On 12/18/2016 6:27 PM, David Gilbert wrote:
I'm far from being young (I hit 70 this March), but as both a
contester and a gamer I think I could add a couple of things to your
list.
1. Online gaming is extensive. At any point in time you typically
use more immediate skills than you do in contesting. I'm not at all
saying that upper tier contesting doesn't require amazing skills, or
that overall they aren't similar, but I think the breadth required
every minute in gaming exceeds that of contesting. Just my opinion,
of course.
Different skill set. I think you need to know quite a bit to be a very
good contester. My son cannot sit down and run 300 an hour on SSB if I
handed him the mic yet. He can learn to do it.
2. Gaming generates far more participation than contesting. The
major competitive games count their active players in the millions
instead of the few thousands for contesting. That means people have
more opportunity to enjoy the activity every single minute of the
day. No waiting for the weekend, no dependency on propagation, no
disrupting sleep patterns to hit prime time.
No doubt there are more online players. Instant gratification is
important to them. DR DX and now some other programs are closer to the
online game but it is still not the same.
3. (Embellishment of your #6) Gaming is totally real time. You know
exactly where you stand every minute of the battle/quest/whatever.
Agree
4. This one may be the most relevant, in my opinion. Gaming involves
direct action/reaction against your opponent. It's constant
move-countermove the entire activity, sometimes with literally dozens
of overlapping actions/reactions directly against your opponent in
real time. I can't think of any aspect of contesting that approaches
this ... and trust me, I've tried to think up a format that would
provide it. Somebody smarter than me needs to work on this. I'm
pretty sure nobody would be doing online gaming either if they had to
spend several hours playing more or less in isolation relative to
their direct competition and then wait a few days before early results
showed where they stood.
I agree with this as does K8MR. You are really competing against
yourself and hoping you beat everyone else by making the proper
decisions to change bands, not about special possible openings etc.
I certainly agree with your comment about the visual aspect. There's
really no comparison.
I don't know how to make this different. You work F6 and a picture of
his house pops up? That might be creepy but I don't know how to make
the interface more interesting. Drawing a line from here to there on a
map might be cool the first few times. Live scoreboard helps but is
still not pretty.
One thing online gaming does is flash stuff across your screen about
what your competitor has done, X monster died, Bill made a +10 sword of
death.
Maybe we need to see the N2IC just worked a double mult! or K5ZD just
completed a 150/hr run? W0MU just got his sweep!
Thanks for the feedback.
W0MU
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