Published on 12, July, 2020
Just a general question for anyone else like myself who has an obsession for gaming. One of my obsessions is football so I enjoy playing an online football game against other gamers my only problem I seem to struggle with is my game play is slower than others and no matter how hard I try to rectify this problem I just cannot seem to fix it.
I've been playing on consoles/PC's for over 30 years. It gets to the point where I'm just annoyed and infuriated. Could this possibly have any link to my ASC? For example my brains processing speed.
On the other hand I have played games in the past like football managing games where I just end up winning everything and any simulation games I'm just really great at.
I'm still trying to figure out a lot about myself since my diagnosis last year.
Anyway I hope everyone is doing well and staying safe through these tough times.
As far as I can measure, it's all about stress and the overwhelming desire to reduce it and take control of your environment. When you play a game you're good at, you're in control of the whole experience - there's a lot of satisfying chemicals buzzing around your body.
When you're on-line playing others, it's something you should be good at but the limitations of your machine, connection and maybe lack of skill will frustrate you and spoil the experience.
It's the same reason people do model railways or play with Lego or read books - it's total control of the environment and therefore zero stress!
I still like Quake 3 - it's challenging enough to get the adrenaline going but I can master it and win.
I agree. I don’t play computer games anymore. But when I did, I always preferred playing games that I was in control of. Years ago my favourite game on the SNES was Sim City. And more recently my favourite game would be Farming Simulator. Both of those games you’re in total control of what does or doesn’t happen. But saying that, I have played football games, but I only liked playing against the computer. I found, when I did play anything against other people online, I found it intimidating. I used to find some people get aggressive, which I didn’t like, so I stopped online gaming. But I understand what you’re saying, it must be really frustrating to know that you’re really good at the football game, but can’t seem to put it into practice.
Many years ago, my wife was playing Sim City on an Amiga 1200 - I watched her for a bit and figured out the underlying strategy so in one marathon night, I started a city and built it to the maximum extent of the game in one go - the trick was a 100% tax rate for 364 days a year and then a 0% rate on election day - I was loved by my people and I had buckets of tax revenue to build as fast as the game would let me.
Playing against people builds lots of unpredictability and too many unknowns into the game which spoils the fun.
I quite like the older, simpler tech. I recently picked up an Atari ST for sequencing my keyboards.
Brilliant. I did the same thing. I was very sneaky in raising the tax level to the maximum, and then dropping it down on Election Day I do miss that game sometimes.
My best buy years ago was a second hand Amiga 500 and sensible world of soccer and Ultimate Manager were my favourite games.