My parents visited me and my partner a few weeks back and one of the highlights was when we sat down and played a card game called Fluxx. It is a simple enough game in that you can start almost instantly but what makes it complicated is that the rules are constantly changing with each turn (hence the name). One turn you will be expected to draw 3 cards and play 4, the next you’ll be drawing 5 cards and then playing only 1. Mid round someone can play cards that force you to discard most of your hand, or give them cards from your hand. The goal for winning will change depending on what cards are laid down. My personal favourite rule to see: if you can speak in rhymes twice, you get to draw and play one extra card.
My parents are avid board and card game players. It was consistently the way to get my family to sit down at a table and interact, outside of eating. My parents also have a lifelong friendship that revolves around playing Pinochle with some American friends. My dad’s only computer game is an online Bridge game that he delves into regularly.
And yet, Fluxx frustrated; there was a confusion over when to ‘play’ a card and when to ‘discard’ a card. Rules and actions would remain in my parents’ hand due to an uncertainty as to what they would do. In one case my mother played a card that meant that my dad instantly won, and he argued against it (and thus almost costing him the win). In another case he realised 3 turns later, laughing as he explained, that he would have won the game if he had known what one action card meant.
We played it for a few hours and there was still this sense that they didn’t fully understand it, and that my dad was only playing to humour the rest of the table. His brow almost constantly furled in a frown.
As I sat there and played, I recognised a lot of his reactions to the game in my own behaviour. There was a level of confusion, and a little bit of panic, the moves and the rules weren’t coming to him as easily as some others at the table and under his irritation was a little bit of, I think, fear.
The first time I think I was cognisant of that same moment of panic, that moment of ‘hang on, how is that happening?’, I was maybe 27 and was in England. My younger cousins, all in their teens/preteens, agreed to play some Halo 2 in split screen. Most of them were neophytes, and only had a basic working knowledge of the controls. For the first couple of rounds I won pretty easily, but then something changed. Of the three, the middle cousin started to outplay me.
If we were in a one-on-one fight, evenly matched, he won most of those encounters. He was just able to hit the head shots quicker than me, and generally reacting to things quicker than I could register. At 27 years of age I had come to the conclusion that I was old – and it was terrifying.
Being the good sport I was, I then switched to what I still had over my teenage cousin: an extensive knowledge of the maps, and tactics that could hide my slower reflexes. I didn’t go for the straightforward gun fights, I baited him into corners and threw grenades. I led him into fights with his brothers and then picked them all off. The tide turned back in my favour and I started winning again. I am not sure he even noticed what I was doing, but he did comment that I was ‘pretty good’ at this game.
Buddy, not that you’ll be reading this, I am sorry/not sorry for using the only tool I had against you being more than ‘pretty good’ at Halo 2.
As I went through my 30s, this is something I leaned on more and more. In a fair fight with most skilled players I was going to lose 70% of the time. So, in games like Titanfall I made sure to try and read other players, and know when to get the drop on them. It meant that I felt competitive in even the most hectic fights.
This was something that I was unsuccessful with on Player Unknown’s Battle Grounds. The massive open world meant that there was more to remember, more to figure out, more strategies to try and keep in my brain, and I just wasn’t equipped for it.
I have said it before, but PUBG is my favourite horror game. From the first time I played it in 2017, almost every drop in a fully populated 100-man game was a white-knuckle ride. Every corner feels like I am going to get killed by a monster, except this is not a scripted event that can be predicted. Instead, death can happen when you walk out in an open field, crest a hill, or look out the wrong window. I did get better though, relying mainly on a more tactical approach, not going for the glory but instead letting other, better players take shots at each other, and then stepping in and taking on who remained after.
I also got really into Rogue Company, a game I have reviewed twice for Xbox Tavern. This game was incredibly tough for me, but it was one that I put hours and hours into, to get to the point where I would say I was competent. Never good, just competent. My frayed synapses could not comprehend what other people were doing but I was able to use the characters that had mines. These mines could be put down strategically to coral people, or just straight up kill them. I was never the fastest shooter, but I prided myself on being able to out-think other players, often claiming kills from beyond the grave as some player confidently walked straight onto my Improvised Explosive Device.
My next big moment of entropy came playing Windjammers 2, a fantastic sequel to an old sports game from the 90s. It is one I’ve spent hours and hours playing and, until recently, would pride myself being ‘pretty good’ at it. At a company retreat I brought this and a few other party games. People drifted in and out of the room and played, and then at around midnight I put on Windjammers – it was popular enough that several rounds rotated. One of my co-workers, a veritable whippersnapper in his mid-to-late 20s sat down next to me, he was incredibly high (it is legal in Canada so calm your tits) and seemed vaguely interested. We started a game with him picking the fast, frail Brazilian, while I picked the mid-range, sturdy Spaniard.
It wasn’t even close the first round, everything I had learned went out the window as he parried disc throws and set up super shots, he seemed to anticipate throws beforehand and get to them before I had thrown them. It felt like I was sharing a game with a 4th Dimensional being that was moving at million frames per second. There was that frown on my face, that I would recognise in my dad later, it was a frown of someone trying to calculate what was happening with a brain that just did not feel fast enough. To think my original review said that beginners needed to watch videos, yeah, old person beginners.
