Sunday Thoughts: Losing

I used to have this odd misconception about people who wrote about games. I had always assumed that if you wanted to write about games, or even be involved in the games industry at all, you had to be insanely good at games. I mean obviously if you wanted to write about a game you had to be the best, to be able  to beat just about any title effortlessly. For some odd reason writing ability never actually entered into the equation in my young mind. Perhaps this is why I’d never really considered writing until Peter asked me one fateful day over two years ago now. I expect he still regrets the decision.

See, I’m not particularly good at games. I’m not awful, I mean I’m capable of playing pretty much anything you put in front of me with different levels of success. However, that’s more competent than good; a far more important skill in reviewing games. You need to be able to force your way through a game, no matter what it throws at you. There are a handful of times we haven’t given a game a formal review because we couldn’t beat them, most notably Super Meat Boy, but those are games which require you to be far more than just competent; in fact they require a level of skill that glimpses ‘good’ as a distant speck in its rear-view mirror.

[drop]For most games though I’m good enough to push through the campaign and write a review. That’s just the campaign though, throw me into multiplayer and things become a bit different. In fact this topic sparked in my head after I was beaten 7-2 at FIFA 12. This wasn’t horribly unbalanced teams, it was a London derby with Tottenham facing off against Chelsea, but FIFA has never really been my game.

That’s not really to say that I really identify any game as being something I can breeze through. I adore Halo, but I’m hardly the best player in the world. I can happily have a laugh with friends but I get easily frustrated if you put me in a competitive situation. Gears of War? Again, it’s fun to play when no-one’s taking Horde too seriously, but I fall to bits when people try to get me to actually play like it matters. Some of you may even remember my brief foray into the world of Killzone 2 for the King of Killzone competition. That didn’t go so well.

Of course I do have a tactic if I’m playing badly and people seem to be caring a little too much. If you’re one of the very small circle of people who’ve ever had the joy of playing FIFA with me you’ll be familiar with my particular tactic in a footballing situation; essentially it boils down to getting bored and trying to get as many players sent off as possible. This is highly amusing for me, although people seem to get terribly annoyed when they’re playing on the same team as me; I can’t imagine why.

I do wonder what it is that frustrates me so much in multiplayer gaming though, my lack of skill is hardly contained to multiplayer sessions. Perhaps it’s because you actually lose in a multiplayer session, when you’re going through single player you just have another go at it. Or maybe it’s because if you die in single player you have a motivation to keep going, there’s a story to work through; when you lose at multiplayer you’ve lost and that’s it.

A better response to all of this would probably be to try and get better, but my hands just won’t let me. They’re horrible, clumsy things, and I doubt I’ll ever make them any more accurate. For now I’ll just content myself with blindly flailing through single player games, and occasionally mucking about in multiplayer. But taking things seriously? Never.