Finding New and Unintended Ways of Playing Games

Ronald Diemicke writes "World of Warcraft players sometimes hang out in front of Ironforge and dance. Fallout 3 players seek out new and elaborate ways of destroying their avatar. Brawlers in Smash Brothers have an itchy pause finger, ready to catch any humiliatingly hilarious screengrabs. The thugs running rampant in Grand Theft Auto are putting Evil Knievel to shame by using a full assortment of vehicles to pull off some incredible stunt work. Personally, I like to collect and move things. My favorite is making piles of bodies in any game that lets me move them around. Ever catch yourself doing something in-game that isn't exactly part of the game, or just something really dumb?"

Emergent behavior

[S3D]

Emergent behavior [wikipedia.org] is a property of any complex enough non-linear system [wikipedia.org].

Ultima Online...

[Anachragnome]

My best in-game friend letting me kill her over and over, then chop up her corpse(s) to supply me with body parts which were needed to take advantage of a bug that allowed you to place objects on the walls of a house.

It got to the point we were having to get creative to kill her as fast as possible. A pet White Wyrm turned out to be the best method. One Bite-Death. If he got hungry, I could feed him some of the body parts as well.

"Whoa! How'd you get all that stuff to hang on the wall?"

"You really want to know?"

Re:Dumb AND obsessively repetitive...

[DNS-and-BIND]

This is just a symptom of hoarding disorder [komonews.com]. Likewise the article in the summary. For whatever reason, some people just can't feel good without FINISHING. A Warcraft level is finite, the real world much less so. What would happen if the completion counter on GTA3 (or whatever game) only went up to 99% and never 100%? Imagine the groaning and gnashing of teeth! And if the reason was revealed as "some developer with a subversive sense of humor made it so nobody could get 100% complete?" Oh, my, there would be blood. The real krovvy kind, not the kind that turns to green when you hit the parental guidance icon.

Re:warthog jump!

[Indiana Joe]

This video was really popular around 6 years ago! Warthog jump [youtube.com]

Someone went to the next logical step and made a flash game [bungie.org] out of it.

Re:Explorer

[david_thornley]

Guild wars gives you rewards for that. Not only do you get titles for poking around everywhere, they occasionally put some neat-looking stuff in places where there's no game-connected reasons to go.

Re:Boom-badadadada-boom-ba-boom-boom

[arb phd slp]

I never got the rhythm of ball jumping in classic Metroid. I used the NES Advantage, flipped on the Turbo for the B button and then turned the knob until it got to the exact right frequency. I could climb all the way to the top of the screen that way (which is good since there was that energy tank on the ceiling in that one place).

Unexpected Response

[Rob Alvarado]

Just wanted to thank everyone for posting their thoughts and sharing their own in-game antics as we had asked you to on SleeperHit. I'm not exactly surprised that I'm familiar with some of these antics, just much more surprised at how many more the community had created that I'll have to try out now. Again, I didn't expect many people to read either my article or Ron's rebuttal to it but I was still looking forward to hearing some of your thoughts. Rob and Ron look forward to disagreeing with each other in the future and we'd love to hear what you think and what stance you'll take then as well. Whether it's with us at SleeperHit or here if we get slashdotted again. Thanks for contributing. I'll be playing tag or catch with myself in Portal. -Rob