| War is fun II / Onlline Gaming | |
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28 Oct 2002 @ 07:54, by Flemming Leer Jakobsen
I was working on an article about online gaming but Funch´s article "War is Fun" got me writing quite a long comment.
So I choose to post it here instead.
Well,
Gotta admit it. I´m sort of addicted to playing online computer games, especially my favorite game Counter Strike. Research indicate that playing a "violent" computer games generate more of the dopamin than heroin!
And that´s the main reason for many playing online games IMHO (In My Honorable Opinion).
The fascination about guns goes a long way back. Basicly it´s an instinct which we as human have survived by for thousands of years, but nowadays we usually do not find ourselves in situations that requires us to use these dormant skills.
We all have them, but some find the combination of dopamin and adrenaline so excillerating that they find ways to get there. They become extreme thrill seekers in the hunt for the miniscule moment of joy and a glimpse of light perhaps. Bungy Jumping out of bridge or parachuting out from cliffs.
It can have various forms, like the athlete trying the perfect his style to crush that extra second out of his body or in worst case the Washington area snipers.
A mild form is playing First person shooters (FPS) like Quake, Unreal Turnament or my favorite Counter-Strike. It´s addictive, but I personnally am hooked for those small and magic moments of feeling teamplay and coorperating with other players on a server to win.
Coming back to Funchs article about the reasons for some to choose to use weapons IRL (In Real Life) or in a computer generated FPS (First Person Shooters) game like Quake, Unreal Turnament (UT) or my favorite Counter-Strike. - Basicly it´s about energy and sometimes I myself get PSI/ESP ideas about not to go somewhere on the map - only to find out that another player is camping there. Or a sense of where exactly the last member of the opposite team is camping out.
I like Counter-Strike for it´s simulation and the teamplay that is requires to win versus Quake or UT, which are based on individual gameplay dependent only on one single persons skills.
I find that the best Counter-Strike players have a certain feel for the energy among players on the server. When you first feel that you have been spotted, you wonder. But sometimes the energy is so strong that the opposite player actually could be sitting right next to you. A lot of players I have chatted with on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) can tell of similar experiences.
Other times when we restart on new rounds I´m perfectly aware of where certain teammembers are. Each members spawn (or start) at random spots. So you cannot tell where people start out. But at some point you get an awareness of other people´s energies and know where they are without even having to check it.
Basicly computer gaming is entertainment and IMHO is the one of the purest forms of energy that you can find nowadays. Nothing on the screen is real. But because some 10 - 16 and up to 32 players choose to it becomes real.
Some 2 million people world wide gather online to play these on servers each week and it is becoming a key gaming industry.
Oh, yes.. Perhaps you wondered. My gaming nick is Merlin Dju. I have been playing since january 2002.
BBC about dopamin
Business2.0 article about Counter-strike: Game Development à la Mod
Other articles in danish
[link] [link]
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Category: Internet
3 comments
26 Nov 2002 @ 03:13 by : Gameplaying
My son Zachery is rather hooked on online game playing too. It used to be Asheron's Call, but I'm not sure what it is now. And I think it is generally a good thing, which teaches you many skills and allows you to have experiences that it would be difficult to arrange in the real world. But, yeah, it easily gets to be quite a bit of an addiction. I've never had a game addiction myself, but my wife has. Not really that kind of games, but for quite some time she was staying up all night playing Tetris kind of games, to keep improving the highscore.
26 Nov 2002 @ 05:16 by spiritseek : competition
with or without another person can become quite a fixation. Maybe that explains road rage to some degree.The car replaces the gun in this instance,a powerful machine that most people possess.
27 Nov 2002 @ 02:02 by : Actually there´s money to be won
$100,000 in cash prices at {link:http://www.thecpl.com/|CPL winter 2002} competition in Counter-strike and $30.000 in UT2003.
But ming, it´s odd. A lot of women love tetris games. I don´t know, maybe it´s the colours and the fixed game format. WYSIWYG kind of thing attitude. hmmm...
Yes, spiritseek. Also here in Denmark a new thing is emerging in traffic. A total egocentric attitude while driwing and I saw a survey that told that driving here in Dk is the 3rd most likely place to get in heated argument and sentences. Also about a fortnight ago, we had a huge traffic accident with some 120 cars involved on a motorway. It was foggy and some drove as fast as 120 km/h with only being able to see some 20 meters ahead! Also the first accident happened in the north bound lane here near Vejle. But people in the opposite lane found it so interesting that they thought maybe it was a TV news broadcast or something like that.
The result was accidents within minutes of the first occuring accident in the south bound lane. On top of it. People started using an emergency lane to get away from the accident. And some even maneged to turn their car and started driving away in a one way lane just to get away from there. Even truck drivers used the reverse to get away from there!
The result. Total chaos with the emergency crews and police not being able to get to the hotspots of the accident. Sad to say 2 people died. But it could have been a lot worse.
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