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silveradept[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#2: "I'm Not Actually Good At Video Games"
Speaking of nerdery, and more things from both my distant past and my recent past, it may not be obvious because I don't do as much of it as I used to be able to, but I've been playing computer and video games since a very young age. Like "playing Math Blaster at the target age for Math Blaster" and "I have played much of the game catalog of Sierra On-Line, before it was bought out, and went through the entire Apogee/id shareware space" and if you get me one of those "Classically Trained" shirts with the video game consoles, you need to have an Atari 2600 and/or a Kaypro II and/or an Apple IIe on the shirt. Yeah, I'm old.
Now, a fair amount of that video game time that I've spent has been in single-player material, or possibly cooperative games here and there (Diablo II over the campus LAN with your roommates was pretty cool), and not a whole lot of competitive anything. To some degree, because I didn't have other people to compete with on the regular, but also because I didn't like the idea of playing against other people, because, at least at the time, the options for competitive gaming were fighting games (Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and Virtua Fighter), FPS deathmatch (Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, and eventually Halo, Half-Life, and the console shooters, etc) and then eventually, base-builders and the predecessors of 4X-type games (Command and Conquer, Warcraft, Starcraft, and so on) I played their single-player modes a lot, but not so much for the versus modes. Possibly because I lost a lot in those situations, and those losses provoked Big Feelings for me, child and teenager who doesn't actually fully understand themselves yet and why these things are provoking Big Feelings.
The best I had for myself was that I had wrapped a lot of my self-identity in being Good at Games, and the part where other people were Better was causing me to feel like a core part of my identity wasn't true. The "other people are Better" part was pretty regular in my university experience, where I picked up the nickname "Berzerker" because most of my attempts at fighting game versus was not doing great with combinations or being able to get the inputs I wanted to happen to go consistently. And because other people were Better, and I was having Big Feelings about that. It is where I found that Smash Brothers and its more limited control set actually suited me better than the Capcom and SNK offerings. (And I played a fair amount of the Marvel Versus Capcom machine on single player while I had quarters and I was waiting for laundry to get done, which was also fun.) I still wasn't Good at Smash Brothers, because other people were Better, but I did develop a reputation for being able to hit timing windows really well with characters like Luigi and Jigglypuff so that I could get maximum effectiveness out of their moves. (The timing and placement for both of their strongest moves is fairly precise, and a player that knows about that can do a decent job of staying out of the situations where those powerful moves can be used…except, of course, when they're distracted or they get hit by something else and I take advantage of the timing window.)
Getting out of university and graduate school and going into my job, I had been sold on the idea that game programs were good things for libraries to do, and I convinced my Friends of the Library group to get a game system and some games, and put on a regular after-school hangout program. I still believe games programs are good for libraries, even though my first supervisor did not, and probably would have shut it all down, were it not for the regular teen attendees in great numbers who came to the program. As it was, despite the clear high attendance numbers, she quickly reduced my programming from three days a week to two, because she told me I was spending too much time in that programming space. Anyway, despite being someone who had decades of experience at gaming on the teens and tweens who came to the program, they still regularly trounced me at games like Smash Brothers. (I retained that reputation for being able to use good timing windows, however, and was a bit of a terror to them with how well I could cause maximum mayhem when there were items around or when I had the super-move available to me.) Much of it was that while I could cause lots of problems on purpose in group settings, when it was down to single combat, things did not go well for me, and that was where the pride and reputation was mostly concentrated. So I remained convinced that I was not good at video games, because even age and treachery couldn't help me out (and because I still needed to be able to consistently hit my inputs, seriously.) This was still potentially Big Feelings territory, but because I was the responsible adult in the room, it usually meant I was passing my controller over to a teen participant to join in and supervising them and their Big Feelings instead. And I rationalized it by thinking that I didn't have the same amount of time these teens and kids did to get good at it, and their networks of players to continue working on their skills with. I was, after all, a responsible adult with a job and a relationship and my partner would be entirely unsympathetic about the situation because she regularly teased me that all I cared about in playing games was winning. (This was not true, but it's tangential to this post to go into the details about the difference between wanting to win at all times and wanting to feel like the contest was fair and winnable.)
