king of video games, part 1
Editor's Note: Bro as I am writing this, I just realized I am basically riffing off of ludwig's world's greatest gamer competition. I'm just going to keep writing and pretend I didn't realize that.
An idea that has been floating around in my head for awhile now has been this idea of being the "king of video games" or something to that effect. Inspired by players such as void and prestivent, they are seemingly godlike at all the games they touch. So as a joke to myself, I've been mentally putting together a list of games that I would need to master in order to become the "king of video games". Honestly, most of the games on the list are just games I've been meaning to play.
One factor that I had to consider while forming this list were the genres of video games I wanted to include. In order to become king, it would obviously have to be all-encompassing. As I continued to brainstorm, I quickly decided that there were games I wanted to exclude. For example, I honestly have no interest in getting good at osu lol. Goodbye rhythm games. Another issue to consider with regards to genre is what do I do with these simulation games like cities skylines or factorio? There's no denying the skill component to these games considering that I can't build a functional city to save my life right now.
Evidently, I'm set to become the king of a very specific subset of games. As a spoiler, the specific subset are essentially PVP games. I just think there's something exciting about improving and competing against other people. Iron sharpens iron they say.
With the matter of which video games to play settled, we turn our attention to the next problem: what does mastery mean? It sure sounded nice in my head, becoming a master. You know that cliché where the dude goes around and learns all the different fighting styles and becomes the ultimate fighting gigachad. That's what I thought I was going to become in my head. The only problem is that I have no idea how I'm going to identify that threshold.
The trivial way to go about it is to just identify some rank and when I achieve that rank, I can claim mastery. However, we all know that's not how it works. Let's take valorant for example. The top rank in this game is called "immortal". However, the top 500 players of this rank get placed into their own tier called "radiant". So when am I a master? Is it when I hit immortal, the top rank, or is it when I hit radiant, the top cut of the top rank? The trivial answer to that is to say higher is better, therefore radiant indicates mastery. But let's be real, top 500 is a lot of work and I'm not even sure that's a good use of my time.
A more nebulous example might be time trials in mario kart. How would I determine that I have achieved mastery in these time trials? Is it based on my aggregate ranking? Do I have to make some kind of arbitrary top cut to enter (aka top 5 aggregate ranking or something)? Maybe it's when I have achieved a select time that the community as arbitrarily decided is good?
Honestly, I pose these questions with no real answers, just an answer I think works for me. To answer this, I want to quickly discuss why I want to do this at all. The answer is simple, I enjoy the process of improvement. There's a wonderful video by core-a gaming called, "The Two Types of Gamers (Honers vs. Innovators)". In this video, one of the types of gamers is described as a honer. Essentially, honers like to grind stuff. Go watch the full video if you want more.
So do I think I'll actually become the video games if I master all these video games? Probably not. In fact, as stated earlier, the final list of games I will be unveiling is essentially just a list of games I've been meaning to play. It just so happens that the way I enjoy these games is through improvement and attaining mastery. Since I wanted my selection of games to cover multiple genres, the list was more diverse than I expected. I didn't realize I wanted to play so many different games lol. I also find this exciting because there will be unique skills that I can learn from each game and genre. In my own way, I guess I am going around learning all the different fighting styles after all.
Part 2 will have the actual games LOL.