07/06/19 - Battle Royales, Plans and The Role of Video Games
The part of the video linked above touches upon something I found out from playing BR games a few years ago, especially PUBG when it was more popular.
One thing that happens in those games is that they have down periods where you're not really doing anything and you're just sort of waiting for the next circle to be shown. In those periods I often found myself either literally waiting (camping) somewhere, or just going around aimlessly trying to find people to fight.
But I started noticing that doing this made me feel somewhat uncomfortable for multiple reasons. One of them is that often times I would find someone to fight but I'd be in an awkward spot since I hadn't thought much about what I was doing. But another was likely what was pointed out in the video, which is that I was in "prey mode". meaning I didn't have a plan of attack and I was just aimlessly going around and waiting for something, which likely made me more stressed and would explain why I felt uncomfortable.
So what I instead instinctively decided to do more was to always have a very well defined plan of what I was going to do next, and then I would act out that plan until I had new information to create a new plan and so on. This seems obvious but actively deciding to do this changed how I approached the game drastically and the uncomfortable feeling I had before vanished completely.
The plan could literally be just waiting in a house until the next circle came, but because it was an actual plan I was doing that while paying attention to all the things that could go wrong, so I'd pick a good house, for instance. And similarly, if I decided to move instead I would decide to move somewhere very specific for some specific reason, like I saw someone going in that direction and I'm going to try to find them, because if you see that someone is going somewhere with a specific car and then you see the specific car somewhere you just know that they're around and then you won't really be surprised by someone showing up randomly. You'll choose ways to move around that always put you into an advantageous if the person you were following was to show up in a general direction.
Anyway, the point being, always having a plan was just the better decision and it's line with what was said in that video. You want to attack problems actively and be the predator rather than just wait around and be the prey.
Now, another thing about this is that this process happened over the 400 hours or so that I played PUBG. It wasn't that I just suddenly decided to do this and did it, it was something that developed over time as I learned to play the game more and more and got quite good at it. And one of the things that is interesting to me about games is that you can actually go through this kind of subtle (in the action to action, short term sense) but significant (in the week to week, month to month long term sense) process that sort of teaches you something in an embodied way. Before going through this process in PUBG, I would never really get what that portion in that video really meant, but because my body has physically gone through this process what was said in that video actually makes real sense to me. And everyone sort of has had this experience in one way or another, where someone says something and you really get it because you've been through the same thing, right?
So I think that this is a very important role that video games can play in society and bridge the gap in understanding between people. Because initially, before I was like 20 or so, the way I thought about how people are went something like: "everyone is basically good and rational, and if everyone has access to the same facts and has similar mental capacities they would reach the same conclusion", but this is seriously wrong and naive, because that's not how people are at all. People are highly motivated by internal and biological things that they have little control over and that they mostly don't understand, and it's reasonable to make the argument that in a lot of cases what people say is mostly informed by those internal drives and not by their higher order processes of reason and logic. And you can easily see that this is the case in things like politics or even discussions over things like programming languages.
And so what games can do, like they did for me with PUBG, is to actually have people embody another way of looking at the world and making them really understand what it's like to be more like that. The only problem is that this has to be done at a very fundamental level that's very hard to break down logically. For instance, I would say that a game like PUBG, on top of being a shooting game and exercising all the skills that come with that, essentially is training some people (like me) to both be more assertive and to also come up with plans and execute them better.
But I guess this is a subtle effect and it's hard to really know how much being better at PUBG helped me in those domains generally (assertiveness and planning) and not just in that one game. I don't know how transferable the skills are, is what I mean. And perhaps there are people out there who were already good at planning and the way they approached PUBG and got better at it was to plan less and learn to be more flexible, right? It's totally possible.
Then the question becomes, is PUBG normalizing people towards some optimal level of assertiveness and planning that the game itself requires, or are people just playing mostly in the way that their personalities allow them to and there's lots of variance to how you can win, and therefore lots of variance to the types of temperaments that can be successful in it? Or maybe all these points I just talked about are completely overshadowed by just being more skilled with a mouse, which could totally be the case...