We played a few more matches but I don’t think I beat him all night. I tried to fall back on strategy, bait him into obvious tricks and he was just too quick. He leaned over to me with a knowing grin ‘I think the Windjammers gods are talking through me’, he was not wrong but it was more than that, I was slow.
We played many more games after that over the following weeks, and I actually got better. I, a crusty 40 year-old man, practically Jurassic, started to grasp new tactics and employ moves to respond to some ripostes. Our back and forths of frisbee-tennis would last 10-15 returns. It was like watching a gruelling play in a tennis match, but instead of it being Federer and Djokovic, it was Kit Harrington and Andy Samberg in the sports parody 7 Days in Hell.
Proudly, I can say that after a lot of practice I came out victorious by winning about half my matches against him, him a person who had only encountered the franchise mere months before. I like to be positive – going from 0 wins to 5 out of 10 wins – that is an improvement of infinite %. And being infinitely better feels rewarding.
The passage of time waits for no man and I am certainly no man. I’d been an avid climber for 10 years but have started to not recover from twists and turns as quickly as I once did. This year I suffered an elbow strain, and while recovering I developed a thumb injury that just emerged, seemingly, overnight. Tendon damage, ligament wear, and/or arthritis? Only a visit to a physiotherapist will be able to tell.
I’ve just started playing Valorant and I’ve never felt older as both my body and mind fail me. A 5 vs 5 hero shooter that shares some DNA with both Overwatch and Counterstrike. Single bullets to the head can end your life, and death means sitting out the round. I have none of the built-in knowledge of the game, the classes and their builds are arcane. I am staring at this hand of heroes and frowning, I don’t know when it is good to play a skill, or when to hold off. I’ve read descriptions for things that make no sense to me; I feel like I am squinting at a foreign language while being inside a washing machine. That sensation of being in a washing machine continues when the action fires off. I’ve sat in spectator mode watching people playing Valorant and I am baffled as to how some of these actions are even possible.
At first, I assumed I was playing with PC players. It was something I latched on to, of course it had to be people playing with mouse and keyboard, I couldn’t be that bad. Except, PC players are cordoned off from console players, and there are even anti-cheat mechanisms for people using M+K on consoles. I then went to my next assumption, this is people just straight up cheating. Now, there are definitely some cheaters, but given the developers attention to hacking, it is unlikely that it is that widespread. For me to be consistently at the bottom of the leaderboards in every match, regardless of whether my team wins or loses, there would have to be a hacker in the game in every match. The answer, more clearly, is that my luck has run out. I can no longer rely on getting the drop on people, baiting them, or playing against their mind games – I just don’t have the capacity to move at that speed anymore. I am holding a deck of cards struggling to discern the difference between ‘play’ and ‘discard’.
It makes me wonder how much longer I have before I am going to have to retreat further and further away from public play. I am already struggling with the kind of abuse that players seem to enjoy casually throwing my way for being ‘bad’. I am compelled to keep playing Valorant because it is an excellent game but I am now, and probably forever onwards, resigned to being that meme where someone in their teens realises that the person they have been clowning on is just a dude in his 40s that has had a long day at work.
I still play PUBG, me and my friends find ourselves in the safe ‘beginner mode’ most of the time. We’re all a little older now, there are less late nights gaming, and more getting up early for work, going to doctor appointments, and spending time with our loved ones. So, this beginner mode is ideal as it was created so that people like us could play against mainly bots with only a smattering of other players who probably like us; not keen on engaging with the “2 sweaty 2 furious” crowd of the wider player pool.
Perhaps more games need to think about how something like that can be engaged as trend in the games industry. Off the top of my head, I can think of Chivalry II’s failed beginner mode bracket and Gears’s dedication to Horde modes. These are good token gestures, but doesn’t assuage my fears, that I am losing grip on the joys I once had.
That said, one of the most inspiring pieces of literature I’ve read in recent years is ‘Chronicles of a Liquid Society’ by Umberto Eco. It is a collection of essays that he wrote over the years of his life, with many being written very close to his death. What is so encouraging about them is that Eco remained fascinated with the world around him. Even when there were things that bumped up against his fuddy-duddy old man nature, things he instinctively rejects, he worked past that and tried to embrace it. He did so with empathy comparing it to previous social struggles and movements and drawing parallels where there were. I unreservedly recommend it as an example of an old man never losing perspective of what is important even in his waning years.
All of this had been running through my head, as a friend of mine and I jumped into a Windjammers 2 lobby the other night. We’d played it a lot on emulator back in the early 2000s and always been evenly pitted against each other. He picked one of the faster characters, and I resorted back to my default, the sturdy Spaniard. There were a couple of close matches but I locked him down to not even wining a single round. A little deflated, he audibly shrugged and said ‘I guess you can consider yourself the champion of Windjammers 2, for now’.
We said goodbye and I sat for a moment.
“Okay, fuck that, no lessons to be learned here. I’ve still got it” I thought to myself as I booted up Valorant. I got absolutely bodied by, what I can only presume, was a helium-voiced French child.
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