Hey. My name is Brandon and Video Games are a large part of my life. My friends are gamers, my brother's a gamer and I work for a video game store, so I'm surrounded by both games and gamers at work and at home. This helps me get a lot of different views from my customers as well as my friends and family.
I'm a competitive gamer at heart. I would love to play games professionally, given the time. Winning is a huge part of gaming to me. I know that sounds bad, so let me explain before you press the back button on your browser the same way I normally would.
I love difficulty, there's nothing like hitting a wall in a game and struggling to get past it. That's what I mean by winning. When you come up against that boss that can one-shot you from full to zero without trying, but you manage to dodge all the fire, block all the punches and whittle them down until there's loot to be had. That's winning to me. That's what I love about video games the most.
On the other hand, losing also has a different meaning in my world. I despise losing when there's nothing I could do to stop it. When a team-mate is dragging you down and there's just nothing you can do, that's a loss that I hate. But when I make a mistake, trip up and pay for it with my virtual-life? I take a little joy in that situation.
Learning from your mistakes is a big part of playing video games and of life. In my experience, one of the most important things when you're trying to be competitive is knowing when a loss is a good thing. Sure there's the sting of being beaten by someone, maybe a winner that tells you "h4h4 noob go back to training", but these are the people you'll be dealing with your whole life. So challenge them again. And again. Until you're good enough to beat them.
That's not to say I'm always competitive. I like the choice of being able to sit back and relax and just hammer out an RPG or run through a platformer by myself, but at my heart games like Marvel vs Capcom and League of Legends, where I can jump in and have fun but still experience a brand-new challenge every time I play, those are the sort of games that I always come back to.
I want to share with you the parts of games that I love and why I love them. The highs and the lows. And hopefully, you'll enjoy it.
I still remember beating you repeatedly at Smash Bros... then you got good at games all of a sudden when I moved out.
ReplyDeleteYou're very rarely competitive in real life Brandon, why are you so different when playing games?
Games always have an objective.
DeleteReal life isn't so simple. It requires time and a lot of thinking to find exactly who you need to beat in real life to get somewhere.
Games however, put that objective right in front of you. You jump in and you immediately know where to go next, or what you need to do to find your way to that place. You know who you need to defeat. And above all, there's always a bigger boss, or a better player, that you want to defeat. That's what makes it so much easier to become competitive, being able to see what you need to do and become motivated to do it.