I wonder what kind of training I would need, in real life, to have the single mindedness of purpose of Kratos, lead character in the God of War video game series.
A bit of history, for context.
I have played video games for as long as I can remember. Handheld consoles, video gaming sets, the whole nine yards.
I was the child that knew what a Gameboy was and what to do with it. The one who could name all the characters in Super Mario, knew to evade the mushrooms, and just how many jumps were required to hit a brick bridge and shake out the money.
Writing this, I’m not sure what I’m leading up to, and, as always, I will wing it.
Lessons in Taste
As we grew older, our game tastes varied only slightly. My all time favorites became hand-to-hand combat games. The sort that allow you execute a smooth combo of moves to eradicate an opponent.
Mortal Kombat brings me joy, particularly when Shao Khan would say, “Finish him!”, in that guttural tone of his. I followed MK from Sega to Play Stations and X-boxes. My love for MK is in near equal measure with Tekken, and I have favorite characters in each game.
Till date, I cannot play games without remembering long summer holidays spent indoors, gaming. When the light went, we would flee outdoors to run amok or ride scooters. I never quite managed the selflessness of spirit required to mount a skateboard.
Lessons in Healthy Competition and Earned Respect
My strongest competition was always my older brother. He was a precise gamer. The weird thing is we didn’t have a gaming mentor, tbh. Everything we knew was self-taught.
I remember being in awe of his ability to plug the (TV?AV?RV) cord(s) in the right port, and make the screen work. I would hold my breath until the TV whitened to reveal the PlayStation logo. I could never keep track of those things. Perhaps because I never had to.
Lessons in Tolerance, Consistency and Patience
We would play combat games for hours, until he decided he wanted to play football. Football I hated, because I could never understand the purpose of the precise combination of moves and it was HEAVILY REPETITIVE, ffs.
Football gaming seemed like a lot of precise movement of balls and players and trying to score from different parts of the pitch. I had a grudging respect for the game, though.
How do you decide to coordinate 11 people all at once, to achieve a goal?
Nah, Fam. Plus, and perhaps, more truthfully, I once lost by 20 goals to 2, to a cousin, and my football aspirations died promptly. You could never beat me at MK or Tekken that way.
Lessons in Loving Innovation
Our love for each console was equal and overwhelming. The day a new one arrived, we would love it as much as we loved its predecessor.
Around the time we had Playstation consoles we got Grand Theft Auto(GTA). Teenagers then, we were. Thinking around this now, the game was probably not age-appropriate. I remember how discomfited my mother was when she got it, but we had begged and pleaded for a month prior, and she obliged. GTA looked and felt like soccer to me, but in a different way.
Yes, sometimes you had to coordinate multiple players, but, at other times, you really were in charge of just one person. And it was so…intense, lmao. The things you had to do simply to attain your goals were unbelievable.
GTA was real life in a video game, and even then, it reminded me of the Lagos I felt was always shielded from my sight.
Like football, though, I couldn't/wouldn’t play it to save my life. What I was great at, was understanding the overview of the game and coming up with strategies on the go.
One mission that came to mind was transporting the daughter of a drug baron, while relying on the loyalty of the city’s most popular preacher, to harbour her briefly in his tower while waiting for the next drop off.
She was spoiled, sleazy and promiscuous, mouthing off at her bodyguards, and trying to seduce the lead character (me), her transporter. Along the way, you had to map the way through safe territory. I cannot forget her name-equal parts incongruous and fitting-Mercedes, it was.
Lessons in Collaboration
This love of GTA-esque gaming spilled over to God of War. God of WARRRRR.
First off, the visuals are damnably amazing. And it was literally the only game in its genre I was interested in. Ah!
The first day we played it, we sat for hours and did nothing else. I mean this literally. We went over the gaming manual, saw the pre-game videos, and sat and reflected. Then we agreed my brother would play it, with support. And support was expensive.
We would hold down key buttons or move the joystick to allow him manipulate the control pad. If one of us tired, another took over. My parents, who had become slightly wary of our gaming time, were enraptured. Their adolescents were getting along swimmingly, for a game that looked advanced and difficult.
When we failed to swing open a gate, everyone would mourn. When we succeeded, we would all rejoice. Kratos lived in my house, and he was magic.
Circling back to the single sentence that started all of this:
I wonder what kind of training I would need, in real life, to have the single mindedness of purpose of Kratos, lead character in the God of War video game series.
I think that this will remain one of those things one wonders about. A present-day Kratos would be largely disliked and grossly misunderstood. His pain, and his story, would not be common knowledge, and the world would hate his stubbornness and his heart for revenge.
The game is opening with a “soft reboot” in a few months, and Kratos has been apparently infused with some father figure traits. I have seen a couple of interviews and videos.
It would be nice to see the work channeled into a man who once fought his way out of hell to prove a point, and promised to kill all the gods in Olympus.
Did I mention that he once wielded a weapon that was bigger than his body? Oh yes.
Lessons of Lessons
I also think that God of War opened my eyes to the power of UX. It seemed magical that a team of game developers in some lab would design a game that was instantaneously loved by gamers all over the globe. It was worthy of that love.
I have managed to cram well over a decade of gaming-thinking into a single post. I hope the itemized lessons resonate somewhere. If they do, will you tell me, below?
What did video gaming give you, and take from you?
While creating this, my keyboard slipped on “Super Mario” and “Mortal Kombat”. It saddens me to say that there was no prediction for either title. i feel cheated. These games are near on or over twenty years old. Isn’t that worthy of a dictionary entry?
