{"id":488,"date":"2006-11-13T19:52:39","date_gmt":"2006-11-13T23:52:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2006\/11\/13\/gamings-greatest-moments\/"},"modified":"2006-11-14T00:47:47","modified_gmt":"2006-11-14T04:47:47","slug":"gamings-greatest-moments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2006\/11\/13\/gamings-greatest-moments\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaming’s Greatest Moments"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some lists are less important<\/a> than others. And Gamesradar’s list of Gaming’s Greatest Moments is useless to me because I’m not quite sure what a gaming moment is. Does a cutscene or intro movie count as a gaming moment? Apparently, because many (if not most) of the 101 moments are cinematics of one form or another. There is also an overwhelming number of action type games here, many dependent on the story being told for the moment to be meaningful. There is a Homeworld<\/em> moment near the bottom of the list, though.<\/p>\n

And, since I don’t play many of those games, the list has dozens of moments I am only vaguely familiar with.<\/p>\n

Strategy games have great moments, but since so many of them play out differently for everyone, you don’t necessarily have the shared experience of finishing Tomb Raider<\/em> or Shadows of the Colossus<\/em> or Baldur’s Gate<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Take one of my great gaming moments. Multiplayer game of Sid Meier’s Gettysburg<\/em> against my friend, Kevin. He’s a little better than me at this game, but our battles are always hard fought. I always play bluecoats. In one game, my defense was faltering on the left so I redeployed from my right. Then he started a fresh assault on the new weaker right flank. Then reinforcements arrived, but they had a long way to go. If I hit his troops head on, these green troops would have cracked, so I force marched them through woods and hit Kevin in a devastating rear attack. His assault crumbled, and I held on for the win. The combination of time, tactics and hair’s breadth finish makes it a game that I remember really well.<\/p>\n

Even if you’ve had similar moments, it’s difficult for you to picture my great game moment, isn’t it? The game might be shared, but the experience isn’t. Few genres can compete with strategy gaming for emergent story telling, but the problem with emergent story telling is that we all didn’t go through the same stuff together. Stories aren’t “Remember the time when…”, they are “Once upon a time…” – both good ways to start a story, but the emotional pull is quite different.<\/p>\n

None of this bothers me. Strategy gamers understand the difference and that’s why you get a lot of After Action Reports on strategy gaming forums. It’s a chance to share the stories with an audience that knows your language even if they don’t know what your battlefield looked like or can’t quite picture your order of battle.<\/p>\n

Feel free to fill the comment box with your own moments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some lists are less important than others. And Gamesradar’s list of Gaming’s Greatest Moments is useless to me because I’m not quite sure what a gaming moment is. Does a cutscene or intro movie count as a gaming moment? Apparently, because many (if not most) of the 101 moments are cinematics of one form or […]<\/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":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-7S","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488"}],"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=488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}