Hao2Game: Become an efficient gamer

Welcome to Hao2Game!

This is the second installment into a series called Hao2Game. It is aimed towards anyone willing to gain some insightful knowledge into the world of gaming that may not be so obvious at a glance. You’ll find serious topics such as learning how to find your perfect play style, how to be an efficient gamer, the types of gamers and much more. Sometimes you’ll find quirky topics such as how to properly troll, how to make games mind numbingly difficult and even how to explain video game humor to a non-gamer.

So buckle up ladies, gents and other assorted entities: here’s how to become a more efficient gamer.

What is efficiency?

By definition, efficiency is: “aAchieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.”

So how does that translate into the gaming world? Most people would instantly think of someone farming the same monsters over and over, but you can broaden the scope of efficiency further than that.

Productivity doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to be towards a tangible reward such as an actual item in the game. It can also be how you spend your time simply playing the game, or speaking to people. It can be translated into any aspect of the game that can boost your overall experience. Kind of how you learned to get your younger siblings to do your chores instead of yourself, you heartless fiend.

But seriously, even wasting time talking to somebody can ruin a lot of your game experience. That doesn’t mean to be anti-social, but you shouldn’t spend an hour trying to speak to someone for a certain result when you can accomplish it within five minutes using another approach. This article will give you are the tools to get the most out of the game for every second you are spending, because, let’s face it: time is precious.

Step One: Stay positive

Believe it or not, a lot of your efficiency comes from your attitude towards your goals. When you’re trying to be efficient, you must always be in the mindset of success. This means constantly filtering out stress, which can have tremendous negative effects on you. When things aren’t going your way and you’re blowing hours into the game and not getting the results you want, stress starts building up. 

What happens when you’re stressed? Well, you start to make mistakes. Agitation can cause impaired judgement due to being impatient or not seeing the full scope of the problem. You can start blaming external factors, such as another player in the area, the way the game is set up, or start getting demotivated because someone else is better than you. You may get so mad, you just might invent a way to stick your arms through the USB port and beat the living crap out of the game developers.

The original Pandora’s Box

So being stressed causes mistakes and that slows you down or makes you want to give up. How do you deal with the stress? Good question. You need to understand that the problem lies within you. That’s a hard pill to swallow (unless you prefer swallowing other things), but it is one fact you need to digest. Blaming external factors won’t change the situation, but flipping your perspective and changing your approach will positively impact the way you play the game. Figure out what is causing the problem and try to adjust for it. Learn from your experiences and apply it to your approach; you will see a huge boost in your efficiency as you improve.

You will being noticing a significant increase in your attitude and more people will gravitate to you. You’ll feel better about yourself for accomplishing your goals and learn how to deal with the setbacks. That’s pretty powerful stuff. Like, Chuck Norris’ beard powerful. 

Step Two: Create benchmarks

So, now that you’re imagining gumdrop forests and happy fairies dancing around, you’ll want to create goals for yourself. It’s a good idea to keep progressing and testing your limits, so try to create realistic benchmarks for yourself. A good idea is to use SMART Goals for most of your benchmarking. The individual letters stand for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. They should be fairly self explanatory, but definitely give the link a visit for more information. 

What you want to accomplish here is to constantly keep improving upon your abilities while maintaining that positive attitude. Just make sure you’re keeping within realistic boundaries and timelines. If you’re just starting out, don’t shoot for the stars just yet, despite what things were said to you as a kid.

He just lost his father to an ambitious child

Try and have fun with it. Don’t restrain yourself to just figuring out how to kill something faster. See how fast you can travel across a city or to a destination. See how quickly you can navigate through the UI. See how many conversations you can hold with people while maintaining a natural flow in the discussions. Not only will you feel good and get into the mindset of constantly challenging yourself, you will shave off a lot of time on these activities which will start to stack up. You’ll be pushing way ahead of the average gamer while only putting in the same, or even less, playtime. Now you can break the laws of the universe and be called a “No Life” while having a life! Straight knee to the balls, Grim Reaper.

Step Three: Learn from others

Now that you’re into the habit of meeting challenges with a positive outlook, you’ll start to eventually come to your limits as a gamer. You can only accomplish things to a certain degree of efficiency before you simply cannot do it any better. However, you are one person and that doesn’t mean you always have the best approach. Look around in the community and see how the top players interact with the game. Learn from them and study their approaches. Two heads are usually better than one. Usually.

Peer around for any videos or streams from well respected gamers and examine how they spend their time socialising, travelling and killing things. You may pick up a few things that you hadn’t noticed before to add to your personal arsenal of badassery. 

Your personal arsenal

A good idea is to look around the Guides section on your game’s forums. This usually has all sorts of tips you could follow to help boost your efficiency. For example, you might learn about some neat UI settings, which gives you a lot more visibility and reduced lag. You’re at the stage where you let others do the dirty work for you, going to a whole new level of efficiency. Just don’t go overboard, or you’ll have to legally change your name to Donald Trump.

Step 4: Compare and contrast

Now that you have all of these awesome options available to you, it’s time for the most advanced step. At this point you need to produce the absolute optimal solution for yourself out of all the data you collected. This will of course require many test runs of all the approaches you have learned of and then recording all of the results.

A good idea is to use a spreadsheet for easy comparisons if you are using numerical data. Having a very firm understanding of at least basic algebra also helps a ton. If you don’t have Microsoft Excel, you can also use a free version called OpenOffice. This is an open source version of Microsoft Office that is community developed and absolutely free. 

Most things you do in a video game can be compressed down to numerical roots and put into a spreadsheet. However, some things will require you to simply analyze the approaches at face value and determine the best one. For example, you can’t really put a visual configuration of a user interface into a spreadsheet. You simply need to see what works best for you by trying out various combinations. 

Congratulations, you are now efficient!

Awesome possum, you can now effectively shred time off your gaming while still enjoying the game itself and getting stuff done. Getting the hang of this will eventually translate into everything you do as a gamer, even selecting your next game to play!

As always, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed it. Please share it with your friends and don’t forget to leave any feedback. If you have any topics you want me to cover, don’t be shy and leave it in the comments below.