As I head deeper into my thirties I find myself less willing to make the time for video games like I had years ago. Now they have to offer me more than pure entertainment value if I am to play them. They have to provide experiences and knowledge that I can indirectly apply to my life so I can improve myself outside of the screen.
Surprisingly the new version of DOOM is one of these games.
While the premise behind DOOM won’t win over any Jim Rohn fans - the Doom Marine kills and maims demons from Hell until they stop bothering humanity - you can still learn and refresh some life lessons from this gem and apply it to your daily life.
Seek Effectiveness Before Efficiency
One of the supporting characters helping you in DOOM is Samuel Hayden, whose mission is to further humanity’s existence by harnessing a source of infinite power called Argent Energy. Unfortunately Argent Energy comes from Hell and includes a side dish of human-slaying demons… a lot of them. Always striving for perfection, Hayden seeks a solution to the situation in DOOM that prevents the demons from entering and destroying our world while we retain the ability to use Argent Energy.
On the other end our protagonist, the Doom Marine, just wants to send the demons back to Hell as that’s the most pressing situation. If there’s no humanity left to save then why bother trying to save the source of Argent Energy. He applies the most direct solutions to reaching this result, mostly involving shooting at and breaking things, which indirectly stunts the growth of human progress.
Authors like Tim Ferriss will routinely point out that it’s better to do the right things instead of doing things right. The battle between effectiveness and efficiency. The Doom Marine possesses this same mindset of effectiveness while Samuel Hayden possesses the mindset of efficiency. It’s important to understand the desired, and actually attainable, efficacy so that you can figure out solutions that will help you reach it.
Get out of Scarcity Mindset
DOOM has a progression system that makes your protagonist grow stronger as you progress through the game. Unfortunately you start off with quite a few setbacks, the most serious being a lack of weapon variety and lack of ammo for those weapons. Because ammo is scarce in the beginning and your ways of increasing it during battle are limited, you end up using your weapons very conservatively, making sure not to miss each shot and not taking advantage of your weapons special abilities that consume more ammo. You develop a scarcity mindset, limiting yourself from creative ways of dispatching enemies in favour of not losing the few resources you have.
When I realized I couldn’t play as aggressively as I wanted to due to these limitations, and the character progression system started opening up, my priority was to remove this scarcity mindset, by:
- Finding secrets in the map that had hidden weapons, giving me earlier access to to them and increasing my arsenal
- Upgrading abilities that increased my maximum ammo or optimized my consumption of them, where I prioritized increasing the maximum over optimizing
While upgrading my health and armor limitations is also useful, being able to use my weapons with less limitations first leads to a new way of thinking about how to kill demons more effectively. You start to develop an abundance mindset, with the option of switching between multiple weapons and using your expensive special abilities becoming a viable tactic during battles. This makes the game more fun while reducing the risks of running out of ammo during critical moments.
Find Risk Before It Finds You
DOOM rewards players for playing aggressively later in the campaign, especially when you’re low on health. In DOOM your health does not regenerate and the only guaranteed way of increasing it, other than finding health pickups in the area or side-effects from your upgrades, is to take it back from your enemies using glory kills. As your character grows so does the variety and number of enemies you face. While this makes the game tougher in some respects it also makes it easier to increase your health quickly due to more opportunities to use glory kills.
It’s tough at first to go after the glory kill when you’re low on health, rather than retreating and seeking cover. “Hide and heal” is how many FPS games, like Call of Duty, work and the more you’ve played them the more you’ve been conditioned to remedy the situation through inaction, rather than taking control of it. This is related to having a scarcity vs. abundant mindset: if you’re not confident that you can increase your resources by moving forward on your own, you will instead play it safe and wait in cover until a viable opportunity you have little control over opens up to you.
Once you become more comfortable using glory kills you realize it becomes a much safer tactic during critical moments than running away. You have to face the fear you’ve somehow been conditioned to be afraid of and react in the most appropriate manner. You have to take control of the situation and ensure the results you seek instead of hoping for the best.
Embrace the Suck
The chances of you dying in DOOM increase in later levels, even after you’ve upgraded the Doom Marine and all your weapons substantially. With no quicksave option you will be replaying many battles over and over. It may even get to the point where you see no way of winning a battle and the temptation to lower the game’s difficulty level becomes an enticing option.
If you’ve played any game from From Software, such as Bloodborne or the Dark Souls series, you know how this feels. But you also know that surge of accomplishment you get once you do succeed. While the odds may not seem in your favour there are always ways of improving your next attempt at the situation: look at your Automap before the battle and see where the powerups are, use portals and jump pads as much as you can to disorient the enemy, use the chainsaw to increase your ammo — yeah it’s a weird mechanic — and conserve the ammo pickups in the area for critical situations. There are plenty of methods of getting through a battle and your mind will open up to them as you explore different ways of trying to clear it.
DOOM is not only a breath of fresh air in modern FPS but also an indirect reflection of how many of us can get trapped in certain situations in life and try to apply solutions that aren’t optimal. By doing the right things, getting out of scarcity mindset, staring down risk and getting through periods of suck you take down the demons in your life that are stunting your progress towards whatever you’re trying to reach.
What a great first post @eswat! Welcome to Steemit and I hope to see more of you here :-)
Thanks @playfulfoodie! I hope to write more posts that bridge the gap between gaming and life soon. 👊
Nice! I give you UP
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