Before I say anything the least related to the topic detailed above, I would like to provide some commentary on FaceBook's recent 'Ticker' innovation, using a popular, contemporary (redundancy makes me all happy inside, as you no doubt gather) medium of satire:
Hell, maybe they took it away now, but I think it was a pretty good meme nonetheless.
And that, dear Martin (Martin is the name I have assigned for my hypothetical reader, for those who didn't see my last post), is all I'm going to say on the matter.
Anyways! From here on in I'm going to be taking the type of egocentric view typical of pretty much ever other blog in the world ever, and discussing what I referred to above as my StarCraft 2 holiday.
Before that, however, we need to establish two truths pretty fundamental to any of this making sense; the first is that I play StarCraft 2 (the multiplayer, that is – the singleplayer isn't quite as demanding) and the second I sort of already spoiled – StarCraft 2 is a pretty demanding game. That is, if you consider sitting at your computer for 20-30 minutes on end with enough adrenaline to kill a horse pumping through your veins and your fingers moving around faster than a cold-turkey crack addict trying to overcome the safety lid keeping him from his next fix, while your brain does roughly the same amount of work which goes into a quantum-theory thesis in the space of about three seconds.
To translate that out of the metaphor for you, and ground it in a bit of reality, StarCraft is demanding in that you are constantly active both mentally and in terms of simply playing the damned game fast – in an average game at the moment, I am pressing and/or clicking around 100-110 buttons every minute. Beyond that, you become emotionally involved in every game – like I in the previous paragraph, adrenaline pumps madly and by the time you come out at the end of a game, you are either at the height of euphoria or burning with rage and ready to beat the living fecal matter out of your desk (or screen, or mouse, or keyboard, depending on what the case may be), because that bastard deserved it!
I'm not even kidding here. There's a twenty-three page thread on TeamLiquid (a StarCraft forum) with pictures like this one, detailing the aftermath of StarCraft rage. Click here to go to it:
So anyway, the point I'm making here is that StarCraft is (or, at least, in the majority of cases becomes) an extremely stressful game.
Usually, however, it doesn't really get to me. I'm the sort of person who doesn't stress or anger easily, and am generally a pretty good loser on top of that – “give respect where respect is due” is usually my motto when it comes to losses... but more on that in a later post.
As I'm sure you all know, however, usually isn't all the time (I know, right!? It's pretty crazy...), and Sunday the 14th of August (two weeks ago today) certainly wasn't a usual case.
You see, I lost. Quite a bit. Eight games in a row, to be exact. What made it worse was that almost every single one of those eight games I had lost because of moments retardedness so awe-inspiring in nature that were we living back in the Middles Ages dizzle (dizzle being the hip way of day or time period, of course), I would probably have approached a bard, minstrel or similar maker of (then) contemporary music and presented to them the idea of taking my tale and creating a ballad of epic scale and proportion, to be passed down through the generations until someone accidentally set the sheet music alight or got hit with a sneaky case of amnesia.
But I digress.
I remember the moments after my eighth consecutive loss quite clearly: Overcome by a zealous hatred of my own incompetency and the sheer overpoweredness of Protoss (a race in StarCraft), I struck a mighty blow to my desk with my fist, in an attempt to vent my rage. As it turned out, the desk was just as solid as it looked, and with that in mind and throbbing knuckles on (in?) hand, I did what any man of noble stature who found himself in my position would do: I ragequit. Because ragequit is a verb.
For two whole weeks, I avoided StarCraft the same way a washed-up rock-star with heroin shoved up his rectum avoids sniffer-dogs at airport security. Well, perhaps not exactly the same way, but you get my drift.
Instead of playing StarCraft, I invested my time in other things – Metro 2033 (a post on which is imminent), the demo for Might & Magic Heroes 6 (another post on which is also imminent) and other so-called 'real-life' things like guitar. I even tried that 'human interaction' nonsense once or twice (trust me, it's overrated). For the first time in a long, long time I played games simply to enjoy them, without stressing over whether I was winning or losing or my ladder ranking or any of that other nonsense.
And I loved it.
I think that with all the stress and obsession over self-betterment it becomes very easy to forget the reason one actually plays games in the first place – to have fun. I suppose that for others it may be different, in that they play to improve and hopefully make something of their gaming abilities, but given that I've come back to StarCraft after a two week period of down-time playing exactly as well as I was and feeling better about it, I really do question whether or not putting yourself through hell really is the most effective training method.
I am back in business (StarCraft business, that is), however, and I must say that I'm loving it and moreover that I'm excited to improve my play – not because I hate the fact that my play sucks at the moment, but because I'm genuinely enjoying the game once again, and I really think that that aspect is an extremely important one.
Anyways, that's all I'm going to say for now. Rock on.
Duncan
Out
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