Theory

[icycalm]

http://culture.vg/features/commentary/s ... -eyes.html

Would anyone care to take a stab at explaining what's wrong with this article before I do it? The author can try too if he wants.

[Qpo]

A few stabs:

"I have to immerse myself more!", was what I thought, and while lol@backwards of seeing that as a means for higher skill

Better controls — i.e. technique, in the article lumped into the term "individual skill" — is a tighter connection between the player's brain and the avatar's body, so there is no "backwards" or "forwards" here, as better controls = more immersive.

In this situation it's actually smart to go looking for the configs of ~da1337s~, since they'll probably have their settings in order

While there are a few settings which quite simply are better, the majority is a matter of preference, so aping someone else's is stupid. For example, I need cl_righthand 0, which makes you hold all weapons as if you were left-handed (as I'm left-handed with rifles and right-handed with pistols, and you use rifles most of the time), which would feel extremely awkward for those fully right-handed.

But while it's probably wise from a long-term "win at all costs trying to max my skillzzzzzz"-perspective to focus on aim, it's of course also boring compared to team-play

Follows from "better controls = more immersive": If you can't control your avatar well enough to feel like you're inside the game, any talking you do with teammates will feel like it's taking place outside of the game, rather than inside of it, so team-play — might be called "group control" — must be secondary to "self-control".

[Qpo]

Actually, those are more answering "what is wrong IN this article?". So, what is wrong with the article as a whole might be that it is a sort of game guide, and that people might enjoy finding this stuff out on their own.

[icycalm]

Dude, you are so far gone it's hilarious. It's more immersive to look by moving your hand instead of your head? Why not move your dick instead, man? Like I said, lol, hilarious. And indicative of the kind of shitty games you play. I mean of course you don't care to take your time and look at your environments while exploring them, since the games you play have tiny, shitty, featureless environments, and you couldn't do any exploration in them even if you wanted to. Besides which, exploration can only be done the first time through an environment. By the time you've traipsed through it for the millionth time you might as well be exploring your apartment on the way to the loo. Not the faintest clue that games like Thief, Deus Ex or Crysis exist, or really any other decent first-person game, where you might want to take your time and soak in your surroundings. In some of these games this is even a life and death matter if you are playing at high enough difficulties, and you are going through a new area. I mean what's the point of buying 3 monitors if you can't use your fucking head? Or of the Oculus Rift, which even you should be able to see is the future of first-person games? The system we already have is perfectly immersive because it perfectly corresponds to reality: look with your head, aim and shoot with your arm. So that I can be looking on my left screen, out of 3 screens, and shooting on the right, if I want to. But you would throw all that out the window just so you can have a tiny little bit more chance of "winning", i.e. of shooting down some other poor little aspie while running around the same goddamn tiny set of 5 or 6 featureless rooms for the billionth time. It's downright depressing.

But your tactic is indeed more immersive than the one the rest of us use, but only in the game YOU are playing. Remember the scoring essay: the aspies do not play videogames, no matter what they say. They play a real-life game called "King of the Scoreboard" in which the videogame in question plays the role of merely a mini-game. So in Counter-Strike looking with your head is more immersive, but in the real-life King of the Scoreboard game which uses Counter-Strike as a mini-game looking with your hand is indeed more immersive because... well, because you say so and since I've never really bothered playing King of the Scoreboard I am willing to take your word for it, just as I am willing to take the word of the Shmups aspies that spending entire weeks and months reading 40-page strategy guides and watching videos in which the game you haven't even played yet is utterly dominated every single pixel of the way is a more immersive way to play the variation of King of the Scoreboard which includes, say Mushihime-sama Futari as a mini-game instead of Counter-Strike.

So that's what's wrong with the article. Its very premise.

[icycalm]

As to why I posted the article even though it's wrong: same reason I posted Sullla's Metagame article. It's actually valuable. "The errors of the great men are worth more than all the truths of the little ones." That's not to say that Sullla and Qpo are great men, but we are not talking about life here, we are talking about virtual life, and in the virtual realm these people are indeed great. Great virtual men, if you will. Or virtually great men, lol. You get my point. So for example "Braid is art" is a mistake any retard can make, and there are indeed countless pathetic attempts at an article where this mistake is made, but "Love the Metagame because it's the game's essence" and "Look with your hand" -- these mistakes are infinitely more advanced, and hence one must be an infinitely more advanced gamer to make them. So let it be understood that I absolutely relish reading such articles. They are freaking awesome, and that's why they are on my frontpage.

[icycalm]

From Orgy of the Will: "Every great specialist ultimately comes to commit a great mistake, the nature of which is determined by the nature of his specialty."

[icycalm]

You know who else looks with his hand? Stephen Hawking. And he doesn't even have to train himself to transfer the impulse to move his head to his hand -- he does it on instinct, since he doesn't even have a functioning neck. Which is why I think he'd make a great "competitive" videogame player, like all cripples.