Techno-Tourette’s

I play video games.  A lot.  Quite possibly too much.  I think my favorite ones are those that really challenge some thought and make you look at things in a different perspective.  A game with a really powerful and engaging story, or with unbelievable gameplay, or the ability to really lose yourself into another “world” for a while really tend to catch my attention.  For me, gaming is all about the experience.  When friends are over, we play Rock Band, or Buzz, or even (surprisingly awesome) Little Big Planet.  Those are games that I don’t often play by myself, simply because it’s about the experience with the friends that are over that make the games enjoyable.  I truly wish there were more games like that, instead of just leaving multiplayer to online-exclusives.

For my own solo experiences, though, it’s a different kind of experience.  I gauge the quality of a game based on how hard it is for me to put it down.  But also by how easily it is for me to go crazy over something that looks to be beyond my control, in which I can perceive a gaming flaw.  In NCAA Football, it’s when I’ve got a defensve line of rock-solids and the halfback is able to run right through them because of the animations that force my guys just slightly to the wrong areas.  In NBA Live, it’s when I get forced out-of-bounds by an animation, or get locked onto the offensive player against my will.  Blitz: The League, when the computer has my guys slipping all over the field while the opposing team is playing like the Niners in the Joe Montana era.  In Grand Theft Auto, when I have to wait an hour to kill the guy I’ve been chasing, even though I’ve been able to make the shot the entire time.  In fighting games, its when the computer can do a million moves flawlessly while any normal person would make at least a couple mistakes, especially when some of those moves are physically impossible to duplicate (the Guile Sonic-Boom to Flash Kick comes to mind from my nostalgic days of SNES gaming.)  It’s in Call of Duty when a grenade lands next to me, but the indicator fails to tell me until the nano-second before it blows up, killing me.  (But that one could be that I’m no the greatest FPS player in the world.  <grin>)  In racing games, it’s when you manage to get ahead by a lap and the rubber-band AI always brings the competitor into supersonic speeds to keep the race “competitive.”   These kinds of things seem to happen all the time.

Each time something like that happens, I tend to suffer from a strange malady that I’ve termed “Techno-Tourette’s Syndrome”, or TTS.  Now, while this follows more the pop-culture definition of Tourette’s, namely, that it follows more closely to Coprolalia, all I know is that these particular situations make me want to spout such a string of profanities that even a muleskinner would hang his head in shame.  I get angry, frustrated, and don’t want to play anymore.  The reason?  Because it feels like there’s nothing that I can do about it.

I used to train in boxing, once upon a time.  When I went sparring, our intention wasn’t to hurt each other, but when something came up, we took care of it in the ring.  We played by the rules, and then left it there.  You spent yourself in that ring.  The only one that you had to worry about failing was you, because as long as the other guy played by the rules, you knew that it was an even match.

I used to swim for my high school team.  All that mattered was who got to the finish line first.  Everything was on you to push yourself, because the guy next to you was going to do the same thing.

In any competitive sport that I’ve played, you play by the rules, and if you then lose, well you knew that you put everything in there that you could, so that was it.  There was no wondering if the other team cheated, because there was a ref, or at least the players would notice.  Cheating was not allowed.

But while playing video games, there is no ref.  All there is is the gamer’s perception, and more often than not gamers notice a lot more than developers seem to want to give them credit for.  We notice when there is an invisible “line” that we have to cross in order for all the bad guys to appear.  We notice when the monsters just appear out of nowhere in an endless supply.  We notice when you change the rules on us, or only apply rules to us, and no one else in the game.  And things like that don’t make us happy.  Instead, it gives us TTS.

I don’t know the answer, but I suspect that it relates to the fact that I don’t like it to feel like I’m being cheated, and there’s no one to take the slack when I feel that way in a video game.  If I’m playing a board game, and I realize that the person next to me is cheating, then I call them out, and they get to live with those consequences.  In sports, the ref metes them out.  But in video games, I hand over 50+ dollars to play a game, only to have it cheat, and I have nothing I can do at it but swear at the screen for ten minutes straight, frustrated out of my mind.

Such is why I installed a pull-up bar just around the corner.  When I get frustrated, I walk away a little, do some pull-ups to force the anger out of my system, and cool off.

But it makes me angry with just the fact that I have to do that at all when playing a @!$@*# #&%!*@& game.

- Kyle

~ by Karratti on Tuesday, 23 December, 2008.