires name, stuck. I was mentally protesting the lack of a russian civilisation on the conquerors expansion pack, and since i chose red for my color, i decided to choose a soviet name as well. i had been looking at pictures of russian ships for a model i was planning (eternally, unendingly) to build, and had looked at the marshal ustinov, which is a soviet slava class cruiser. This name somehow popped to my mind. I naturally assumed that the guy whom they named it after must be some great soviet hero named Ustinov, and therefore would be great for an aspiring AoE conqueror like me. Turns out that he never saw a battle, and was a political appointee to the grand post of 'Marshal of the Soviet Union'. My dismal progress with AoE (except as a member of the second floor team that ruled B-hostel) anyway meant that the name was apt. I fared about as well as Dmitry Ustinov would've done in battle. Some later victories in naval battles prompted me to think of changing to Admiral of the Soviet Fleet Kuznetsov, but turns out he was a politician as well, and would've done me no good.
And last, but not the least, was 'Chihuahua'. Those were the days when internet entertainment meant the Paris Hilton sex tape, and she carried a chihuahua... to my credit it got mistaken later for 'che guevara'. But really, thats not why i chose it. While i do admit that it was paris hilton who got me reading up on chihuahuas, i found out that these tiny dogs have no concept of their size. They dont know how small they are, and that doesnt stop them from taking on bigger dogs, and that is cool i thought. But i guess most of you never got past the sex tape comment and are probably googling it right now. Anyway, for the first few days at least, it was easy pickings for me as i could kill people when they were trying to spell my name on multiplayer chat :D
What am i trying to achieve with this post? tolerance. Like i said, i've gotten a PSP and have now transformed into an ultra snob at levels of coolness you can only dream about. While it may take anywhere from days to months for me to return to ground state, i would like you all to read this post and remember that i used to be a mildly amusing chap, and forget the current PSP fuelled asshole-ness.
Each gamer has a different policy. Some have the same handle for all the games the play. Some have a different handle for different games. And some run through names like toilet paper. Unless you were Sheryl Crow, in which case you would take much longer with a roll. I fall into the second category, I have a handle per game. And i'll tell you briefly about those.
The least dramatic of the lot is the one i'll start with. scarface. yeah, pretty normal, with allusions to violence and gore if you think hard enough. but the story behind that name starts in diu. where sonam kazi and i were trying our darnedest best to play real life NFS on two 50cc lunas. Of course, real life games, as i mentioned in the previous post, have no 'damage off' function, so i crashed and ended up with a cut on my temple (close enough to the eye to be sinister-ly cool). Of course, the game continued, even with one of my eyes swollen shut with blood in it. I started playing Medal of Honor Allied Assault right after that, and decided to honor my partially successful attempt at transcending the borders of gaming by adopting the handle 'scarface', as the scar from the wound was all i had to show for the effort.
Everyone remembers their first time. At multiplayer gaming that is. We had just started on the NFS Porsche version, and no one really knew who was playing with what handle. I decided to take advantage of that, and joined in with the name of mahajan, which was the name of a rather unpopular (then, at least) character on campus. And, well, not to boast, but in ten minutes time i was winning all the races. To add insult to injury, i never revealed my name as long as possible, and the rest kept thinking that it was the unsavoury mahajan that was rubbing their noses in the dust. Of course, soon as everyone came to know it was me, i quietly changed names. To what, i dont remember.
The one that stuck, as usual, is the one thats not really interesting. Unless ur into the same things as i am. 'Marshal Ustinov', the Age of Empires name, stuck. I was mentally protesting the lack of a russian civilisation on the conquerors expansion pack, and since i chose red for my color, i decided to choose a soviet name as well. i had been looking at pictures of russian ships for a model i was planning (eternally, unendingly) to build, and had looked at the marshal ustinov, which is a soviet slava class cruiser. This name somehow popped to my mind. I naturally assumed that the guy whom they named it after must be some great soviet hero named Ustinov, and therefore would be great for an aspiring AoE conqueror like me. Turns out that he never saw a battle, and was a political appointee to the grand post of 'Marshal of the Soviet Union'. My dismal progress with AoE (except as a member of the second floor team that ruled B-hostel) anyway meant that the name was apt. I fared about as well as Dmitry Ustinov would've done in battle. Some later victories in naval battles prompted me to think of changing to Admiral of the Soviet Fleet Kuznetsov, but turns out he was a politician as well, and would've done me no good.
