10 Signs That You’ve Been Playing Too Many First-Person Shooter Games
I have been spending the last couple of weeks playing video games. My brain is not accepting new projects at the moment, nothing I start seems to captivate my interest, so to while away the time until inspiration hits me again I’ve been playing video games. More specifically, I’ve been playing FPS games. I find that, after spending 4 or more hours a night playing these games, my brain is revolting against rational thought when I’m not paying attention to anything in particular, and it occasionally forgets that I’m not playing a video game in it’s initial reactions. Of course I don’t act on these impulses, that’s what crazy depressed teenagers do, I just get used to a surreal sense of “normal activity” by way of repetitive themes and actions in video games. Here are some examples…
1) When walking past a ventilation grill, I subconsciously think “Oh look! A ventilation shaft! I should totally shoot through the grill and climb into that!”
2) After hours of playing I realize I need to get an ingredient for the dinner I realistically should have cooked hours ago. So I walk out into quiet the dark of 9pm, and head to the store. After two blocks I see someone else on the sidewalk, and think “There he is! I should hide in the shadows and shoot him before he sees me!” (this will segue nicely into a future article I’ve started writing about why idiots should not own guns)
3) You approach a closed door and hear people on the other side, the correct action is NOT to leap up into the air and kick the door open. You only have to make this mistake once to lose your job.
4) In real life, no one runs backwards. No one leaps from a balcony down two stories to the ground below, and certainly no one has a “strafe sidestep” mode. If you ever see someone walking directly sideways, you’ll know what he’s been doing for the past five hours.
5) My office phone starts to ring while five other “You Have To Do This Right Now” activities make themselves simultaneously apparent, I have to remember that the Pause button on my keyboard doesn’t do a damned thing!!
6) I turn the corner and am surprised by someone coming the other way… be sure I don’t react while carrying a stainless steel chainsaw with a laser scope. That too can get you fired.
7) Don’t blurt out in a meeting “Why the hell would someone put a laser scope on a chainsaw? It’s not like there’s any aiming involved!” Might not get you fired, but you will end up looking like a psycho.
8) This is a big one - there are no mechanical robot zombies hiding above the panels of your drop ceiling, waiting to drop down behind you the moment you walk under them. Whatever you do - do not break up all your drop ceiling panels.
9) If you get caught in a long-winded, uninteresting conversation with another person, this is called a “Conversation” and not a “Cut-Scene.” Hitting the spacebar will do nothing for you, I’m afraid.
10) When you realize, two hours after waking up, that today is just going to be a very very bad day - there is no Restart Level command. You have to go through with the whole day, and make the best of it. If there is any rule in video games that can be incorporated into the real world… this one and the spacebar are two I would like to lobby for quite heavily.
Originally published at BlueSmoke Studio. You can comment here or there.