tonx
New Member
Todays topic is to discuss the differences with anything in life between novelty and adversity.
For months now, those of you who follow any of my facebook comments, knew that there was a new Video Game comming out on most platforms called Call of Duty- Black Ops. It was the "upgrade" to the highest selling video game of all time, Call of Duty - Modern Warfare 2. For those not familiar, it is a first person shooter, where you are thrown into games with other real people, and the objective is to shoot/grenade/stab/kill other players for points and levelling up.
Modern Warfare 1 and 2 were the first video games where I got months and months and months of gametime due to their severely addictive nature. There are 25+million other players worldwide who all experience this, so don't think me as the supergaming nerd, but my goal in these games were to improve every time I played. Every single time I believed that I had conquered the game with my play style, someone would come up with some new strategy to beat me with.
So back on topic. Monday night at midnight, the new Black Ops was released. Essentially it was the same concept as the previous games.
Rushing back from the store and eagerly putting the disk into my PS3, I was expecting months and months of gameplay out of the new game. In fact I had a full slab of Jack Daniels in the fridge, and made parties concerned aware that I would be unavailable for about 48 hours.
To say the least, I was beyond extremely dissapointed and returned the game to the store the very next day for a full refund. The game had this hollow feeling compared to its prequals and I did NOT enjoy it one little bit. I just simply could not put my finger onto as why. I mean the new game had new guns to use, more customisation of character, new "maps" (levels to play on) and they had done alot of research to remove alot of the complaints people had of the previous games. All of the guns were more difficult to aim, explosives were much weaker, and if a player made a mistake in strategy, they were killed almost instantly by the better player. They had made the game so the "better gamer" or the "most skillfull player" ALWAYS topped the leaderboards. I'm not the greatest gamer ever made, but I'm far above the average joe, and I was topping almost every single game.
Since then I have been thinking about it almost non stop, and believe I have come up with why I didn't enjoy the gameplay at all.
The adversity was simply not there. Very rarely did I have to think quickly to get kills or stay alive. The game created far too big of a gap between better players and worse players to the point where doing poorly for someone as experienced as me was impossible to acheive. It widened the gap between the have's and the have nots. The novelty of the new game was there, but I think I got around 10 hours of gameplay out of it, compared to the previous version where I got close to 40days of actual gameplay out of it. Essentially, I didn't have to OUTTHINK other players at all to perform.
Then I started thinking about bowling, and how we are facing exactly the same issue as this new video game will face very shortly, when other players work out what is going on.
When a bowler no longer feels challenged by their house shot they purchase a new ball to keep them interested. Yes they are promised a huge improvement with the latest and greatest technology, but essentially they are investing in a new novelty for their enjoyment. How long does that player get use out of that ball? Until they are bored of it and the next release comes, because the challenge of scoring simply isn't there on their house shot. Compare bowling to something more difficult like golf, and using this theory, it is very easy to comprehend that while the concept of both bowling and golf is the same, they have become very very different over the years.
Facing a new challenge is what keeps competitive people in anything in life interested, not a novelty, which is usually very short lived.
This experience, and these new thoughts have given me some tools to move forward as a better competitor at life, because while we all get frustrated at many things in life, it is probably the one thing that keeps us comming back.
Hard to comprehend isn't it?
Feel free to comment and agree or disagree, or relate it to something in your life that is frustrating but you continue to do it.......
Tonx
For months now, those of you who follow any of my facebook comments, knew that there was a new Video Game comming out on most platforms called Call of Duty- Black Ops. It was the "upgrade" to the highest selling video game of all time, Call of Duty - Modern Warfare 2. For those not familiar, it is a first person shooter, where you are thrown into games with other real people, and the objective is to shoot/grenade/stab/kill other players for points and levelling up.
Modern Warfare 1 and 2 were the first video games where I got months and months and months of gametime due to their severely addictive nature. There are 25+million other players worldwide who all experience this, so don't think me as the supergaming nerd, but my goal in these games were to improve every time I played. Every single time I believed that I had conquered the game with my play style, someone would come up with some new strategy to beat me with.
So back on topic. Monday night at midnight, the new Black Ops was released. Essentially it was the same concept as the previous games.
Rushing back from the store and eagerly putting the disk into my PS3, I was expecting months and months of gameplay out of the new game. In fact I had a full slab of Jack Daniels in the fridge, and made parties concerned aware that I would be unavailable for about 48 hours.
To say the least, I was beyond extremely dissapointed and returned the game to the store the very next day for a full refund. The game had this hollow feeling compared to its prequals and I did NOT enjoy it one little bit. I just simply could not put my finger onto as why. I mean the new game had new guns to use, more customisation of character, new "maps" (levels to play on) and they had done alot of research to remove alot of the complaints people had of the previous games. All of the guns were more difficult to aim, explosives were much weaker, and if a player made a mistake in strategy, they were killed almost instantly by the better player. They had made the game so the "better gamer" or the "most skillfull player" ALWAYS topped the leaderboards. I'm not the greatest gamer ever made, but I'm far above the average joe, and I was topping almost every single game.
Since then I have been thinking about it almost non stop, and believe I have come up with why I didn't enjoy the gameplay at all.
The adversity was simply not there. Very rarely did I have to think quickly to get kills or stay alive. The game created far too big of a gap between better players and worse players to the point where doing poorly for someone as experienced as me was impossible to acheive. It widened the gap between the have's and the have nots. The novelty of the new game was there, but I think I got around 10 hours of gameplay out of it, compared to the previous version where I got close to 40days of actual gameplay out of it. Essentially, I didn't have to OUTTHINK other players at all to perform.
Then I started thinking about bowling, and how we are facing exactly the same issue as this new video game will face very shortly, when other players work out what is going on.
When a bowler no longer feels challenged by their house shot they purchase a new ball to keep them interested. Yes they are promised a huge improvement with the latest and greatest technology, but essentially they are investing in a new novelty for their enjoyment. How long does that player get use out of that ball? Until they are bored of it and the next release comes, because the challenge of scoring simply isn't there on their house shot. Compare bowling to something more difficult like golf, and using this theory, it is very easy to comprehend that while the concept of both bowling and golf is the same, they have become very very different over the years.
Facing a new challenge is what keeps competitive people in anything in life interested, not a novelty, which is usually very short lived.
This experience, and these new thoughts have given me some tools to move forward as a better competitor at life, because while we all get frustrated at many things in life, it is probably the one thing that keeps us comming back.
Hard to comprehend isn't it?
Feel free to comment and agree or disagree, or relate it to something in your life that is frustrating but you continue to do it.......
Tonx