I'm not exactly sure when the mental shift finally happened for me, or when it took, or what was responsible for it. I have a sneaking suspicion it was because I was fucking tired of having my partner keep going on and on and continuing to ascribe motivations to me that weren't true so she could chide me about having Big Feelings about a game and being a bad example to the autistic girl who I was often playing with. Even as I was doing a reasonable job about articulating where the feelings were coming from and what they were about, and trying to make them less of a shouty explosion and more into an expression of annoyance. My partner very clearly wanted me not to have those feelings at all. (That's a separate entry in this series.) However the change came about, I was able to insert into my brain a different set of rules for playing by, ones that wouldn't trip Big Feelings about not being Good At Games, that wouldn't be intensely focused on the idea that winning was the standard for expression of skill and everything else was Not Good At Games. Instead of playing to win, something very unlikely to happen, I was playing to see how long I could last and how far I could so. This might still have Feelings when I had the opportunity to win and it didn't happen, but I gave myself a much bigger zone of what would be considered success (I wasn't the first out this time, so I succeeded) and made it so that if I were beaten by the players who were better than me at the very end, then it was still a success at having gotten that far, rather than a complete failure because I didn't win.
In doing so, I also managed to avoid the pitfall of reworking my thinking into a Stop Having Fun Guy's mindset, where everything that can be done is legal to do to gain an advantage, regardless of whether it was intended to be done, and that anyone who doesn't adopt the mindset of winning at all costs and with all techniques is a "scrub" and no longer worth listening to if one wants to "git gud" at games. In Smash Brothers, those kinds of players were memetically described as "No Items, Fox Only, Final Destination," describing a playstyle where all of the players agreed to a ruleset where no randomness would be introduced through the presence of items (cutting off a significant amount of the gameplay), no randomness or strategy involving the layout of the stage would be introduced by selecting the single long flat board that is the Final Destination stage (cutting off a significant amount of the gameplay), and all of the players would select Fox, the character at the top of the character tier rankings for speed, versatility, and overall ability (cutting off a significant amount of the gameplay). Thus, having pruned anything away that they believed wasn't related to "skill," these hypercompetitive players believed they had a true system of determining who was actually the better player at the game compared to the filthy casuals who were playing the game much more as the creators intended it.
By playing the game with a different set of rules in mind, I was able to keep the Big Feelings down to only a few kinds of situations. That, and it became clearer to me that my playstyle is as much about strategic use of space and control using the items that are to hand, rather than having the right kind of twitch needed to dodge, interrupt, or otherwise execute frame-perfect inputs on a consistent basis with the character that I had trained extensively with to understand them on a frame-perfect level. Plus, I added an additional insulation against my Big Feelings and started playing with random selection of characters, so that it was not only "how far can I get in this situation," but also "how far can I get in this situation playing a randomly-assigned character against players who are choosing characters they are well-trained with?" It made getting beaten soundly less of a sting ("Ah, the RNG didn't like me this round") and it made the successes of getting as far as I did more impactful in my head ("Second place with a character I don't play much is pretty cool.") I still had characters that I was better at than others, because their mechanics were more familiar to me, but I was deliberately trying to train myself as an all-rounder, to try and do a decent job with whichever character had been given me, and to try to recall their moveset and specific things I had learned about playing them while in the process of playing the round. Some of that paid off at one of the conventions, where as I was spending some idle time between panels, I sat down at a Smash Brothers console, and someone played with me, using their specific character, and me using random characterization, and I won a fair few of those matches. Does that mean I've become Good? Maybe, but the more important part of it was that I had fun, and it wasn't a situation where one or the other of us was hopelessly outclassed against the other.
