Shut Up and Play

On Sunday afternoon, I wound up in a few matches with my stepson Karl, who goes by Crazy Hang Man / HardCoreHangMan on XBL. He’s a member of another competitive team, so I don’t play with him too often, but he’s a good player and good fun to play with. He’s also very keen on helping other people get better at playing Halo 3 – so much so that within a minute of me joining his session he was going through the ranked playlists to see which one he could help bring my Skill up on.

He chose probably my least favourite playlist, Team SWAT. I’ve always been frustrated by the tendency for even slight lag to grant a clear advantage to one team, and told him so. Karl was insistent we try it, though, so I gritted my teeth and went in.

As I was expecting, we lost our first match, dropping my Team SWAT Skill from 6 to 5. In the second one, though, Karl did something that surprised me – he told me to stop making call-outs. He insisted that the effort I was putting into making call-outs was directly interfering with my actual combat abilities.

I was surprised and a little bit upset. If you’ve played with me for any length of time, you’ll know that I believe that communication is a key part of success in a team game (Frez, I'll bet you're nodding your head right now). Also, I was making most of my call-outs only after I had already been killed. How could my combat skills be suffering in the five seconds between death and respawn? And most of the time, the first I knew of the presence of any opponents was the bark of a BR a split second before I was looking at my fresh corpse and the current score.

Karl, though, kept a cool head in the face of my frustration. He reassured me that my communications skills were great, but some of the best Team SWAT players he’d ever been on a team with were able to help their teams win games by pulling excellent scores and K/D ratios – all without saying a word. By concentrating so much on trying to call everything out, I wasn’t BR-ing properly (which is vital in Team SWAT, of course).

I still couldn’t see his point, and I was being driven up the wall in the way that happens when you’re arguing with someone you can’t see, and I knew it. So I did what I do when I notice myself getting angry – closed my eyes, took a few deep breaths and told myself to relax and give Karl’s suggestion a try. I also decided to keep taking deep breaths right the way through the next game. This has benefits over and above keeping me calm. Have you ever noticed that when you’re breathing deeply, you start taking in everything in your field of vision, not just what’s directly in front of you? That started happening for me.

All of a sudden, I go from four kills in each of the first two matches to ten – and on one of the maps I’m not comfortable on, Blackout. We still lost, but by only eight kills, and that was with one man down (one of our teams dropped out during the match). Suddenly, I’m a lot more confident, with my BR, with Blackout and with Team SWAT.

The fourth game was closer, only four kills shy of the win on Narrows, and I posted nine of our forty-six making only the odd call-out. My score suffered again on the fifth game, but I think that was because Karl and our third player, chaotic gearz, were thoroughly owning our opposition. By Game 6 on Construct I was back in the swing, breathing deep, making the occasional call and earning nine kills again, boosting my Skill back up to 6. I was thoroughly in the mood to continue, but the Matchmaking well suddenly ran dry for Team SWAT.

I took away from that session that not only is Karl an awesome teacher – he’s gonna turn his two boys into rock-solid men, I’m sure – but also that while communication is vital, so is combat skill – and to learn how to improve one you sometimes have to stop doing the other.