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With the start of a new year, many of us look to make changes about ourselves or our lives. Some might decide to exercise more; others might choose to learn a new language, while another group might try to be more frugal.
If you enjoy playing games, then your New Year’s resolution might be to improve your skills in this area. If that’s the way you choose to go, then here are some simple steps you can follow to become a better gamer in 2022.
Read About New Strategies
The first step to becoming a better gamer starts away from the game itself. It’s essential to build your theoretical knowledge of different strategies and tactics that you can deploy while you play.
One of the first ports of call on your quest for gaming knowledge should be books. There are good titles published about nearly all major games, though you’ll find it easier to find them for older releases since authors will have had more time to write a strategy book.
Look for Online Resources
It’s not just booked either. Today, we can use the internet to learn almost anything. No matter whether you’re a business student looking to improve your writing skills, an aspiring coder looking to learn your first programming language, or a video editor trying to fix some blurry footage, you can find the resources you need online.
The same applies to gamers. The World Wide Web is jam-packed with resources that you can use to learn general techniques that can help your overall skills and game-specific tips and tricks to help beat challenging levels.
You’ll find guides covering just about every type of game you could ever possibly imagine. For card players that want to add a new game to their repertoire of knowledge, beginners’ guides can help you pick up the skills to titles like three-card brag. Such guides usually cover everything from the basic mechanics to the values of each hand and act as a handy cheat sheet to refer back to as you start to play.
Watch Others Play
You can learn a lot by reading, but you can also learn by watching others play. This provides you with an opportunity to watch the techniques that others use and see how they work in action.
For example, if you’re watching a Call of Duty game, you may notice some players jumping around a lot. This is a technique used by some to make it harder for their opponents to hit them. You may see even more advanced players working together much more closely and how this can effectively beat opponents in team game modes.
Thankfully, it’s straightforward to watch others play games today. Sites like YouTube and Twitch provide an almost infinite amount of gaming content for you to enjoy for free from just about any internet-connected device you can think of.
Practice
Once you’ve read and watched plenty of helpful content, you need to put it into practice. Of course, the main reason you play your favorite games is to have fun, but if you want to improve your skills, it can help to add some structure to your gaming sessions.
It would help if you tried to practice the theory you learned as you play, as it will take time to master.
To hone your skills, you should expect to dedicate hours to practice. This is something that all professional esports athletes do. For example, Lynnie “artStar” Noquez, a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player, spends around six hours playing for at least five days a week, with admin work and competition squeezed in around that.
Watch Yourself
Professional sports coaches record games and training sessions and play them back so that players can watch themselves in action. This allows them to reflect on how they performed and look for improvement areas.
This same approach can be applied to video gaming. Thankfully capture equipment is easy to come by today, so it should be relatively easy to record and watch your gaming sessions.
In doing so, you can look for weaknesses and develop approaches that you can take to address them.
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