If I went back to FPSes, or something like that, I'd probably have to see it first as learning how to aim on a console before I had thoughts about being able to do well with any of it. (As opposed to on a PC, where I can more easily pinpoint my shots and the circle strafe is way more intuitive to execute.) Or, more likely, it would have to be learning how to take on a specific role in a team shooter and then learn how to do that well, and then work on learning the other roles, while losing a lot against teams who have been training together from the beginning and already have all of those roles down. If I did that, or even if I wanted to engage more than the minimum requirements for Player versus Player kinds of content, I'd also be accepting that I wanted to engage with the attitudes that are still prevalent in gaming spaces. Even if that engagement was "block, block, block, all of you should be ashamed of using slurs like that in victory or defeat," or opening up the risk of having someone decide to send a Special Weapons and Tactics team to my residence because they were unhappy at being defeated in a game. It's a good thing in my life that I've managed to avoid the pits and chasms yawning around me as I try to have enjoyable hobbies and relate to other people in life and on the Web. Once I find the maturity and the ability to understand just how trapped the landscape was, I marvel that I managed to get through it with as few wounds and bad pathways as I did.
I've come to the understanding with myself that it's just not great for me to engage in player versus player content, unless I absolutely have to, and if I do, it's best to do it as little a possible. I'm engaging with the PvP content of Pokémon Go, usually because they've set some rewards out for participation, yes, and it's still causing some Feelings, when you're that little bit too slow to something, or when you get at a certain point in the tiers and it seems like no matter what you try to do, everyone else has a combination that there's only one specific counter to, if you can find it, and that assumes everything falls in your favor. I'm not looking forward to the level task that says "you must achieve a certain ranking in the PvP side of things" as I climb toward level 50, even if it's probably going to be more of a grind and losing my way to the spot, rather than having to find whatever the winning combination is and grind that out instead. I don't like that many games have achievements set as "win this many total games in PvP" or "have a win streak this long in PvP" both because that's not great for me, but also because I object on principle to the idea that to have fully achieved everything in a game, I have to play against other people, locally or, more usually, online, and subject myself to whatever culture has developed there, for however long it takes to get through those slogs. I have a feeling at least some of the players would say "you have to git gud" and think that's an acceptable solution to the problem.
Like many of the things that I'm going to be talking about in this series, the thought that I'm not Good at video games is based on a faulty premise: I've believed that Good means being the Best, or I'm using someone else's idea of Good as the measuring stick (if not specifically the Stop Having Fun Guys, then it's usually something derived from them), rather than my own. It's taken experience to gain the wisdom to successfully work with myself, understand myself, and find new ways of looking at the situation that work for me and ultimately lead to a happier, more healthy way of looking at things. As much as I would have liked to short the process and arrive at the better way of looking at things without all of the aggravation in between, I needed all of the experience to synthesize a working mindset and test it for success. And nowadays, when I'm playing with the kids and teens who aren't relentlessly training all the time, I get a lot of "you're good at this!" which ultimately proves the point I needed to learn from the beginning: Good is relative, and the more important thing to do is have fun.
#2: "I'm Not Actually Good At Video Games"
Speaking of nerdery, and more things from both my distant past and my recent past, it may not be obvious because I don't do as much of it as I used to be able to, but I've been playing computer and video games since a very young age. Like "playing Math Blaster at the target age for Math Blaster" and "I have played much of the game catalog of Sierra On-Line, before it was bought out, and went through the entire Apogee/id shareware space" and if you get me one of those "Classically Trained" shirts with the video game consoles, you need to have an Atari 2600 and/or a Kaypro II and/or an Apple IIe on the shirt. Yeah, I'm old.
Now, a fair amount of that video game time that I've spent has been in single-player material, or possibly cooperative games here and there (Diablo II over the campus LAN with your roommates was pretty cool), and not a whole lot of competitive anything. To some degree, because I didn't have other people to compete with on the regular, but also because I didn't like the idea of playing against other people, because, at least at the time, the options for competitive gaming were fighting games (Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and Virtua Fighter), FPS deathmatch (Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, and eventually Halo, Half-Life, and the console shooters, etc) and then eventually, base-builders and the predecessors of 4X-type games (Command and Conquer, Warcraft, Starcraft, and so on) I played their single-player modes a lot, but not so much for the versus modes. Possibly because I lost a lot in those situations, and those losses provoked Big Feelings for me, child and teenager who doesn't actually fully understand themselves yet and why these things are provoking Big Feelings.
