[OT] The Art of Winning Games

[Starhawk]

Well my opinion on games is this I play to win and often times I am "evil" when I play because I will slaughter thousands or millions or billions in strategy games, I have scored over 11,000 kills with Delta Force Land Warrior (have had it for 6 years) and done it all without the least bit of remorse or hesitation yet I would never seek to kill another person unless they threatened the life of a person I loved or myself and even then I would most likely try and just disable them instead of kill them.

Okay if your first and only impression of me was playing a wargame against me you'd think I was evil and sadistic because I do brutal things to win games such as the wholesale slaughter of entire cities (Civ2) or leaving no survivors from an enemy army (Medieval Total War) or destroying whole planets (SEIV) for the sake of WINNING! (P.S. brutal game tactics I don't actually pull out a crobar and hit my apponent).

In SEIV I blow entire enemy colonies and even homeworlds to peices (mainly because I don't have the full game and can't get troops in time to make it worth it) without remorse killing millions if not billions of the enemy in a single shot. Even though it's a game I've heard people complain that this makes me a brutal person (not directly me but people who play games like that) which is utter BS because in real life I am extremely compassionate and can barely stand to see an animal suffer much less a fellow human being and would probobly do anything I could to prevent another person from being hurt or killed.

Same goes for FPS games I will without a doubt kill a team mate or two to save my own arse....especially if it is a CTF game and they are in my way and keeping me from scoring for the team. But on the other hand I have played "operation shield" for other players who have the flag and will readily let my character die for the greater good of the team. Yeah it pisses people off when I throw a hand grenade to clear out a bunker that has six enemy troops and two friendlies that are pinned down but my whole opinion is you had no hope to begin with and at least I got the bad guys too right and I'd expect them to do the same to me in order to win the game?

I hear people say that by basic nature humans are killers far too often and quite frankly it is a stereotype as most humans can't even stand the site of a corpse in RL (I've seen a few in my short time on earth and almost threw up even though they were in a medical school type environment). I mean humans are not naturally KILLERS we are naturally competitors which leads to a brutal form of game called war. The AVERAGEindividual is not a killer and would never think of killing another human being.

I am a Christian so I have the inharent beleif that God made no evil when he made the universe, however he gave his creation a choice to be evil or good, and sadly many things choose the side of evil and thus MANKIND is neither evil nor good as a species but it comes down to the individual person to choose what they will be.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

i once made a list in my head of all the crimes i'd approximitly be guily of if the games were real. from genocide(strategy games), to petty theft(adventure games).

[Erax]

Puke : Interestingly enough, many Brazilian tribes practiced cannibalism, before the Portuguese arrived and Banned it. Which gives rise to one of my pet phrases : "Yes, tradition and cultural roots are a wonderful thing, let's revive the customs of our ancestors and go eat all the foreigners."

Puke again : that's the reason why fiction and games exist (or at least my opinion of it), but of course they have gone on to be much more.

Loser : There were wargames before HG Wells (although he may have invented the commercial wargame), but the irony is still there. As is the fact that Monopoly was invented by a socialist who wanted to portray the evils of capitalism.

Narf : self-control goes so much against all our species survival instincts that it is almost a form of violence against oneself. So-called 'safe sex', on the other hand, does not really solve the problem either because there is a part of us that wants children, not just sex. It's interesting to see what society has come up with to appease the parental instinct in an overcrowded world : pets, consumerism, concentration of the population in cities where living space is scarce and the growing perception that sex is an end in itself. Wait, I remember a book that described a society like that, it was called 'Brave New World'.

[Loser]

Originally posted by Starhawk:
... I would never seek to kill another person unless they threatened the life of a person I loved or myself and even then I would most likely try and just disable them instead of kill them.

Depending on what state you live in it might be better to just kill them. Check and see if you have a Make My Day law.

Originally posted by narf poit chez BOOM:
there's another option for population control: self-control.

Self Control is and illusion. The effect you are actually describing is an effect of peer pressure and so depends heavily on the folk to which you peer. After all, I call it Self Control when I get my inhibitions under control enough to do the sorts of things that rid one of one's virginity.

Originally posted by Narratio:
Genghis Khan took his lads for a stroll across Europe for perfectly good reasons in his opinion.

That would be Batu Khan.

Thanks for the link Erax. You've definitely got me there. It's often said these days that we are moving closer to Brave New World than 1984, but I'm fairly sure both of them were good Self-Preventing Prophecies.

[ December 11, 2003, 12:39: Message edited by: Loser ]

[Fyron]

I hear people say that by basic nature humans are killers far too often and quite frankly it is a stereotype as most humans can't even stand the site of a corpse in RL (I've seen a few in my short time on earth and almost threw up even though they were in a medical school type environment). I mean humans are not naturally KILLERS we are naturally competitors which leads to a brutal form of game called war. The AVERAGEindividual is not a killer and would never think of killing another human being.

That would be based off of a narrow slice of the world that is not representative of people in general.

[geoschmo]

I think by and large most people are basically "good" as individuals, and treat other individuals well an with respect. But it is when we get together in Groups that we tend to lose it. Even among petty criminals and stickup men, they often work in at least pairs. The murderer who kills alone is typically the psyochotic individual who has something wrong with him and so doesn't fit the normal human pattern. The human race has a nasty tendancy to sink to the basest level of any particular group. I don't know why, but I think it's because when we start thinking of ourself as part of a group, and others as part of a different group, we start to see them as objects rather then people.

[Stone Mill]

If you'll allow, I'll stick more to the "winning games" topic, rather than winning and losing in real life, which is somewhat subjective and relative to personal experience and the situation.

When it comes to playing games, I enage with the attitude that I'm going try and win; giving my opponents hell by leveraging any legal asset at hand.

I find they appreciate me for it, as much as I love someone throwing their best at me.

"I like a man who smiles when he fights" -Winston Churchill