5 ms·

I think it's always been like that in any game with predesigned layouts and enemy placement. I was still a kid (in the 1980s) when I figured out I was playing

by dkarl 7y ago

I think it's always been like that in any game with predesigned layouts and enemy placement. I was still a kid (in the 1980s) when I figured out I was playing a fundamentally different game from the kids who really loved video games. I was thinking, "I need to get faster at making decisions and timing my actions so I can respond to what's on the next screen," and they were thinking, "Okay, the next screen has two goblins closing from the upper right corner and one goblin closing from the middle and a fireball from top to bottom after four seconds, and the exit door starts closed and opens or closes every three seconds, so I'll kill the closest goblin while I wait for the fireball and then hit the exit the third time it opens...." I remember feeling guilty when I remembered what was on the next screen, because it felt like cheating. It kind of broke my heart when I realized that was the best way to get good and it was pointlessly stubborn for me to resist a technique that games were designed to cater to.

lonelappde 7y ago
I think you learned the wrong lesson. You shouldn't spoil your own fun because a bunch of savants can't see the forest for the trees. The secret of gaming is that the objective isn't to get the highest score / lowest time, it's to have fun playing. wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Jach 7y ago
It's not just games, it's life. But to take a non-video game, e.g. in hockey the better goalies aren't better because they have awesome reflexes or quick thinking, but primarily because they're better at predicting where the puck is going to be and positioning themselves accordingly. Same thing with gamers knowing "what's ahead", or "what's ahead with probability". Very few things are so random that "more accurately predicting the future" isn't the dominating strategy, with execution of the moment, while important, not being the primary factor.
- jacobolus 7y ago
  > Very few things are so random that "more accurately predicting the future" isn't the dominating strategy, This is what is nice about research. Real problem solving matters. But also what is frustrating about research: real problem solving is hard!
- maxerickson 7y ago
  I imagine the best goalies end up having great anticipation and also way above average reflexes. It's a really small group.
skykooler 7y ago
This is part of why I enjoy procedurally-generated games like Minecraft: you can learn how to do things in the game, but you can never memorize the game because it's different in every world.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  Challenge style modpacks tend to really bring this out. My completion of Age of Engineering is this small countryside feeling open air base, Direwolf20 (famous YouTube Minecraft player) beat it with a space station. The only obvious commonalty is we both have huge floating energy spheres from Draconic Evolution which looks kinda out of place next to a greenhouse compared to inside a space station. "There's more than one way to do it" is a driving ethos in most of these packs. For speedrunners though any sources of randomness are mostly just annoying. If it's 50 seconds faster to start on a hill, and your personal best is 40 seconds slower than the world record, you're not going to play runs where you didn't start on a hill. You're just going to reload.
gagege 7y ago
This is the exact reason I don't like most platformers. I never realized it before, but that must be why I gravitate toward procedural games, multiplayer, and rogue-likes. I totally relate to that guilty feeling. I like having to think on my feet, and never saw the point in memorizing a sequence of controls. It's like it ceases to be a game at that point!
- ryandrake 7y ago
  Same thing with fighting games. I liked to play Mortal Kobmbat as a kid, and I always approached it as a game where you anticipate, react, and adapt to your opponent. When I got further into the “MK culture” and met much better players, one of them explained to me: “You’re going about it all wrong. Fighting games like MK and SF are about memorization and executing patterns, not about strategy.” The best players basically memorized the combos and could pull them off them consistently. Indeed, future fighting games made these combos explicitly part of the game mechanics. Just for fun I tried one of the latest Tekkens, and the entire game is memorization of button sequences and playback. Yawn
  - greiskul 7y ago
    Well, the combos are a part of the game, and to be a top player you need to know how to execute your characters combos. But for real competition, (at least for SF, and smash bros, never watched competitive MK), it really comes down into anticipating, reacting, and adapting to your opponent. You need to know what options your opponent has available to them, what are they likely to do, and how to properly react. You do need to memorize the timings of attacks, but the game becomes sort of a fast paced unbalanced rock papers scissors. David Sirlin wrote lots of articles and even a book about competitive gaming in general, specially fighting games, explaining concepts like this. It's just that some games have this strange curve in the learning curve, for instance Starcraft, where beginners think the game is all about strategy. But as you learn to play, you find out that it's more about macro, cause having more units normally beats any strategy. But then if both players have top notch macro, they have to begin doing tradeoffs in what they build, maybe cut some units to get a technology faster, or be greedier but more vulnerable for a while for a later payoff. In other words, the game becomes about strategy.
silversconfused 7y ago
My wife and I play two player house of the dead now and then. She memorizes levels, I skillshot. It's potent in combination. She gets the zombies I forget, and I get the ones she misses. Since it's always the same, it also doesn't get her too jumpy with anxiety. (We've gotten to the final boss on both saturn HOTD 1, and DC HOTD 2, never beaten the games though...)
- CannisterFlux 7y ago
  Off topic, but are you still playing Dreamcast HOTD 2? Did you keep a CR tube TV around for it? I still have a DC, HOTD2 and the lightguns, but they don't work with modern LCD TVs.
  - silversconfused 7y ago
    Yes I keep a crt around for hotd and duck hunt. :) I intend to make a multi-system arcade cabinet some day to clean up the games area.
    - CannisterFlux 7y ago
      Ah well! I thought that there had been some new tech breakthrough :)
noobermin 7y ago
Well, now you're talking like me. People don't get it, but I try my darnedest to beat a boss/level in single player mode[0] on the first or as few tries as possible so I don't learn it too much, because it 1) breaks the illusion that it's a game (it hurts the "experience" for me if the superhero gets a second or third chance) and 2) I like being pushed to respond quickly rather than replaying a script, and I consider it an accomplishment to beat a screen of a platformer for example on the first try. Another set of games my girlfriend recently turned me on to are rhythm games, particularly VOEZ[1]. Again, as I don't think I said in the first comment but said elsewhere, it's not like I don't like the "classical music" style and I'm all "jazz music," but my "jazz" style is definitely my default mode. If you asked me afterwards to remember the notes, I would be able to tell you the gist but I certainly don't remember details, a lot of it is focusing when it gets complicated and responding on beat. And, as I said above, my absolute favorite is playing a song for the first time and trying to get a good score, because I really have no idea what's coming and it pushes my "respond quickly" buttons. [0] not that you don't learn quickly/during the fight without dying, and as many games often are, there is an obvious hint of what to hit, the rhythm to a boss, etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voez
yread 7y ago
Very nicely put. When I'm forced to use detailed knowledge from previous tries I always feel like back in civ 1 saving and loading until a trireme defended a city against a legion.
toast0 7y ago
This sounds like sightreading vs memorizing songs (musically or DDR-ish). There are some games where I just can't get past certain parts, because it's too fast to sightread, and I can't memorize the sequence (the Battlef*ing toads speeder level is a good example, especially with two people), but there are others that are hard to finish if I miss something, because I've played it so much I've lost the ability to sight read it (Contra and Life Force, mostly)