The best I had for myself was that I had wrapped a lot of my self-identity in being Good at Games, and the part where other people were Better was causing me to feel like a core part of my identity wasn't true. The "other people are Better" part was pretty regular in my university experience, where I picked up the nickname "Berzerker" because most of my attempts at fighting game versus was not doing great with combinations or being able to get the inputs I wanted to happen to go consistently. And because other people were Better, and I was having Big Feelings about that. It is where I found that Smash Brothers and its more limited control set actually suited me better than the Capcom and SNK offerings. (And I played a fair amount of the Marvel Versus Capcom machine on single player while I had quarters and I was waiting for laundry to get done, which was also fun.) I still wasn't Good at Smash Brothers, because other people were Better, but I did develop a reputation for being able to hit timing windows really well with characters like Luigi and Jigglypuff so that I could get maximum effectiveness out of their moves. (The timing and placement for both of their strongest moves is fairly precise, and a player that knows about that can do a decent job of staying out of the situations where those powerful moves can be used…except, of course, when they're distracted or they get hit by something else and I take advantage of the timing window.)
Getting out of university and graduate school and going into my job, I had been sold on the idea that game programs were good things for libraries to do, and I convinced my Friends of the Library group to get a game system and some games, and put on a regular after-school hangout program. I still believe games programs are good for libraries, even though my first supervisor did not, and probably would have shut it all down, were it not for the regular teen attendees in great numbers who came to the program. As it was, despite the clear high attendance numbers, she quickly reduced my programming from three days a week to two, because she told me I was spending too much time in that programming space. Anyway, despite being someone who had decades of experience at gaming on the teens and tweens who came to the program, they still regularly trounced me at games like Smash Brothers. (I retained that reputation for being able to use good timing windows, however, and was a bit of a terror to them with how well I could cause maximum mayhem when there were items around or when I had the super-move available to me.) Much of it was that while I could cause lots of problems on purpose in group settings, when it was down to single combat, things did not go well for me, and that was where the pride and reputation was mostly concentrated. So I remained convinced that I was not good at video games, because even age and treachery couldn't help me out (and because I still needed to be able to consistently hit my inputs, seriously.) This was still potentially Big Feelings territory, but because I was the responsible adult in the room, it usually meant I was passing my controller over to a teen participant to join in and supervising them and their Big Feelings instead. And I rationalized it by thinking that I didn't have the same amount of time these teens and kids did to get good at it, and their networks of players to continue working on their skills with. I was, after all, a responsible adult with a job and a relationship and my partner would be entirely unsympathetic about the situation because she regularly teased me that all I cared about in playing games was winning. (This was not true, but it's tangential to this post to go into the details about the difference between wanting to win at all times and wanting to feel like the contest was fair and winnable.)
I'm not exactly sure when the mental shift finally happened for me, or when it took, or what was responsible for it. I have a sneaking suspicion it was because I was fucking tired of having my partner keep going on and on and continuing to ascribe motivations to me that weren't true so she could chide me about having Big Feelings about a game and being a bad example to the autistic girl who I was often playing with. Even as I was doing a reasonable job about articulating where the feelings were coming from and what they were about, and trying to make them less of a shouty explosion and more into an expression of annoyance. My partner very clearly wanted me not to have those feelings at all. (That's a separate entry in this series.) However the change came about, I was able to insert into my brain a different set of rules for playing by, ones that wouldn't trip Big Feelings about not being Good At Games, that wouldn't be intensely focused on the idea that winning was the standard for expression of skill and everything else was Not Good At Games. Instead of playing to win, something very unlikely to happen, I was playing to see how long I could last and how far I could so. This might still have Feelings when I had the opportunity to win and it didn't happen, but I gave myself a much bigger zone of what would be considered success (I wasn't the first out this time, so I succeeded) and made it so that if I were beaten by the players who were better than me at the very end, then it was still a success at having gotten that far, rather than a complete failure because I didn't win.
