What I Miss About Counter-Strike

[chaosmachine]

Sometimes I struggle to accept how many years I spent playing Counter-Strike. They say that mastering a field takes 10,000 hours of practice. I don't doubt that the time I spent practicing Counter-Strike approached that. Hearing myself say that makes me shudder.

 

Of the millions of things I could have chosen to master, Counter-Strike was it.

 

There's a feeling you get when you go in to something knowing you're about to execute with perfection. It's the feeling a musician gets before picking up her guitar to play for the 1000th time. The feeling Aaron Rodgers gets before slinging a spiral through a 6-inch gap passed three defenders.

 

That was the feeling I got playing Counter-Strike.

 

here's the whole thing:

 

http://eseanews.com/...mments&id=10446

 

someone else posted this quote from DFW:

 

But it’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing…the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way”up close and personal" profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life — outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very small…[Tennis player Michael] Joyce is, in other words, a complete man, though in a grotesquely limited way…Already, for Joyce, at twenty-two, it’s too late for anything else; he’s invested too much, is in too deep. I think he’s both lucky and unlucky. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well.

 

I think about this now and then, what it means to sacrifice significant parts of your life to get good at something... I probably spent 500 hours playing Tekken, for example, and was ranked something like 50th in the world for a while... but why? Guitar would have been a better investment, I think.

 

Right now, I'm learning to draw. I've spent a couple hours on it every day for the last 6 weeks or so, and it's cool to see progress as I fill up my sketchbook...

[dr lopez]

 

 

 

i hate myself.

 

edit: i also beat ultima buster in about 500 hours.

[Hautlle]

The article was OK, I wish it was longer. I can definitely relate to the number of hours it takes to master something and how that narrows down your world. Think of all the Ph. D's that think of nothing but their area of research/study. In a world of such vast knowledge and specialization, to further that knowledge or ability you have to focus down like a beam of light through a magnifying glass about to light an ant ablaze. There's no time or energy to be wasted on other things. There was a time in my life when I played CSS for 60+ hrs a week. It opened me up to the world of clans, competitive pc gaming and all that, but I don't miss it in any way. Hours spent running over strats, practicing, fucking off in game... It was fun at the time, but looking back I'd much rather have a more rounded life and be able to enjoy the many things available to me, as I do now. It's nice to be able to focus on one area and become great, but it's also very limiting and not entirely fun, as the article points out. You just get caught up in it and it quickly becomes your entire world.

[data]

 

every day for 5 years. 500 hours? i did 500 hours per week!

[chaosmachine]

well, let's not mention skyrim. it's not even multiplayer :\

[chim]

However, what they don't tell you is that putting your mind to something is not normal. Putting your mind to something means doing things that normal people don't. That's the only way to be exceptional. People who really put their mind in to something are different. They're weird. There's something wrong with them. There's something different that makes them tick.

 

Being up at 6AM making music, this hit me pretty hard..

 

I played 1.6 in a UK clan for a while back in the good days, it wasn't too serious, but there was something indescribable about playing it as well as you could not just because everybody else was, but because it was so rewarding. The game mechanics were simple & balanced yet held their little quirks that yielded tons of strategies and little habits to learn, and they all made a difference so practicing was worthwhile.

 

For instance, if you learned to tap the movement key opposite to the direction you were moving in when having to shoot someone, you stopped instantly rather than gradually slowing down, which made your shots dead accurate some milliseconds earlier than the other guy. Not much stuff like that in games these days. Here in sweden, with NiP/SK and all, it was religion.

 

 

cs source doesn't count by the way.

 

[gaarg]

I've put more hours in playing pc games than drawing and painting put together in the last couple of years. I'm an idiot.

[modey]

Making music has almost entirely replaced gaming for me. Actually, it seems like a game sometimes.

[kaen]

starcraft

[jeremymacgregor87]

minecraft

[Braintree]

I used to be ranked in the top 150 Halo 1 players in the world

[Guest Super lurker ultra V12]

[Guest couch]

I haven't taken a competitive FPS game seriously since CS pre 1.4. None of the ones that have come out since have felt as...good.

 

The article is pretty good. And I saw it linked a few times by people that I was in a wow guild with back before Wrath. Kind of as a way to justify their time spent in that game. I guess they feel the article accurately represented them since that guild was the notorious EJ (I went to a different just as notorious guild after a while though, to hide from the spotlight since I played a controversial class/spec).