07/06/19 - Battle Royales, Plans and The Role of Video Games
The part of the video linked above touches upon something I found out from playing BR games a few years ago, especially PUBG when it was more popular.
One thing that happens in those games is that they have down periods where you're not really doing anything and you're just sort of waiting for the next circle to be shown. In those periods I often found myself either literally waiting (camping) somewhere, or just going around aimlessly trying to find people to fight.
But I started noticing that doing this made me feel somewhat uncomfortable for multiple reasons. One of them is that often times I would find someone to fight but I'd be in an awkward spot since I hadn't thought much about what I was doing. But another was likely what was pointed out in the video, which is that I was in "prey mode". meaning I didn't have a plan of attack and I was just aimlessly going around and waiting for something, which likely made me more stressed and would explain why I felt uncomfortable.
So what I instead instinctively decided to do more was to always have a very well defined plan of what I was going to do next, and then I would act out that plan until I had new information to create a new plan and so on. This seems obvious but actively deciding to do this changed how I approached the game drastically and the uncomfortable feeling I had before vanished completely.
The plan could literally be just waiting in a house until the next circle came, but because it was an actual plan I was doing that while paying attention to all the things that could go wrong, so I'd pick a good house, for instance. And similarly, if I decided to move instead I would decide to move somewhere very specific for some specific reason, like I saw someone going in that direction and I'm going to try to find them, because if you see that someone is going somewhere with a specific car and then you see the specific car somewhere you just know that they're around and then you won't really be surprised by someone showing up randomly. You'll choose ways to move around that always put you into an advantageous if the person you were following was to show up in a general direction.
Anyway, the point being, always having a plan was just the better decision and it's line with what was said in that video. You want to attack problems actively and be the predator rather than just wait around and be the prey.
Now, another thing about this is that this process happened over the 400 hours or so that I played PUBG. It wasn't that I just suddenly decided to do this and did it, it was something that developed over time as I learned to play the game more and more and got quite good at it. And one of the things that is interesting to me about games is that you can actually go through this kind of subtle (in the action to action, short term sense) but significant (in the week to week, month to month long term sense) process that sort of teaches you something in an embodied way. Before going through this process in PUBG, I would never really get what that portion in that video really meant, but because my body has physically gone through this process what was said in that video actually makes real sense to me. And everyone sort of has had this experience in one way or another, where someone says something and you really get it because you've been through the same thing, right?
So I think that this is a very important role that video games can play in society and bridge the gap in understanding between people. Because initially, before I was like 20 or so, the way I thought about how people are went something like: "everyone is basically good and rational, and if everyone has access to the same facts and has similar mental capacities they would reach the same conclusion", but this is seriously wrong and naive, because that's not how people are at all. People are highly motivated by internal and biological things that they have little control over and that they mostly don't understand, and it's reasonable to make the argument that in a lot of cases what people say is mostly informed by those internal drives and not by their higher order processes of reason and logic. And you can easily see that this is the case in things like politics or even discussions over things like programming languages.
And so what games can do, like they did for me with PUBG, is to actually have people embody another way of looking at the world and making them really understand what it's like to be more like that. The only problem is that this has to be done at a very fundamental level that's very hard to break down logically. For instance, I would say that a game like PUBG, on top of being a shooting game and exercising all the skills that come with that, essentially is training some people (like me) to both be more assertive and to also come up with plans and execute them better.
But I guess this is a subtle effect and it's hard to really know how much being better at PUBG helped me in those domains generally (assertiveness and planning) and not just in that one game. I don't know how transferable the skills are, is what I mean. And perhaps there are people out there who were already good at planning and the way they approached PUBG and got better at it was to plan less and learn to be more flexible, right? It's totally possible.
Then the question becomes, is PUBG normalizing people towards some optimal level of assertiveness and planning that the game itself requires, or are people just playing mostly in the way that their personalities allow them to and there's lots of variance to how you can win, and therefore lots of variance to the types of temperaments that can be successful in it? Or maybe all these points I just talked about are completely overshadowed by just being more skilled with a mouse, which could totally be the case...