In doing so, I also managed to avoid the pitfall of reworking my thinking into a Stop Having Fun Guy's mindset, where everything that can be done is legal to do to gain an advantage, regardless of whether it was intended to be done, and that anyone who doesn't adopt the mindset of winning at all costs and with all techniques is a "scrub" and no longer worth listening to if one wants to "git gud" at games. In Smash Brothers, those kinds of players were memetically described as "No Items, Fox Only, Final Destination," describing a playstyle where all of the players agreed to a ruleset where no randomness would be introduced through the presence of items (cutting off a significant amount of the gameplay), no randomness or strategy involving the layout of the stage would be introduced by selecting the single long flat board that is the Final Destination stage (cutting off a significant amount of the gameplay), and all of the players would select Fox, the character at the top of the character tier rankings for speed, versatility, and overall ability (cutting off a significant amount of the gameplay). Thus, having pruned anything away that they believed wasn't related to "skill," these hypercompetitive players believed they had a true system of determining who was actually the better player at the game compared to the filthy casuals who were playing the game much more as the creators intended it.
By playing the game with a different set of rules in mind, I was able to keep the Big Feelings down to only a few kinds of situations. That, and it became clearer to me that my playstyle is as much about strategic use of space and control using the items that are to hand, rather than having the right kind of twitch needed to dodge, interrupt, or otherwise execute frame-perfect inputs on a consistent basis with the character that I had trained extensively with to understand them on a frame-perfect level. Plus, I added an additional insulation against my Big Feelings and started playing with random selection of characters, so that it was not only "how far can I get in this situation," but also "how far can I get in this situation playing a randomly-assigned character against players who are choosing characters they are well-trained with?" It made getting beaten soundly less of a sting ("Ah, the RNG didn't like me this round") and it made the successes of getting as far as I did more impactful in my head ("Second place with a character I don't play much is pretty cool.") I still had characters that I was better at than others, because their mechanics were more familiar to me, but I was deliberately trying to train myself as an all-rounder, to try and do a decent job with whichever character had been given me, and to try to recall their moveset and specific things I had learned about playing them while in the process of playing the round. Some of that paid off at one of the conventions, where as I was spending some idle time between panels, I sat down at a Smash Brothers console, and someone played with me, using their specific character, and me using random characterization, and I won a fair few of those matches. Does that mean I've become Good? Maybe, but the more important part of it was that I had fun, and it wasn't a situation where one or the other of us was hopelessly outclassed against the other.
If I went back to FPSes, or something like that, I'd probably have to see it first as learning how to aim on a console before I had thoughts about being able to do well with any of it. (As opposed to on a PC, where I can more easily pinpoint my shots and the circle strafe is way more intuitive to execute.) Or, more likely, it would have to be learning how to take on a specific role in a team shooter and then learn how to do that well, and then work on learning the other roles, while losing a lot against teams who have been training together from the beginning and already have all of those roles down. If I did that, or even if I wanted to engage more than the minimum requirements for Player versus Player kinds of content, I'd also be accepting that I wanted to engage with the attitudes that are still prevalent in gaming spaces. Even if that engagement was "block, block, block, all of you should be ashamed of using slurs like that in victory or defeat," or opening up the risk of having someone decide to send a Special Weapons and Tactics team to my residence because they were unhappy at being defeated in a game. It's a good thing in my life that I've managed to avoid the pits and chasms yawning around me as I try to have enjoyable hobbies and relate to other people in life and on the Web. Once I find the maturity and the ability to understand just how trapped the landscape was, I marvel that I managed to get through it with as few wounds and bad pathways as I did.
