5 Ways Gaming Changes When You Start Playing As An Adult

5 Every Surprise Is A Stunning Revelation

One of the first games that I started in my quest to finally participate in conversations was Red Dead Redemption, a game that was made because, while the Grand Theft Auto games are pretty good, they certainly lack the ability to instantly drown you whenever you get close to any amount of water. But that's sensible, as the main character has a tortured backstory, and the most obvious comical quirk to add to him would be to make him unable to bathe without first writing a suicide note.

What caught me off guard from the outset was the existence of enemy characters with their own dick-ish agency. A villain had fled on horseback, and I pursued him on a horse of my own. I shot his horse, and he fell off. What I expected was the usual Red Dead way of doing things, where I execute my foe after telling him something like, "We all have our regrets for the things we've done ..." or whatever. Instead, bandit Javier Escuella, sensing the opportunity to make me feel foolish, simply ran over to me, pushed me off my horse, and rode away on it, as if it had been his master plan all along.

Could video games do that to you? Was this the first time that this had ever happened? Had I just witnessed some grand fluke that would appear only once and then leave me telling my disbelieving friends that I was now the subject of an X-File? And then that shit happened twice in a row, and it was like the game had discovered my Achilles heel of not being very good at Red Dead Redemption.

People talk about exploiting game mechanics, but was I such an idiot that the game had realized it and begun exploiting me? It was the closest that I'll ever come to being in a sequel to Her, and it took a while for me to cope with the fact that when you have so many internal parts all working at the same time, eventually one of those parts is going to do something that surprises you. They're not all going to shoot, reload, and then peek over to see if you're still sniping them. A few of them are going to pull your pants down and steal your property while you're trying to do something really cool. And a fraction of those will do it over and over again until you light the problem on fire and write it all off as a necessary measure in your war against criminals and humiliation.

4 You Have To Train Yourself To Not Get Angry

As you get older, you tend to stick to the things that you're good at. And don't let this column fool you -- I'm not that old at all. I'm still at the age where I can successfully leapfrog over things when I get drunk, without having to worry about breaking my face open on the sidewalk. I feel like that pretty successfully paints a picture of me. But, since I graduated from college, I've noticed that I gravitate toward the activities that I know I won't become frustrated with, even when they start falling apart. And though I lacked experience, I wrongly assumed that video games would fall into that category.

Like feeling astounded in the last entry, it's also very easy to become enraged. Having missed out on them, I played all three BioShock games. The first was great, the second was almost oppressively unnecessary, and Infinite was fun. However, due to the fact that underwater utopias are filled with security cameras and the flying bullet robots that love them, I died a healthy amount of times while playing BioShock 1. Around the middle of the game, I was dying to the extent that you'd think I was teaching someone else how to. "See there? You get yourself trapped in a corner with no ammo and just let them rip you apart. Now you try. Screaming at yourself, your controller, and the TV is optional, but it's rewarding in a way."

As my fingers stumbled across the buttons like the trembling first steps of a newborn deer, I realized that the initial idea that I'd had about playing this series was bullshit. I was not going to keep my composure because I was "too old" to be thinking about punting a game system. I was going to have to tell myself to calm down and to take a second before sucking at BioShock again. Previously, whenever I'd see a video of a person swiping at the contents of their table and wailing at a World Of Warcraft session, I'd think, "I am a superior hominid who would never become angry at such trivial things. More tea, Prime Minister?" Now, I get it. If I was a person with better emotional control, I would take one of these videos and place it alongside a video of myself getting pissed at restarting yet another level to prove that, deep down, I am a petulant nerd with unsightly facial hair. Sadly, the latter video would almost certainly end with me charging toward the camera while shouting, "You did this!"

Learning something from scratch is rarely fun if you believe that, inherently, you should be good at it because you're good at other things like it. I, like most of my parents, tended to lump movies, books, TV, music, and video games together under the genre of "Can be enjoyed while sitting down/eating pizza/eating pizza rolls." I figured that I'd be naturally adept at video games since I was remarkably talented at sitting through a director's commentary. But a director's commentary doesn't kill you whenever YOU CAN'T FIND A PLACE TO DUCK, YOU GODDAMN ROBOT. Playing video games gave me a crash course in what it was like to focus on using my "inside" voice again, so that I didn't go the route of a second-grader and end up crying in futility because mean ol' Mr. Xbox hates my happiness.

3 You Have To Adjust To Video Game Logic

I'm a child trapped in the body of a larger child, and that's not just a metaphor. A first-grader, talented in the arts of science and cruelty, now controls me like the Krang. I HhavEe noL comPplaintsM abouEt this, and I have yet to become cynical about gaming. The medium hasn't yet burned me enough. Give me a few years of having my hopes spectacularly torched, though, and you'll probably find me posting memes that directly name game developers. My time to throw wild, haphazard tantrums on the Internet will arrive, I promise.

It's because of the fresh view that comes from just exiting my pupa stage that I think that the Batman: Arkham games are the greatest things that have ever happened. You get to be Batman, and the combat system works almost 90 percent of the time. Why are we so jaded and angry? For years, the sole purpose of a Batman video game was to make us interested in switching over to a Spider-Man video game, and to finally have a few that are generally playable is a blessing.

One of the things that is extremely common in this Batman series is vent travel. It is the primary method of transportation in Gotham City. Need to get to another room or even another building with ease? Simply rip off a grate, hop in, and follow it to your destination. Hiding from your enemies? Climb inside an empty vent and wait for them to inevitably get distracted. From the very beginning of Arkham Asylum, you're taught to look for holes in the wall that Batman can slither through. Don't let the romanticized versions of the Dark Knight fool you. When Batman wanted to talk to Chief Gordon, he didn't use the window. He simply went to the roof, pulled off the seal, and cost the police department thousands in ventilation repairs.