And last, but not the least, was 'Chihuahua'. Those were the days when internet entertainment meant the Paris Hilton sex tape, and she carried a chihuahua... to my credit it got mistaken later for 'che guevara'. But really, thats not why i chose it. While i do admit that it was paris hilton who got me reading up on chihuahuas, i found out that these tiny dogs have no concept of their size. They dont know how small they are, and that doesnt stop them from taking on bigger dogs, and that is cool i thought. But i guess most of you never got past the sex tape comment and are probably googling it right now. Anyway, for the first few days at least, it was easy pickings for me as i could kill people when they were trying to spell my name on multiplayer chat :D
What am i trying to achieve with this post? tolerance. Like i said, i've gotten a PSP and have now transformed into an ultra snob at levels of coolness you can only dream about. While it may take anywhere from days to months for me to return to ground state, i would like you all to read this post and remember that i used to be a mildly amusing chap, and forget the current PSP fuelled asshole-ness.
Monday, 12 November 2007
On gaming - an old one..
2 am. abandoned trainyard. gunfire barking all around welcomes the casual stranger as the allied and axis powers face off in on of the many battles that are to decide the dreadlock over europe. only, europe kinda resembles b-hostel in the case in point. cliched start, i know. nothing quite like the d-day sequence of saving private ryan. but this is all that my groggy head could come up with after multiple attempts. groggy because of a night's worth of intense and insane battles ranging in scope from the beaches of normandy in the second world war to the turks and britons of ancient time. Also known as hands-on research for this article, the excuse i've been giving myself for over a week now. also known to som! e (most, actually, but us larger-than-life gamers think we are a majority) with a lack of imagination and an amd machine with an nvidia graphics card as a colossal waste of time. Maybe, but try selling that to a very belligerent panzerpappu patgaonkar who's just had his innards blown out thrice by his own teammate.
The name usually defines the gamer. there are those who keep one name forever and then there are those who change depending on every passing whim. as a result, we sometimes have such absolute gems of death reports generated by the computer as, 'Bal Thackeray was blasted to bits by sir jj thompsons dynamite'. For my part, yours truly is the improbably codenamed Chihuahua. (improbable, i suppose, because wonders like paris hilton werent known to modern science at the time of the war). Im a sniper extraordinaire (even if i say so myself, heh heh. oh yeah? whose article is this anyway huh?) and like all snipers extraordinaire i have an arch-nemesi! s, the impossibly codenamed Bellente.(impossible because its been impo ssible for all of us, including bellente himself, to comprehend the meaning of the name). The two of us wage our personal feud oblivious to the grand scheme of world war two unfolding around us, much like the vassily zaitsev and major konig we idolize from 'Enemy at the Gates'. And then we go for chai and the post game de-briefing session. dont be taken in by the fancy words, the de-briefing session is where the winners can continue rubbing it right into the losers. since you win some and lose some on a regular basis, you're virtually assured of your fifteen minutes of fame here. even though we are all firm believers in the adage 'Its just a game, guys' the frayed tempers that are often seen are part of the deal. when you win, grin. when you lose, grin and bear it.