I've come to the understanding with myself that it's just not great for me to engage in player versus player content, unless I absolutely have to, and if I do, it's best to do it as little a possible. I'm engaging with the PvP content of Pokémon Go, usually because they've set some rewards out for participation, yes, and it's still causing some Feelings, when you're that little bit too slow to something, or when you get at a certain point in the tiers and it seems like no matter what you try to do, everyone else has a combination that there's only one specific counter to, if you can find it, and that assumes everything falls in your favor. I'm not looking forward to the level task that says "you must achieve a certain ranking in the PvP side of things" as I climb toward level 50, even if it's probably going to be more of a grind and losing my way to the spot, rather than having to find whatever the winning combination is and grind that out instead. I don't like that many games have achievements set as "win this many total games in PvP" or "have a win streak this long in PvP" both because that's not great for me, but also because I object on principle to the idea that to have fully achieved everything in a game, I have to play against other people, locally or, more usually, online, and subject myself to whatever culture has developed there, for however long it takes to get through those slogs. I have a feeling at least some of the players would say "you have to git gud" and think that's an acceptable solution to the problem.
Like many of the things that I'm going to be talking about in this series, the thought that I'm not Good at video games is based on a faulty premise: I've believed that Good means being the Best, or I'm using someone else's idea of Good as the measuring stick (if not specifically the Stop Having Fun Guys, then it's usually something derived from them), rather than my own. It's taken experience to gain the wisdom to successfully work with myself, understand myself, and find new ways of looking at the situation that work for me and ultimately lead to a happier, more healthy way of looking at things. As much as I would have liked to short the process and arrive at the better way of looking at things without all of the aggravation in between, I needed all of the experience to synthesize a working mindset and test it for success. And nowadays, when I'm playing with the kids and teens who aren't relentlessly training all the time, I get a lot of "you're good at this!" which ultimately proves the point I needed to learn from the beginning: Good is relative, and the more important thing to do is have fun.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-03 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-03 06:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-03 06:47 pm (UTC)And I soloed my minstrel in Lord of the Rings Online from low 40s to the level cap of 140 in just over a year, so that was satisfying.
I'm not the best, but I am quite adequate.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-03 07:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-04 03:17 pm (UTC)Heeheehee, love it! 💗 Reminds me of Lt. Commander Data's approach to Strategema.
I used to play a decent game of Doom PvP, but only against players who used keyboard like I do (anyone versed in using the mouse could stomp me because it was so much faster and more accurate), and only on maps I already knew very well. But soon after my summer '94 of Doom I was trying to program things for real, and that became my excuse for why I never got gud like many of my guy friends: "oh I program games, I don't really play them". But yeah, it's weird how I kinda felt the need to have that Excuse For Failing This Man Test handy... 🤔😉
(TW: Going deep....)
After my last suicide attempt age 19, I had to leave campus, move back home to Bumfuck, and try to rebuild my life and education. When I finally had the money and time to visit campus and see my friends again, nearly all of them were deeply invested in playing the hottest new release called StarCraft -- far more than seeing me for the first time in months. My girlfriend at the time was with me, and we were both shocked at the callousness; it really put a dent in those relationships. (Things worked out OK later, but it was a low point.) I resolved after that (not always successfully) to be able to put things down when a person you haven't seen in a while is in the room.
Being A Serious Gamer and Being Present For Your IRL Relationships kind of feel mutually exclusive to me now. I know some people can manage it -- obviously, competitive games are hugely popular -- but I can't myself.
I think your patrons are lucky to have you, as a guide who can mentor them in their gaming interests while still being present for them.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-04 04:05 pm (UTC)Going on to program games after playing then is a good reason not to have been dragged underneath too much. But yes, interesting how it felt like there needed to be an excuse handy rather than am explanation.
Getting gud at games and developing relationships outside of games are both things that demand an investment of time, and I think it's rare that someone has enough time to juggle them, especially if also juggling work and other responsibilities. Where the priorities are determines which is those relationships gets put on a back burner.
There's a little bit about teaching how to play the games and to have fun. A lot of what's actually being taught with my programs is regulation of Big Feelings and the need to share space and take turns. Sneaky lessons, those ones.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-11 11:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-11 11:46 pm (UTC)Like how the Smash Brothers algorithms always play perfect and the difficulty level is about how often the control input the algorithm demands is actually accepted.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-11 11:48 pm (UTC)Humans. Why. +sigh+
no subject
Date: 2023-12-11 11:56 pm (UTC)The more common one is usually "what are you, a casual? This game is for the hardcore!"