by dkarl 7y ago

lonelappde 7y ago

I think you learned the wrong lesson. You shouldn't spoil your own fun because a bunch of savants can't see the forest for the trees. The secret of gaming is that the objective isn't to get the highest score / lowest time, it's to have fun playing. wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

Jach 7y ago

It's not just games, it's life. But to take a non-video game, e.g. in hockey the better goalies aren't better because they have awesome reflexes or quick thinking, but primarily because they're better at predicting where the puck is going to be and positioning themselves accordingly. Same thing with gamers knowing "what's ahead", or "what's ahead with probability". Very few things are so random that "more accurately predicting the future" isn't the dominating strategy, with execution of the moment, while important, not being the primary factor.

jacobolus 7y ago
> Very few things are so random that "more accurately predicting the future" isn't the dominating strategy, This is what is nice about research. Real problem solving matters. But also what is frustrating about research: real problem solving is hard!
maxerickson 7y ago
I imagine the best goalies end up having great anticipation and also way above average reflexes. It's a really small group.

skykooler 7y ago

This is part of why I enjoy procedurally-generated games like Minecraft: you can learn how to do things in the game, but you can never memorize the game because it's different in every world.

tialaramex 7y ago
Challenge style modpacks tend to really bring this out. My completion of Age of Engineering is this small countryside feeling open air base, Direwolf20 (famous YouTube Minecraft player) beat it with a space station. The only obvious commonalty is we both have huge floating energy spheres from Draconic Evolution which looks kinda out of place next to a greenhouse compared to inside a space station. "There's more than one way to do it" is a driving ethos in most of these packs. For speedrunners though any sources of randomness are mostly just annoying. If it's 50 seconds faster to start on a hill, and your personal best is 40 seconds slower than the world record, you're not going to play runs where you didn't start on a hill. You're just going to reload.