there is an old gaming lore that says : the game never dies, it just moves onto another level. ok, i made that up, but it applies very much to the night fighters of the b-hostel. For them, the crazies, life is just an extension of the game. so much so that gamers are often seen contemplating about possible sniper sites on the hostel building, taking secure ingress and egress routes to and from the institute with the primary objective of staying undercover from co-ordinators and faculties, dreaming of setting up giant working trebuchets on the main lawns and actually building model sniper rifles just for a better feel of that virtual kill at night. people discuss in full earnest the possibility of having live-fire wolfenstein-style combat games with amazing disregard for the complexities involved in such a misadventure. those are but trivial before the eyes of the believer and i have personally met people dreaming of a pellet gun version of the game. sometimes you even have groggy heads from lack of sleep and a brain that tells you that you're being forced to write all this under gunpoint and that namrata rai and suneel chenamaneni are actually federal agents after the enigma code.
the key to the fun, for the information of the skeptics, is in believing. its a world of instant gratification, and any of the night fighters, regardless of whether they play wolfenstein, or age of empires, or need for speed or grand theft auto would swear by it. life as a drag race is a lot more fun than life as a rat race, even though the Divine Server sometimes ditches you by turning ON 'pedestrian traffic' and 'accident damage' as i found out the hard way in Diu while burning rubber on the streets there with a 40cc rented luna. Diu was nurburgring, the luna a hayabusa, me valentino rossi, and the real world eats my dust. s'long, suckaz, grin and bear it
The name usually defines the gamer. there are those who keep one name forever and then there are those who change depending on every passing whim. as a result, we sometimes have such absolute gems of death reports generated by the computer as, 'Bal Thackeray was blasted to bits by sir jj thompsons dynamite'. For my part, yours truly is the improbably codenamed Chihuahua. (improbable, i suppose, because wonders like paris hilton werent known to modern science at the time of the war). Im a sniper extraordinaire (even if i say so myself, heh heh. oh yeah? whose article is this anyway huh?) and like all snipers extraordinaire i have an arch-nemesi! s, the impossibly codenamed Bellente.(impossible because its been impo ssible for all of us, including bellente himself, to comprehend the meaning of the name). The two of us wage our personal feud oblivious to the grand scheme of world war two unfolding around us, much like the vassily zaitsev and major konig we idolize from 'Enemy at the Gates'. And then we go for chai and the post game de-briefing session. dont be taken in by the fancy words, the de-briefing session is where the winners can continue rubbing it right into the losers. since you win some and lose some on a regular basis, you're virtually assured of your fifteen minutes of fame here. even though we are all firm believers in the adage 'Its just a game, guys' the frayed tempers that are often seen are part of the deal. when you win, grin. when you lose, grin and bear it.
there is an old gaming lore that says : the game never dies, it just moves onto another level. ok, i made that up, but it applies very much to the night fighters of the b-hostel. For them, the crazies, life is just an extension of the game. so much so that gamers are often seen contemplating about possible sniper sites on the hostel building, taking secure ingress and egress routes to and from the institute with the primary objective of staying undercover from co-ordinators and faculties, dreaming of setting up giant working trebuchets on the main lawns and actually building model sniper rifles just for a better feel of that virtual kill at night. people discuss in full earnest the possibility of having live-fire wolfenstein-style combat games with amazing disregard for the complexities involved in such a misadventure. those are but trivial before the eyes of the believer and i have personally met people dreaming of a pellet gun version of the game. sometimes you even have groggy heads from lack of sleep and a brain that tells you that you're being forced to write all this under gunpoint and that namrata rai and suneel chenamaneni are actually federal agents after the enigma code.
the key to the fun, for the information of the skeptics, is in believing. its a world of instant gratification, and any of the night fighters, regardless of whether they play wolfenstein, or age of empires, or need for speed or grand theft auto would swear by it. life as a drag race is a lot more fun than life as a rat race, even though the Divine Server sometimes ditches you by turning ON 'pedestrian traffic' and 'accident damage' as i found out the hard way in Diu while burning rubber on the streets there with a 40cc rented luna. Diu was nurburgring, the luna a hayabusa, me valentino rossi, and the real world eats my dust. s'long, suckaz, grin and bear it
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