I’ve recently noticed that my ongoing work with the Shooter Sandbox, my first-person shooter project, is having an increasingly negative impact on my performance when playing similar shooter games.
On the surface this might not make sense. Learning more about how these games are built should deepen my understanding of the genre and make me a better player, but this is a real phenomenon that I’ve experienced firsthand.
I suck at Counter-Strike and it’s all the Shooter Sandbox’s fault.
I was once decent
I have sporadically played CS since high school and the heady days of 1.6, and although I’ve never been more than a middling AWPer I still really enjoy the way it plays. From its earliest incarnation to the most recently released sequel, CS has always felt like the purest form of competitive shooter.
For me it’s always been the yardstick to which all other shooters are compared.
I don’t care what people say. CT-side cs_assault is great fun.
On a technical level Counter-Strike gameplay emphasizes muscle memory, twitchy reflexes, and intimate map knowledge. It requires deliberate and consistent practice across a range of different systems including movement, spray control, and the deployment of utility items. This is before you can even start thinking about strategy.
It can be a really difficult game to play casually, and one that requires significant time investment to play competitively.
I never took the technical side of the game very seriously, which meant my skills quickly plateaued.
Master Guardian 1 was the high watermark of my CS:GO career, and it was all downhill from there.
Aim (re)training
Have you ever switched between playing games that share a lot of surface-level similarities, but differ a lot in the minutiae of their implementation?
Counter-Strike and Valorant are a great example of this. They’re two games that on first glance follow an identical design pattern, but their gameplay (especially the gunplay) can differ in ways that makes jumping between them difficult. All of your muscle memory just feels off, almost clumsy.
My experience coming back to Counter-Strike after living in the Shooter Sandbox for so long has had a similar feeling.
It goes without saying that when you’re making a game you spend an absurd amount of time playing it. What I didn’t realize when starting out on this journey is that this kind of iterative playtesting, the comprehensive exploration of different weapon configurations, spray patterns, and movement paradigms, is functionally identical to the deliberate practice my friends and I would put into our CS gameplay.
This involved hour after hour of firing different weapons against a wall at different distances to test spray patterns, moving at different speeds through the environment to refine motion-based recoil deviation, and throwing hundreds of flashbangs to tweak their effect based on your viewing angle at the moment of detonation.
By going through this process I have been consistently and deliberately retraining myself to instinctively use the weapons of the Sandbox, and in so doing I have been unravelling decades of muscle memory.
I have trained myself to be really good at a game no one else can play.
I can’t be the only one. Perhaps we should start a support group?
Confessions
There is a decent chance that this entire article is an over-indulgent denial of an obvious fact; that I can’t click heads as well as I used to because I’m simply old. I turn 37 this year (which in and of itself is devastating) and one day soon I’ll probably need to start getting used to the idea.
Until that time I’ll just have to keep finding something else to blame.
