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The Joys of Unconventional Gameplay

Mario Kart 8 Cat Peach

One of the most enjoyable things you can do in gaming is embrace unconventional gameplay. Now, by this I do not mean cheating; that can get in the sea. Instead, I’m discussing ways of playing that are all well within the rules that the very game designers constructed.

My supervillain origin story isn’t what you might expect – in fact that’s overstating it, I’m just mildly irritating – this doesn’t start how you think it does. Yet, it is my first foray into playing games in a deliberately unconventional way and where the first arguments begin. To this day, I still find these arguments quite confusing.

It all begins with a really cool hat.

The name’s hat; really cool hat

It was my formative years: I was a teenager but my therapist swears it happened before I turned 11. I was playing 007 Nightfire and I, as you might expect, was playing as Oddjob. Now, if you’ve played a Bond game before, you may see where this is going and in terms of unconventional gameplay, this is the most mild form in this piece.

Oddjob Hat

I’d been following my friend around, waiting for a more amusing moment to end his life. I got out his hat and revealed my plan: “Hey… I have a really cool hat, look!” I threw it at point-blank range and killed him.

Over time it shortened to just: “I got a really cool hat!” It still evokes moments of panic from that friend. See, point-blank is one thing, so I challenged myself: wouldn’t it be far funnier if I could make my friend terrified anywhere on the map? What if I became so good with it I could stand a reasonable chance of hitting from any distance?

The point being, as we continued to play into adulthood, I realised how the different approach was far funnier to me, even if people raised objections to it. It was within the rules, so if possible, why wouldn’t I? Landing a kill with the hat from afar, even if I went onto lose the overall match, brought far more joy to me than a victory.

The niche and extremely hard, yet silly to master, nature of it made it addictive.

So now, as a regular in Call of Duty games, I do just that.

From mild-mannered hobby to serious problem…

Now I’ll confess, it has gotten a bit out of hand. In Gun Game, a mode whereby you kill people, working your way up through a different gun every time until you hit 18 kills and win, you can opt to not seek victory. You can choose to stab people at close range. This doesn’t improve your score, so you can’t win, but it does result in people being pushed back a gun or effectively a mid-match level.

I began getting more kills than the overall winners; in Call of Duty Vanguard that wasn’t even uncommon.

Call Of Duty: Vanguard

The fury was pretty palpable. So while the minimum needed to win was 18, in this match I got into the late 30s with kills as I fairly often did. People were, understandably, growing annoyed with my laughter over the game chat. There was an incident where someone celebrated killing me, which I thought was a bit rude.

So I said: “Wait, that was you? One sec.”

About 15 seconds later I added: “There we go,” as I quite literally killed the celebration.

The response I got would probably end my writing career if I dared repeat it verbatim.

Rules of engagement and failure to read

To be clear, I never insulted people over game chat; I just laughed and often acknowledged how far ahead in kills I technically was. It was my own skill that began amusing me – this was hard, but through seeing the comedic element I persevered to become surprisingly very good.

The hatred confused me. It is within the rules, so if you dislike the rules, why choose that route to go down for enjoyment in your spare time? There are other options; it’s like trying to play Mario Kart while being terrified of ever seeing a blue shell.

Anyway, the real comedy for me is in the complete legitimacy of what I was doing. This was a feature that was designed for the game. Presumably to strengthen the feel of it being a ‘party game’ type mode. This is exactly what players signed up for, yet they found it incredibly infuriating.

I never stopped finding that funny, nor people’s attempts to tell me I’m ‘playing it wrong’. Again, I refuse to insult people over game chat, I’m here for fun, not to insult or harass people, but also no? I wasn’t cheating so I wasn’t playing it wrong at all.

Sticks n Stones

The mode on Call of Duty where I found my personal nadir was Sticks ‘n’ Stones. I could actually win matches. See, if you kill people with a crossbow, you get 100 points, if you kill someone with a throwing axe, you get 50, but you completely reset the victim’s score.

… Guess what I did?

Similar to the hat, it was extremely hard to master over longer distances but with practice and laughter I got to the point I could make kills from large distances, both horizontal and vertical.

Vigilante justice and party time!

Again, I got some criticism for it and people got rather angry about it, yet that was kind of my point. There shouldn’t have been any anger at all; if I could be a lightning rod for this over-the-top and unwarranted anger, at least it would go to someone like myself who could handle it. Yes, as pretentious as it sounds, there was an element of vigilante justice to it.

The moment you can give up on, or reduce your chances of, winning in favour of preventing others from winning, through unconventional gameplay, it’s a party game. The lines can be pretty clear, take Super Smash Bros. for instance: you can have an element of randomness which breeds unconventional gameplay, but then you can just switch items off.

Is the Super Smash Bros franchise in trouble?

Everyone is here, everyone is fear… until the items go off and it’s just a normal contest.

Party games are clear, it isn’t subjective: either the developer includes a rule that makes one, or it doesn’t. People know exactly what they’re getting into.

That’s why I’m justified in this, as much as I’ll find it funny, that comedy arises from a deep confusion of just not understanding the anger.

Tragically, this story has a sad ending because as I’ve grown up it turns out I have a weirdly large head, so the one thing I’ve never got for Christmas is a really cool hat.