gagege 7y ago

This is the exact reason I don't like most platformers. I never realized it before, but that must be why I gravitate toward procedural games, multiplayer, and rogue-likes. I totally relate to that guilty feeling. I like having to think on my feet, and never saw the point in memorizing a sequence of controls. It's like it ceases to be a game at that point!

ryandrake 7y ago
Same thing with fighting games. I liked to play Mortal Kobmbat as a kid, and I always approached it as a game where you anticipate, react, and adapt to your opponent. When I got further into the “MK culture” and met much better players, one of them explained to me: “You’re going about it all wrong. Fighting games like MK and SF are about memorization and executing patterns, not about strategy.” The best players basically memorized the combos and could pull them off them consistently. Indeed, future fighting games made these combos explicitly part of the game mechanics. Just for fun I tried one of the latest Tekkens, and the entire game is memorization of button sequences and playback. Yawn
- greiskul 7y ago
  Well, the combos are a part of the game, and to be a top player you need to know how to execute your characters combos. But for real competition, (at least for SF, and smash bros, never watched competitive MK), it really comes down into anticipating, reacting, and adapting to your opponent. You need to know what options your opponent has available to them, what are they likely to do, and how to properly react. You do need to memorize the timings of attacks, but the game becomes sort of a fast paced unbalanced rock papers scissors. David Sirlin wrote lots of articles and even a book about competitive gaming in general, specially fighting games, explaining concepts like this. It's just that some games have this strange curve in the learning curve, for instance Starcraft, where beginners think the game is all about strategy. But as you learn to play, you find out that it's more about macro, cause having more units normally beats any strategy. But then if both players have top notch macro, they have to begin doing tradeoffs in what they build, maybe cut some units to get a technology faster, or be greedier but more vulnerable for a while for a later payoff. In other words, the game becomes about strategy.

silversconfused 7y ago

My wife and I play two player house of the dead now and then. She memorizes levels, I skillshot. It's potent in combination. She gets the zombies I forget, and I get the ones she misses. Since it's always the same, it also doesn't get her too jumpy with anxiety. (We've gotten to the final boss on both saturn HOTD 1, and DC HOTD 2, never beaten the games though...)

CannisterFlux 7y ago
Off topic, but are you still playing Dreamcast HOTD 2? Did you keep a CR tube TV around for it? I still have a DC, HOTD2 and the lightguns, but they don't work with modern LCD TVs.
- silversconfused 7y ago
  Yes I keep a crt around for hotd and duck hunt. :) I intend to make a multi-system arcade cabinet some day to clean up the games area.
  - CannisterFlux 7y ago
    Ah well! I thought that there had been some new tech breakthrough :)

noobermin 7y ago

Well, now you're talking like me. People don't get it, but I try my darnedest to beat a boss/level in single player mode[0] on the first or as few tries as possible so I don't learn it too much, because it 1) breaks the illusion that it's a game (it hurts the "experience" for me if the superhero gets a second or third chance) and 2) I like being pushed to respond quickly rather than replaying a script, and I consider it an accomplishment to beat a screen of a platformer for example on the first try. Another set of games my girlfriend recently turned me on to are rhythm games, particularly VOEZ[1]. Again, as I don't think I said in the first comment but said elsewhere, it's not like I don't like the "classical music" style and I'm all "jazz music," but my "jazz" style is definitely my default mode. If you asked me afterwards to remember the notes, I would be able to tell you the gist but I certainly don't remember details, a lot of it is focusing when it gets complicated and responding on beat. And, as I said above, my absolute favorite is playing a song for the first time and trying to get a good score, because I really have no idea what's coming and it pushes my "respond quickly" buttons. [0] not that you don't learn quickly/during the fight without dying, and as many games often are, there is an obvious hint of what to hit, the rhythm to a boss, etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voez

yread 7y ago

Very nicely put. When I'm forced to use detailed knowledge from previous tries I always feel like back in civ 1 saving and loading until a trireme defended a city against a legion.

toast0 7y ago

This sounds like sightreading vs memorizing songs (musically or DDR-ish). There are some games where I just can't get past certain parts, because it's too fast to sightread, and I can't memorize the sequence (the Battlef*ing toads speeder level is a good example, especially with two people), but there are others that are hard to finish if I miss something, because I've played it so much I've lost the ability to sight read it (Contra and Life Force, mostly)