One Good Day

I don't know if y'all know this, but I do play video games, too. Not as often as I play board games these days, but often enough that I spend money on the occasional Season Pass or other game.

And yes, I am allowed to use y'all in a non-ironic manner.

Here's the thing, though.  In my circle of friends, I have a reputation for being good at board games. We've done mixed tournaments (meaning "more than one game involved") and I always do well. Not because I win a lot of games, but because other players score high at some games and low at others - I tend to take second or third at everything.

Now everyone has their preferred styles of game. I'm not especially discriminating: I love auction games. I love dexterity games. I love trick-taking and ladder games. I love worker placement. I love hidden information and asymmetric play.

But I'm not good at everything I like. I'm terrible at dexterity games.  Among the worst, even. It's the one category of game at which I am virtually guaranteed to wind up near the bottom of the standings.

Now let me swing this back around to video games:

The vast majority of what I play is First-Person Shooters. I love FPS games. I play a few sports games from time-to-time. Once in a while, I can be talked into a fighting game. On my computer, I enjoy real-time strategy. But when I'm in front of a console, I'm nearly always playing an FPS game.

I love the hardcore crunchy player-tweakable games, too. You know, where you pair X gun with Y scope and Z ammo and your loadout includes this accessory and that accessory ...

Right now, that means Battlefield 1. It's not as adjustable as Battlefield: Hardline was (and is), but it's a definite step up from Star Wars Battlefront (which I wanted to love, and just ... didn't). I unabashedly love this game, and I have wasted entire weekends sitting in front of my PS4 playing it.

But I'm not very good at it.  Allow me to demonstrate how bad I am:

As they say: A picture is worth 1,000 words. Those numbers are bad. Because, although I love FPS games, I'm bad at them. I play for fun.

That said, sometimes I have a good day.

I nearly always play support-type roles. In Battlefield 1, that means Support or Medic. And I'm usually decent at anything that doesn't involve pulling a trigger.  You see those 1700 kills?  803 of them are with a mortar. And I'm a terrible sniper.

So with their first DLC pack, they introduced weapons that could only be unlocked by meeting certain criteria. Some of those are the kind of thing I can brute force. "30 Kills with ," for example. If I play a thousand games and get one kill every thirty games, I'll eventually get that 30 kills.  Some of them, however, are more difficult.  "5 Headshots In One Round with ."

Ugh.  That's ... that's more difficult. See that "ACCURACY            0.15" up there in the image?  Yeah. Headshots with a sniper rifle might be out of my reach.

But then I was playing while talking to my wife, and I got one. Probably my first sniper headshot since the days of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. And I had an unfair advantage with that one (I had a large HDTV when most players were still playing standard-def).  "Did you see that!?" I asked her.

And then I got another. And another.  In fact, I got all five.

It was a good reminder:

Even if you're bad at something, sometimes you will still have a good day. Once in a while, the dice will fall your way and you will succeed at something you'd thought beyond your reach.

It makes me want to play more Ice Cool. Because maybe I'll have a good day at that.

Next week, I don't think I'm going to have a normal post - I have one written, but I'm going to delay it until after the show. I'll be at Origins, so I may do some of what I usually do at GenCon, where I post daily updates of how the day went/what I did.  I'm looking forward to it.