 

Then I quit, realizing that considering the time spent playing. The level I played at. I was not comfortable with taking it to another level (getting more involved in gaming culture in general using my position as a catalyst for it.)

 

 

The last part of his article hits home. He's spent all that countless time devoting himself to something that has no staying power. Games have a fast turnover rate. Unlike something such as a sport or art which you can devote the vast majority of your adult life to. Where as a game, you're looking at ~10 years for a fucking good game. Very few games have that kind of staying power. And that's an incredibly long time for a game to stay in the spotlight.

[oscillik]

I've put more hours in playing pc games than drawing and painting put together in the last couple of years. I'm an idiot.

you're only an idiot if you think you're an idiot.

 

spending time doing something that one enjoys, in my opinion, is not time wasted.

[Guest iep]

hardcore fps'ing is mental gymnastics.

modern speed-chess, if you will.

[Guest Pennywise]

I've put more hours in playing pc games than drawing and painting put together in the last couple of years. I'm an idiot.

you're only an idiot if you think you're an idiot.

 

spending time doing something that one enjoys, in my opinion, is not time wasted.

 

I agree with you a little, but you can't enjoy playing games if you know there are better things for you to be doing. Obviously the best thing to do is to be sensible with the amount of hours you put into gaming. I don't and yes, i feel like a fucking idiot too.

[pcock]

i played counterstrike source for years and was still average, theres something about that game that is just ultimately satisfying, when you rip up a round and wipe out 5 people it feels awesome. theres no console shooter where ive ever felt as good slaughtering people. ive spent a truely huge portion of my life playing the piano though, that feels more worthwhile.

[roasty]

However, what they don't tell you is that putting your mind to something is not normal. Putting your mind to something means doing things that normal people don't. That's the only way to be exceptional. People who really put their mind in to something are different. They're weird. There's something wrong with them. There's something different that makes them tick.

 

the younger you learn this the better, though it may foster the 'misunderstood-genius' complex in some.

[chenGOD]

@ roasty

That sounds about right. I remember waking up at 6 to practice the piano for a couple of hours before school and then practicing for another 3 hours after school.

Or when I got older and started playing football more seriously, usually three practice sessions a week, training outside that and then matches on the weekend.

 

 

 

no masturbation jokes yet?how many hours has watmm spent practicing that skill set?

 

[Guest Rabid]

hardcore fps'ing is mental gymnastics.

modern speed-chess, if you will.

lol, no.

[Guest viscosity]

what bout frozen synapse.. high speed chess analorgy?

[essines]

I'm in the top 1000 MW3 players right now and I haven't even tried very hard or played all that much. This says to me that MW3 isn't that much of a game.

[Guest ex-voto]

Heroes of newerth - the new version of Dota - was for almost 2 years of my life continuously present in my mind. I played the game on a pretty high level, on teamspeak 3 with fellow "mates" and it was so addictive. Coming up with a good strategy and actually see them work gave so much satisfaction.

 

The downfall of this game was the fact that it was dominating my other thoughts. Actually at a certain time I was being worried about the fact that shots or actions suddenly would bounce while speaking with people...

 

When I was done with work, no matter what time, I would start up the game and play it without any sensation of time, or time what so ever not even being relevant. The game was so important to me that I would even forget the more important things in life, such as friends (sorry Iep!) relationships et cetera.

 

What did I gain from it? Being good at controlling a hero on a map? I laugh at myself for thinking that was important.

 

I don't miss it, not even a single second.

[vamos scorcho]

jesus. you don't play games for the future, you play them for the now. I don't miss playing chess 10 years ago. I don't miss watching Videodrome for the first time. It stands that the experience was fun then, and if I did it now, it would be fun now. That's all that matters.

 

If you weren't having fun, that's one thing. I know from playing Counter Strike: Source for the past few days, I've been having fun. Yeah, it's fucking impossible, and I'm consistently at the bottom or near the bottom in every server. It IS new to me though, and I've been enjoying it. I get a few kills every 10 games or so, and those kills are pretty nice. I enjoy the gameplay. Anyway, I'm more for talking about Counter Strike than the idea of games being a waste of time in comparison with artistic endeavors, etc.

[vamos scorcho]

It's all about balance of life areas in the domain of the grey. I don't plan on becoming a master genius of Counter Strike... shit, the article is right. I do pity people who care about achievements in games, getting points, top scores, and all that. If it brings you joy, sure. I just don't sense that those people are really getting joy. It's more a compulsive and sick desire to push something into the red.