There is a certain selection of things – strange things – that gamers simply cannot resist doing. We’re all nerds. A big community of excitable nerds. We know that. That’s why we revel in the little weird things we do in games. What are these “weird things” specifically? Find out below and we revel in our nerdom together.
Hoarding Items and Objects:
It’s just too hard not to. Why should a developer, like Bethesda for example, spend so long rendering seemingly useless objects in a game like Fallout 4 for us not to hoard all of them in our limited inventories. Exactly, it’s a testament to great video game design that we find and keep every single thing that we can get our hands on. Even if they are incredibly pointless to the game’s narrative or have no utility at all.
Killing your Teammates:
C’mon. We’re all friends here. You can admit it. The infamous “team kill.” It mostly happens in online shooters like Rainbow Six Siege where friendly fire can actually harm or kill your own teammates. But sometimes we just do it for the fun of it. It incurs the wrath of our teammates who will shout down the end of their mics to us until the sound crackles with distortion. But what the hell. It makes us gleefully and sinfully happy.
Reloading with an almost full clip:
I thought I was the only player who had like OCD-like tendency. But apparently not. Thank god. Again, this mainly happens on FPS multiplayer titles. You’ll catch sight of an enemy in your red dot sight, gun them down in 3 or so bullets leaving you with a clip almost 3/4 full. But you still reload the whole clip. Just to make sure.
Change our clothes in an RPG:
RPG’s are supposed to be the ultimate immersion in a video game world right? So that’s why we do freaky things by own our accord to immerse ourselves even more. One of these things is to change player-bought clothes in game. I know it sounds kinda crazy but it really does give the player the sense of freedom with their character. It’s a strange, little way of allowing complete immersion in a video game world with a character that the player has full control over.
Driving normally in open-world games:
Another suggestion in the same category of the previous seemingly mundane ability to change a characters clothes is to actually abide by driving laws and drive “normally.” By normally we mean, don’t go on car rampages, shooting sprees, hit lamp-posts on purpose so your character flies through the windshield. That kinda thing. Instead we stop at traffic lights, overtake other cars respectfully and appear as genuine good citizens. Until we exit the car and pull out an M16 that is, of course.
Tea-bagging:
The champion of bragging rights. The tea-bag. We won’t dwell on this too much because it’s already been said to death but the tea-bag is a completely legendary finishing move. Keep watching that kill-cam, your humiliation is not over yet.
Climbing the tallest building and jumping off:
Because we can. Because it’s a video game and the boundaries and confines of death can be stretched. We know it’s only simulated and we’ll never actual put ourselves in harm. So we climb to the nearest building and hurl ourselves off, watch our character bounce off the ground when they hit it like a sack of potatoes. Oddly satisfying.
Shooting red barrels:
It’s technically incorrect. Shooting red barrels of fuel would not actually make them explode, they’d just dump out oil through the holes. But it works in games. Works so satisfying well too. We can’t help but clear the room of the things whenever we catch a glimpse of them.
Pan around the camera in an open-world game:
Beautiful, expansive worlds like Witcher 3 are known for this. We want games to be awe-inspring and cinematic so we take control of the camera and pan it around in an epic-feel way. Extra points for panning when to of a mountain or something that really shows the capability of the game’s stunning visuals.
Care about KD ratio:
It really makes no difference. Many multiplayer games don’t even depend on a team death-match type mode anymore. Games have pretty much moved on from who can get more kills than the other time. It’s not as simple as that anymore. But players still care about their Kill to Death ratio. Bragging rights? Pissing contest? Who knows – but they do.
So, are you victim of any of these “weird” gamer things? Of course you are. We all do them. There’s no shame here. Just admit it. We’re weird gamers. We do mundane, crazy stuff to indulge our gaming fantasies. But that’s alright. We all need our down time in some way or the other.