As a general stereotype, I think gaming is shown in a bad light and generally considered as an unproductive use of time. By no means am I saying that one could do better things than staying up all night in a COD session with friends, I feel that some types of games are often unvalued in what they may have to offer. Take Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) for example – at first glance, one can quickly characterize it as a mindless, violent shooter for the casual gamer. But to actually excel at the game, one needs to tap into quiet a few skillsets that I feel can be best explained through the eight intelligences proposed by Howard Gardner’s:
Logical-mathematicalIntelligence: the ability to develop equations and proofs, make calculations, and solve abstract problems. Visual-spatial intelligence allows people to comprehend maps and other types of graphical information.
COD Application: COD deals heavily in utilizing both Bayesian probability (i.e. what actions would most likely lead winning the current encounter) and Game Theory (i.e. what is the opponent most likely to do and how best to counter it). And to a smaller degree, one’s ability to easily gauge geometry in terms of tacticals’ travel paths off various surfaces or long-distance bullet drop and travel time makes them much more effective in many encounters.
Musical Intelligence: enables individuals to produce and make meaning of different types of sound.
COD Application: add a surround sound headset into the equation and suddenly what you hear becomes nearly as important as what your seeing as events unfold around you.
Bodily-kinesthetic Intelligence: entails using one’s own body to create products or solve problems.
COD Application: this one is easy enough given just how well you take in the scene and react accordingly, but keep in mind that you have mere milliseconds to react accordingly and constantly update your plan of action. Games like COD also involve advanced movement mechanics that the casual audience is not only likely not using but more importantly not expecting one to do (thus granting one an additional element of surprise). A prime example is doing a mere split-second of the game’s tactical sprint prior to jump – this leads to players generating and maintaining a great degree of velocity while freeing them up to start aiming (given the developers’ decision to not penalize accuracy while jumping). Do this around corners or off elevated positions and one is likely to catch his opponent off guard.
Interpersonal Intelligence: reflects an ability to recognize and understand other people’s moods, desires, motivations, and intentions.
COD Application: psychology plays a massive role in COD as the best way to win encounters is being able to predict your opponents decisions and take the best course of action to counter them. One begins to form blueprints characterizing likely reactions from casual, intermediate and more advanced players, and initially assigns each opponent of each new game one of these blueprints. Then, each opponent’s blueprint is further refined and custom-catered following each subsequent encounter.
Naturalistic Intelligence: refers to the ability to identify and distinguish among different types of plants, animals, and weather formations found in the natural world.
COD Application: every game presents a unique degree of physics due to how developers decided to craft the environment and its responses to gamers’ actions. One’s knowledge of how the environment is constructed becomes a huge advantage when constructing a plan of action. For example, COD has been developed to include a component known as lag compensation (or a device that aims to best minimize the connection-related latency issues between gamers) which adjusts what each gamer is currently seeing to a degree. This leads to three states for every encounter – 1) the general instance of the game, 2) what player A sees and 3) what player B sees. Here, state 1 is the “pseudo-objective” instances as it represents the current state of the match, incorporating each players’ decision, whereas I label it as “pseudo” because no single player can 100% accurately see this state on an ongoing basis. Rather, states 2 & 3 highlight the “subjective” instances as what every player actually sees is a function of each player’s latency and upload / download response times to the games servers.
Verbal-linguistic Intelligence: refers to an individual’s ability to analyze information and produce work that involves oral and written language, such as speeches, books, and emails.
COD Application: most COD game modes are team based, thus the outcome of any given rounds heavily relies on one’s ability to effectively communicate with teammates. Teammates’ callouts help to paint a picture of what’s going on far beyond what a given player can see or hear at any given moment, and this factors heavily into creating a plan of action (for example, hearing that there is an enemy at location A leads to a player making a mental note that at time(t) = 0, an enemy is there alongside any other enemy positions that he or she is aware of via other means. Then, as t = 1, 2, 3+, the player needs to keep note of where that enemy likely moved to given the other ongoing events of the round.
Intrapersonal Intelligence: refers to people’s ability to recognize and assess those same characteristics within themselves.
COD Application: one needs to be keenly aware of his or her strengths and weakness when creating a plan of action for each encounter and also how these characters best mesh with his or her teammates to compensate for the teams’ collective abilities.
Now, with all that out of the way, I have decided to stream my gaming on Twitch from time to time, not in the hopes of becoming the next Ninja or Shroud, but rather because I saw it as an excellent learning opportunity in how to craft live content in the 21st century and all the technical, behind-the-scenes aspects necessary to get the job done (i.e. using broadcasting software, catering custom computer builds to maximize quality, accounting for hardware / latency limitations). One cannot even begin to explain the nightmare that trying to coordinate streaming between multiple computers with various video / audio / media inputs can quickly devolve into.
Included below are clips from some of my prior streams: