The Gamer's Quarter

[RaBeeWilliams]

ATPB - Anti Perfect Brigade.

It's origin is from New Orleans, dating back several years ago in a living room where Soul Caliber 2 was being played by four players, all my cousins. Their ages raged in 12, 13, 14, and about 10. It was coined by myself when I wanted to take on the oldest male of the crew in very serious matches (who knew his way around a Taki), but wanted to hold back and keep the game still fun for the other new comers when it was their rightful turn at the stick.

Definition - In a round, when the amount of damage you take is 60 perfect or over, and you have yet to land a blow, there by making it dreadfully apparent that you will lose that round, you then resort to:
a.) turning defensive, and

b.) using the most cheatful hit that you can think of landing in the middle of the other guy's string to make a connection, there in by preventing them from obtain the boastful victory of a perfect, or flawless bout.
Simply land that crucial blow, and you've sealed yourself as a member.

I knew that I had really tapped onto something when my favorite cousin of the group (not a very avid gamer, by far, including for fighters) would shout a clamorous "ATPB!" through a laugh as she would fend off my Taki-playing rival, without even needing me to reignite the phrase, risking wearing it out. Somehow, the game became more comfortable after that. It was still fun for all, but playing for a different purpose other than just winning and having a safety net for your emotions even if you don't win suddenly evened the playing field. Everyone was 'good', after that. I wish that I can be that clever again.

This thread is about the games outside the games that exists. I can't tell you how many home rules there are for different games out there, be it not to screen watch during Killzone or Perfect Dark, tea-bagging your kill in Halo 2, regardless if he's sitting right next to you or not.

Another one I was known for was back in the Goldeneye era. Since I played so few people in multiplayer, I was obsessed with the look of the game and how well it controlled. At such a young age, when my motor skills must have been their sharpest, I tapped into a fluidity with the game of the likes that I would have never known, much like what web based video archives and spectator modes of FPS's would capture. I became sort of full of myself, to be blunt, but I'd never take it too seriously, because since I didn't have anyone around to share my little world with, I choose to be the ruler of it, extending a much needed hand across my back when I most needed it.

When I would play somebody, and when I would get a kill, as the screen on their end of the TV dripped to a red hue, I would run to their body and angle myself above them so that they were the last thing they saw before the screen faded into darkness. Then, whatever automatic I had on me, I would unload the rounds into there face, right before they respawned.
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[Nana Komatsu]

I won't try to go into "second person halo" since it takes way too long to explain. Instead here's another set of halo rules we made up in Milwaukee.

Once while playing Halo 2 in Blood Gultch with rocket launchers, one of my friends got into a warthog and prcoeeded to drive around screaming "I'm a noob! I'm a noob!" There after the rest of us would chase him until one of us got the kill. Once he was down, the other players all ran to the unoccupied vehicles and proceeded to drive around screaming "I'm a noob! I'm a noob" until someone killed them to.

[Harveyjames]

I don't get it ;_;

[Scratchmonkey]

Well, if you're talking about Nana's thing, you want to stay out of the warthog (an ATV) because it's basically an invitation for other people to kill you: you're a large moving target that can't fire back (if you're the driver). So, the person involved was inventing a new game (maybe called Hunt the Noob) where they were imitating a new player and the "winner" would be the player who shot them.

On the other hand, you might be talking about the whole thread in general, which seems to be about introducing player-defined goals to games. In the initial example, if a new player is playing somebody experienced in a fighting game, they're almost certain to lose, every time. So, to make the game fun, they create a realistic goal, that being preventing the other player from "perfecting" them -- that is, reducing their health from 100% before the other player can kill them outright. (Which seems to be a pretty universal thing to happen in fighting games, or at least I've seen it multiple times with multiple different people).

I happen to think that player-created goals are a very important aspect for a certain segment of games and generally show up in most games. "Game performance" would be a facet of this, with speed-runs being a player-created goal to finish the game as fast as possible, my method of playing Dwarf Fortress includes not deliberately killing any of the dwarves as a player defined goal and chaining in Ikaruga being an example of a company recognizing player-created goals and designing a regular in-game goal around how people like to "perform" when playing a game. So the "homerules" mentioned in the first post are really player-defined goals that happen to occur in a multi-player context and are explicit, as opposed to the usually unspoken rules that come with single-player ("I'm going to play International Cup with a random team on 5-star difficulty until I win the whole thing", etc.).

Apologies if I'm being overly pedantic/condescending. It's late here and I couldn't really tell what you weren't getting.

[dessgeega]

i thought this thread was about home-rule for ireland.

anyway, i typically expect not to finish games that i play, so i set a series of smaller goals that build up toward the ultimate goal of a one-credit clear. when i downloaded r-type on the virtual console, for example, my first goal was "reach stage four on one credit". after i did that, it was "reach stage four on one life". now it's "reach the boss of stage four". i havn't done that one yet.

oh, and i edited out the apostraphe in the thread title because it was driving me nuts.
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[kirkjerk]

Actually, I was expecting this to be more about "scrub" rules ("response" to Sirlin here), like making certain characters unselectable in a fighter or kart racer because, among this group of gamers, that character seems to be unbeatable.

Instead, it seems more about game repurposing (still looking for a better name for that... I describe my "storm chasers" game in the desert level of Mario Kart DD... that was fun, though the lack of scorekeeping was annoying.

Though the original ATPB idea is somewhere in between...
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[RaBeeWilliams]