And, no, I haven’t been playing Grand Theft Auto.
It may sound like a dorky idea – it is born of gaming, after all – but it’s true. At least for me, anyways.By playing one game a lot in a short period of time, you get in the habit of thinking in terms of that game. Play a lot of racing games and it can affect your driving – sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad one. Spend a lot of time in Splinter Cell or Rainbow Six and I’ll bet you start checking out your environment more and figuring out the best way to clear the “hostiles” from the bank while you’re waiting in line.So what have I been playing that brought this up?
Spider-Man 2
No, I’m not jumping off buildings and fighting crime, but things do look differently now. Obviously, a good bit of the game is spent swinging around Manhattan, so you’ve got to keep an eye out for the next spot to shoot a web to keep on moving, or figuring out when to let go to land on the next rooftop.I haven’t built a set of web-shooters, so I don’t need to know that kind of information about my neighborhood, but I keep finding myself thinking about it. Walking to work today (after a busy morning of keeping New York safe), I realized I was looking at everything differently. I kept checking out how the buildings were spaced out, and whether or not the road was too wide to be able to cross it by swinging out form the buildings on one side, releasing that web and hooking up to the ones on the other side. (I could make it easily.) I was looking at the taller apartment buildings and trying to figure out how many jumps it’d take to get up to the top of them. (About 3-4.)
I was more than halfway to work before what I was doing even registered with me. It didn’t seem crazy or anything, just a bit odd. I don’t need this knowledge, so why was I thinking about it, solving problems I’d never have to face?
I think it’s a matter of keeping your head in the “gamespace.” By thinking about stuff in terms of the game, it makes it easier to jump back in after a day or so of not playing it. Sure, the landscape here is (just a little) bit different from Manhattan, but the physics of the moves needed are pretty much the same.
I’ve done similar things with other games before. I’ve thought about levels in certain games while I wasn’t playing, trying to plot out the best way to deal with them. Those damned special ops ninjas in Half-Life spent a fair bit of time in my head until I finally got past that level. With the Tony Hawk series I’ve put non-game time into figuring out how to string together a good combo to get past a “Pro Score” goal.
Does any of this make sense?
Or is this just me being an obsessive geek? (Probably just be being a geek, but I thought it was interesting enough to share – so here it is. ^.^)