{"id":2662,"date":"2010-10-18T10:44:15","date_gmt":"2010-10-18T15:44:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=2662"},"modified":"2010-10-18T10:52:10","modified_gmt":"2010-10-18T15:52:10","slug":"this-is-your-brain-on-strategy-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2010\/10\/18\/this-is-your-brain-on-strategy-games\/","title":{"rendered":"This Is Your Brain on Strategy Games"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s not that I only play strategy games – I love a good RPG or puzzle game. I used to play a lot of adventure games, too. But strategy and war games are my bread and butter, my alpha and omega, the reason I blog and podcast and get paid to begin with.<\/p>\n

There is a price to going for depth in a genre instead of general breadth. While most of my colleagues have sunk time into Dead Rising 2 or Halo Reach, I’m still working through the improvements to Victoria 2 and finding the perfect way to use the Akkadians in Bronze.<\/p>\n

It’s not just that I am outside many conversations; most gamers I think don’t play every major game as soon as it comes out and only take part in a few conversations anyway. It’s that strategy games condition your mind in certain ways that makes an abrupt change to another genre quite difficult.<\/p>\n

It also leads you to believe that if you can master the Cultural Victory in Civilization 5, then playing Rhythm Heaven on your DS should be a piece of cake.<\/p>\n

My good friend and colleague Jenn Cutter<\/a> is a bad influence on me in many ways. Her gaming covers a wider and more Japanese map than mine, plus racing games and things that I have never heard of. Our discussions often refer to rhythm and music games, which she knows very well, and she, in effect, challenged me to play Rhythm Heaven.<\/p>\n

I suck at it, and I think I know why.<\/p>\n

The obvious explanation is that I, in fact, have no rhythm. Given my general aversion to freeform dancing, this is apparent to any casual observer. But I think there is something more to it than this.<\/p>\n

Deep immersion in strategy games and even action RPGs conditions you to expecting certain things from a game. You expect to have the signals and cues appear on screen in a certain way and to have your responses to these cues translated in a certain way. Aural cues are rare and give you some time to respond.<\/p>\n

Rhythm Heaven is really all aural. You need to respond purely to a sound and then you have to take that sound and answer it with a physical action. On the DS version, this means flicking the stylus sharply and strongly.<\/p>\n

A rhythm game like Rhythm Heaven would work better if I could confidently close my eyes and know that my stylus flicking thing would work. (When I explained to Cutter that I had never flicked my stylus before in a game, she accused me of never using my DS; in fact Dawn of Discovery and Civilization Revolution just never use stylus flicking.)<\/p>\n

I’ve written before about the grammar of games<\/a>, but we have to recognize that many games and genres have completely different languages. I don’t mean in terms of jargon or acronyms – though those matter. I am hardly monolingual in gaming matters, but I am so immersed in one language that the shift to a game where my ears are more important than my eyes and my reflexes more important than my brain is a humbling experience.<\/p>\n

But like a language, the only way to fix it is to get more deeply immersed in it. So I haven’t quite given up on Rhythm Heaven, though progress will be slow. I’ve got a couple of ideas in mind about how to regularly get more exposure to new non-strategy games without breaking my budget.<\/p>\n

In some ways, I expect this is like someone who only plays Madden trying to get into Out of the Park Baseball or someone who only plays Call of Duty pausing for a ripping game of Imperialism. It’s not just a matter of unfamiliarity – it’s a different brain space, a different way of understanding how your expectations of how a game should work defeat you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s not that I only play strategy games – I love a good RPG or puzzle game. I used to play a lot of adventure games, too. But strategy and war games are my bread and butter, my alpha and omega, the reason I blog and podcast and get paid to begin with. There is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-GW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2662"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2662"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2665,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2662\/revisions\/2665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}