(as Published in DNA, Bangalore)

1> More lives than a cat

One of the first computer games I ever played was Mario. What I liked about it was that you got more than one shot at life; three to be specific! It got even better with Prince of Persia, as you could keep “spawning” yourself till you saved the princess from the “evil magician”, but you had a 60-minute time limit to do it in. As gaming technology evolved, the concept of “lives” got the boot. It was replaced by save-load system. This too varied from game to game. While some games let you save  your game progress as and when you want to, some let you only save at specific checkpoints. Now wait, I wish I had saved my life just before the tenth grade exams. Darn, I could have studied harder.

2> Ammo overload

Heard of zombies? Yes, those ugly, semi-decomposed, brain-dead human bodies that dig your flesh. They don’t use guns, do they? Hell no! Then why is there so much ammo lying around villages solely habituated by zombies? Maybe we should ask the developers of Resident Evil who throw us into such a dark, menacing world every two years or so. If not for the kind game developers who decided to leave more ammo than necessary, the protagonist would have been dead meat. Oops, I meant meat for the dead.

3> Whack your boss

We’ve all, at some point, dreamt of yelling back at the boss and walking out with a promotion instead of a pink slip. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, but not in the domain of gaming. Here, ‘boss fights’ are synonymous with fighting super-villains. If you are not good at the game, you should fear them. But if you’re good at it, you can look down on them with disdain. Bosses in games
might be tough to compete against, but they are not without flaws. So defeat the boss in a jiffy or else be ready to be tagged a n00b. For the uninitiated, boss fights are fights in games with someone who is  equally strong or much stronger than you are.

4> Slow-mo tricks

There are not many games which would let you do something like this. You have to stick to Max Payne for doses of “awesomeness in slowmo”. The game which has a noir feel to it lets you dodge bullets like Neo in Matrix. As if that wasn’t good enough, there are plenty of bad guys to kill and you can take your own sweet time to fight your way out of tough corners with the “bullet-time”. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time too lets you wield some control over time. The game doesn’t let you slow time down but allows you to travel back a few seconds. This feature is a huge relief, especially if you miscalculated a jump and landed in one of the many trenches.

5> You kill, you make money

There is no place on earth where it is legal to kill people and steal from them. A game development company rolled out the game, Kwari, with the intention of providing online relief to those craving to steal. Kwari was a free-to-play online game, where one could pay only for the bullets they would be
using. In the game, you could go and steal bullets/money from others after killing them. But you had to be careful because there was generally someone waiting to kill you as you tried to steal from the dead. The game, however, did not find many takers and those who tried it out found it way too expensive. The game finally shut shop.

6> Make gold with hands clean

Imagine a gold mine. Now imagine someone mining gold.What have you got? An old chap with dirty rags for clothes and nails filled with filth? That sounds like a mine in the real world. In the gaming world, it’s probably some guy in China sitting in an internet café and making gold and selling it off through underground forums for real world money. Gold farming started with World of Warcraft where you needed in-game gold to upgrade yourself. So those who want to progress faster in games, depend on these gold diggers for some extra dough. Incidentally, the culture which we
call gold-farming forced the Chinese government to bring out strict laws regarding time spent playing MMOGs — massively multiplayer online games. But we can always wish “farming” precious metals was that simple.

7> Simlish? It’s gibberish!

When it launched, the game Sims was considered a technological marvel. It gave you complete control over a small bunch of people (sims). Many schools in the US used the game as part of  studies to analyse human behaviour. They wanted to see how people would behave if they were given the power to control everything, from thought to action. The most interesting part of Sims was simlish, which is the language spoken by Sims. If you try to make sense of the language by listening to it, you wouldn’t understand a thing. In order to help you understand what the sims are saying,  thought clouds would keep popping up. Imagine if people  start speaking simlish for real? We would
see cute, animated avatars popping up in thought bubbles right above their heads. Don’t pop them by mistake, though. We don’t want to miscommunicate, do we?

8> You car looks broken, it isn’t

Anyone in the games. No, we’re not referring to their speed or stylish looks. Just the fact that they are indestructible is reason enough, especially in Bangalore. The minor scratches caused in city traffic would not lead to such big headaches then. Look at games like Need For Speed (NFS) or Burnout. The cars never get wrecked, no matter how bad the impact.On the other hand, there are games like FlatOut,where your car will not only break into pieces after a crash, but will also slow down to snail speed. But the funny part is that when you hit objects in the game, you gain nitro — nitrous oxide can give a quick boost to the engine, making it go faster — and in NFS, a drift too can get you nitro!

9> Where cheating’s fair

When games are being created, developers make cheats which are supposed to be only for the use of game testers. However, they trickle down to gamers at some point of time and become a helping hand for those who find certain stages too tough. Wish things were as simple in real life too. Going through a bad patch? Simply search google and ta-da, you got a cheat code. Sounds utopian, huh?

10> Pushover the police

In every game you play — Mafia,GTA, NFS —you have to be careful of the guardians of society who will always try to stop you. But for an experienced gamer, getting out of this net is easy. In games, the police never get to your doorstep after hunting you down through your car licence plate. Nor do they file cases against you. They are nothing more than “bosses,” who you need to push out of your way, so you can concentrate on your crime syndicate.