It’s just so cathartic to post my open thoughts on a website!  Been doing it since high school, guess things don’t change so easily.

I played an interesting set of TF2 today.

The content of the game itself wasn’t the interesting part.  After all, I just play against bots as a pyro and set things on fire.  It sort of calms the withdrawals I get from not playing Natural Selection anymore.  Yes despite not having played NS since 2006, I still miss it.  It was fun!  So playing a Pyro in TF2 is kind of similar in that you run at things, and if you can get within range and stay maneuverable they die and you can move on, but if they draw a bead on you, you’re toast.  Then pretty soon you die and respawn and do it again.  Pretty standard Alejo-FPS-play.

So the interesting part is that a few rounds in on one of my favorite maps, I noticed I wasn’t playing too well.  When killing is the only real goal, level of play can be approximately measured by kill:death ratio, which was at the time 50:20.  A kill:death ratio of 2.5:1 isn’t *bad* per se, but I’d played better before.  In fact I have two screenshots of a sterling 3:1 ratio after 100 and 150 kills, so I suppose those are the standard to which I hold myself.

Well, I think I can do better, I said to myself.  I idly calculated how many kills I would need to bring it up to 3:1 (I would need to net 10 kills while still also making 3 kills per life).  I did this while playing and started focusing on how to play better.

Sidenote: I’m not a perfectionist, quite the opposite.  I always accept contextualized imperfection, and it did occur to me that I’m currently on my break, on a day when my energy is low, after essentially a year of no break and a semester that has been a meat-grinder.  I have declared myself entitled to doing “nothing” which for me is reading and video games, and these are hardly optimal conditions to excel at things.

Yet my kill:death ratio started to climb rapidly, and as my confidence grew, I found myself idly calculating and recalculating and moving the goalposts, as we humans all so often do.  3:1 morphed from highly skilled gameplay to an ordinary level of play as I approached it.  These are bots after all.  Many people disdain playing against them.  They’re too easy, too exploitable, undisciplined and unrealistic.  Real humans are a much bigger challenge (I have maintained a 2:1 kill:death ratio on actual human servers at peak play, but it’s tough).  What had for a moment seemed like peak performance was now pedestrian.

When I was at 95 kills to 32 deaths I decided to see if I could get to 100 kills before 33 deaths, essentially topping the 3:1 ratio in time for a big round number.  Unfortunately my aggressive play leads to a rather large standard deviation in kills per life, and I died still at 95.  There was an opportunity then to be frustrated.  I had picked out a goal and come up short of it.  I decided to eschew negative emotion (this is supposed to be “fun” right?) and kept on killing.

Then an interesting thing happened.  I started rampaging, blowing past 3:1 on a rampage littered with the computerized burning bodies of bots.  Soon I was 10 kills over a 3:1, then 15.  Soon I was idly pondering whether I was capable of hitting a 3.5:1 ratio.  This is, of course, while still playing.  I noticed several things about this thought process, being an introspective person:

• A 3:1 was a sort of landmark, I knew I had been past it before (I seem to recall getting a 4:1 on a particularly helpful map) so this was an awful lot of pondering for something that’s not really tangibly amazing
• There’s also the part where TF2 is billed as a strategic and tactical game, and merely padding your K:D ratio is somewhat frowned upon, but I reckoned this was canceled out by playing against bots, where the more strategic game choices aren’t even available
• My level of play seemed to be improving, not the moving or setting on fire part (which had already been honed by hundreds of hours of NS) but the rocket reflection in particular (I finally saw what the “killed by reflected rocket” icon looked like this night)
• I was doing an awful lot of math for someone supposedly on break
• Hey I like math! Otherwise I wouldn’t even have the job I have
• Okay moving on

I didn’t quite make it to 3.5:1 by 150, but I calculated how many more I would need.  This helped focus me, and I soon hit the 3.5:1 ratio (I don’t remember where) and then proceeded to hold it.  Merely quitting as soon as it’s achieved would be silly, for several reasons.  First, quitting out of the middle of a round seems gauche (trained I suppose by years of playing with people), and second, the high variation makes it easier to get to a particular ratio than to keep it.

But keep it I did.  I slipped a bit (at one point being 10 kills in the hole) but yet another medic-fueled rampage brought me back over the top, and when I suddenly noted to my surprise it was 12 rounds, I had barely kept up the 3.5:1 ratio and my brain was now overheating, I prudently decided to screenshot and out for this.

As you can see I consider myself a very introspective person.  If you boil down the essence of “fun”, it’s to generate positive feelings and/or vent/alleviate negative ones.  I haven’t been feeling very negative, as the end-of-semester woes were tiring but not frustrating and I had the assistance of a marvelous grader for the lab exams, so generating positive feelings was the goal here.  I believe I derived the following points of “fun” from this game:

• Classic Alejo: taking care with setting goals.  A self-imposed goal is designed for two things: to measure and to motivate.  I measured my performance, motivated myself, improved the performance, then moved the goalposts so I could re-motivate myself without getting over-ambitious, all while in the fail-free shade of “it’s break, it’s bots, no one cares, you aren’t even at your best.”  Success can be magnified by articulating factors that were in opposition to it, so I guess that was the point of that.
• Self-monitoring is a positive feeling for me, as I can have a tendency to be hard on myself.  I feel like I walk a fine line between too hard on myself, where nothing is good enough, and not hard enough on myself, where I fail to achieve worthwhile things.  I think most people have to deal with this, but I’m not anyone else and I’m not judging anyone else’s ability to do this, I’m just happy with how I handle it.  Practicing the skill of goal-setting and re-setting feels good.  I know that in the end, we allow ourselves to feel good, and it’s important that I continually be comfortable with that feeling.
• I enjoy making things that last.  While my basic movement and aim abilities are essentially solidified, I improved my rocket-reflection, which is hilariously fun, a thing that will likely last.  I gain particular satisfaction from tangible improvements that are a new achievable standard.

I would be an awesome/terrible football coach.  They’re always driven to the next level no matter what.  I would probably coach a winning game and go “Woo!  I accomplished something!” I’m going to go get some ice cream!” whilst my competition is furiously staying up late at night figuring out my various weaknesses.  Then I would outlive them all.  Allowing oneself to feel good in the moment doesn’t get you the Superbowl, but it does get you to bed at a reasonable hour.

Here is the final screenshot!  Also note in the 11th round, when I was starting to feel my brain overheat, I tried playing sniper, racking up three headshots before dying and switching back.  I’m not very good at sniper, but I think I’m better than before!