Have you ever played a game in multiplayer and got your ass kicked? Of course you did, we all have. But did you ever think why that happened?

Multiplayer gaming is competitive and can be very brutal. In some games it actually seems impossible to get better because you get pummeled into the ground faster then you can say “pummeled into the ground”. Also, you might actually stick to playing only certain types of games, because you know that if you start playing RTS’s or simulations online you will lose. So far you’ve described it as a ‘barrier’ or stuck to the usual defense of  ”i just don’t play those games”. But is it the game’s fault, or yours?

Counter Strike Source

Let’s take a random practical example of say.. a guy named Jim. He is mostly a Counter-Strike/ Call of  Duty/ Left4Dead/ Insurgency FPS player. He’s quite damned good at those types of games and as such, enjoys playing them. Now, you might think Unreal Tournament/ Doom/ Quake is in the same boat. They’re still FPS’es right? Throw Jim in any of those games and notice how he is a general bottom-score lister. How did that happen? What’s the difference? What changed besides the game?

Let’s take the comparison of Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament. In Counter-Strike, you start off by choosing a weapon out of a limited selecting and going towards your objective. All you need to know is what weapon to choose and what way to use to your objective. That’s the basic you should know to play the game efficiently, no matter how well you play the game itself.

Unreal Tournament 2004

Let’s take Unreal Tournament now. You start, have to find a weapon and some powerups, learn what weapons do and how they combo, learning to do double jumps and wall jumps and if you have a special objective aside from Deathmatch, how and where to use it. This baseline for learning the basics in UT seems a lot larger in scope and depth then Counter-Strike.