That doesn't mean that you don't spend hours looking for vents to use when you have the obvious luxury of a door, a door that you're ignoring because you're too busy lingering in "There must be a secret!" mode. Video game logic dictates going into a room and being open to the idea that maybe the switch you need to press is in a place where no conceivable asylum employee would put it. I don't expect a mental institution that houses someone named "Killer Croc" to be entirely true-to-life, but encountering a puzzle every time you want to turn the electricity on really makes you question the use of tax dollars in the DC Universe.

Opening myself up to video game logic made for a far smoother process than if I'd focused on finding the right door all the time. I can't quite describe it without sounding like I'm trying to be a Batman that always has to use the last stall in a public bathroom, so I'll go ahead and sound exactly like that: "I don't look for one specific thing at a time. Instead, I open my gaze to look at everything, which leads me to find things much faster. Oh, a line in the men's room? Well, damn. This is a bit of a pickle, isn't it? Guess I'll wait until I get home."

2 Video Game Storytelling Takes Some Getting Used To

It's weird to have to plan a game around how nice you want to be to the fictional people/aliens in it. Whole sections of the story are immediately cut off from you because you got annoyed with your starship crew one too many times. I've played enough Pokemon, both in my adolescence and in my yesterday, to know that, even if you silently decimate a person's entire team and take all of their battling earnings, they'll still tell you about how much of an honor it was to meet you. They're joyously appreciative of the fact that you wiped yourself with their livestock.

Like this, only with more cockfighting.

But not every game treats you like you're the Colonel Kurtz of the Kanto region. Some games will respond to your middle finger with a middle finger of their own and give you the most anti-climactic ending that a writer can come up with. Have you spent the game gluttonous and full of murderous desire? Your character will be given a sad conclusion to his adventure. Did you pet every puppy but accidentally break into someone's closet once? Haha, you. The options for what kind of story you will be able to access slowly trickle away, leaving you desperately skimming the Wikipedia page for tips on how to achieve a more fitting final act. It's not a bad system, because games are meant to be played, replayed, and then finally traded in for 17 percent of their original value at GameStop. But it does leave you feeling cheated sometimes, especially if you play video games with the express purpose of completely razing the continent.

A lot of this probably sounds ridiculously obvious to those who have been playing video games for a while, but in the span between my two first loves (Pokemon and Super Godzilla for the Super Nintendo) and Batman: Arkham Asylum, I never beat a single-player game. The last example I had for reference when it came to video game endings was some text across the top of a screen saying that I had saved the day and that it was time to return to the ocean. It's wonderfully simple and may as well have been replaced by the words "YOU CAN'T ESCAPE FATE." It's because of this, and the fact that I am a giant dummy, that I initially felt slighted by the idea that, if I wanted a certain ending, I'd have to go back through the game and do meticulous things to ensure it.

I was forced to think ahead. Where did I see myself in five years? It also forced me to embrace YouTube as a way to forego having to grind through a game in order to get to the certain points where my input would make a difference. If I want to know what happens when I spare some bad guy's life, all I have to do is type that into YouTube and I can have it, with or without commentary, in 25 different parts. We've moved past the era of "This is all cat videos!" into a new age of "This is 95 percent video game walkthroughs and 5 percent makeup tutorials." And I will embrace this transition, because I'd love to see every possible finale for Heavy Rain without having to sigh again.

1 You Have To Adapt Your Play Style To Survive

Fallout 3 is butthole depressing. Everyone in that game has come to terms with the fact that their family has been mutilated and all they have left are tin cans on the floor. You spend 30 dialogue options trying to tell an orphan boy that he will be OK, and he'll respond with telling you about how doomed you are. Whatever, dirty shack baby. I own both a laser pistol AND a hunting rifle. I am the closest thing that this wasteland will ever get to a Jesus metaphor, a word that I doubt you can learn from all of the ruined books every town seems to have lying around.

For years, I'd operated under the notion that the difficulty curve of video games was a steady one. Fallout 3 gave me an entirely new mantra for guidance: "Sometimes, you're just going to be killed and there is nothing you can do about it." I would be walking toward missions when, suddenly, I'd come across giant mutants that would eviscerate me while I tried to use a pistol to graze them to death. During one of the first parts of the game, I ran into a giant scorpion that pursued me across literally the entire map.

Every once in a while, I would turn back to see if the unkillable arachnid was still chasing me, and there it would remain, undeterred by Operation: 4 Miles Of Running. It only stopped when I jogged past a merchant, who gave his life to save me by attracting the scorpion's attention. The scorpion slaughtered him and scuttled away, and then I looted the hero's body. If you've never played Fallout 3, I'm sure that sounds horrific, but Fallout 3's tagline is "What Do Dead People Have In Their Pockets?" That game is a grave-robbing tutorial.

Video games usually have a "totally poke the bears" mentality. Fallout 3 gives you the "come back to the bears when you're ready" option, which is far more like real life. You hear that, North Carolina Zoo? That's the sound of me getting ready for Round 2. You can see the bears and get bullied by the bears, so you go find some smaller bears and kick the crap out of them. You do this until you're wearing the best anti-bear armor available in the abandoned crates of the dystopia, and then you come back to the bigger bears.

My old play style simply wouldn't work in this revolution of narrative freedom and bears of varying rank. There is no one method that dictates your actions anymore. Instead, when you can't kill something, you just kill everything around it and then come back to it. When one door closes, you smash through the rest of the doors until you find a key.

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For more from Daniel, check out 6 Classic Horror Films You See Differently in a New Audience and 5 Ways 'The Fast and the Furious' Is Better Than You Realize.

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