I wouldn’t be surprised if I spent most of my free time in high school playing counter-strike. Valve/steam undoubtedly have the actual stats but thankfully that’s not public. Then it’d be really embarassing (even more than blogging about counter-strike!)
Practice makes perfect: There’s probably a lot of people in my life (parents, teachers, etc) that wish this lesson didn’t come from a computer game. The way I see it, better that than nothing!
Before CS, I thought there were some things that practice simply could not improve. There’s a certain amount of randomness in the world which makes practice futile. But in a game, there’s only a finite number of random states to be in, so if you practice and learn all of them, you win! Michael Larson is a great example of this. Of course, me playing counterstrike back in the day was another great example.
Sound: At first glance, CS feels like any other shooter. I think one of the neatest features was its use of sound. Beginners think of sound in the game as a decoration, whereas pros use it to guess when you’ll pop around the corner. CS is probably not the first game to do this, but it was the first game where I took sound seriuosly. Then again, it’s also the first game I ever took seriously.
After playing CS, I found myself much more familiar about my surroundings in general. A door would close down the hall and I start thinking about whether or not someone had left or just entered the room. When was the last time I heard that door close? Were there footsteps?
People care about games: The idea of being a pro-gamer did not exist a few years ago and to this day, I don’t think it should. There’s something wrong about people making money playing games. They aren’t even testing them. They aren’t doing anything but playing. Yes, they win tournaments now and then but how much can you win? How can you make a living?
Apparently, people can and do. After learning about things like CPL and WCG, I became much more worried about the world. Possibly more worrisome than the thought of John McCain on SecondLife.
Defaults are good: There was a period of time where I loved to configure everything. Not just games. I had buttons on my computer in weird places and special hot keys to do different things. The lesson I learned from trying to play CS on other people’s computers is that all that crap makes you dependent on some configuration. When in doubt, learn the default as it’s probably reasonable.
This is a pretty lame post and probably makes no sense to people that haven’t actually played first person shooters. What I’m banking on is this unrelated note I learned from the internet: readers love lists. (And, I love using the colon now!)
I feel you.