So I know I missed the monthly musing topic but until two nights ago I didn’t think I was one of those gamers with bad habits, I guess it’s only when other people are in your company that your realise your bad habits and reactions.

Recently I have been playing a lot of 360 games with Riser Glen mainly and Suff0cat and Asian Joe occasionally. Now I’ve mentioned how I swear when I’m enjoying a game before but I don’t think you understand the extent of it, you’ve never heard a swear word properly until you hear it from an Australian chick. Suff0cat and Asian Joe don’t get it as much but poor Riser Glen has abused ears who are currently in therapy. Seriously. And I never noticed how bad my swearing was until I get killed for the 37th time on a chapter in the Ninja Fagdens. I don’t know where this habit came from either. I think because I use games as a release of frustrations (which makes me amazing at button mashing games) that it all comes out as a bad case of Tourette syndrome.

My other confession is what I do when I know I’m getting way too stressed out from a game and need to chill out and concentrate, you know that point when you’re blinded by rage? Yes, the throwing controllers, taking razor blades to your wrists and threatening the television moments. Well I have a very simple solution that for some reason always works: The Hampster Dance.

This habit I do know the origin of so I’ll give you the back story. For those of you who don’t know I used to play World of Warcraft, I was one of the lead hunters in a high end raiding guild pre-Burning Crusade. Anyway so when I first joined the guild I began the quest to get my Rhokdelar bow, which is basically a test of skill in the sense that you have to kill four demons that each have different strategies which were generally ridiculous(not these days because the quest has been nerfed). So I had a lot of trouble with these because I would get stressed by them and there would always be people with different strategies who would just come and try to help but in the end make it harder. Then one day, another hunter from one of the bigger guilds on the server said he had heard people trying to help me and realised that my problem wasn’t that I wasn’t good enough to do it, but that I had too many people yelling in my ear about how to do it. He said to me “you know the strategy, you have the skills, you just need the concentration”, now I am in Real Estate if you don’t know, which suits me really well because the busy schedule is a perfect match with my head which constantly has a thousand things going on at once, so the concentration is easier said than done for me. My hunter friend said to me “I know what you need, download the hamster dance by Hampton the hamster and listen to it while you’re fighting. Don’t talk, just do it, trust me, it works!”

So I did. And safe to say I had my Rhokdelar soon after. It soon became a habit, whenever something was too hard and I needed to concentrate Hampton would be played and it has never failed me. EVER! It might not always be first go but it’s generally pretty quick, and I’m not ready to kill myself when it doesn’t work like I was pre-hamster dance.
I actually found out from my friend that a lot of the hunters on my server used it and they found the same thing, it ended up being a ritual in our guild that if we were having trouble with a boss we would change vent channels and I would play the hamster dance through the channel and we would down the boss and have a good laugh. AMAZING!

Two nights ago I was stuck on a level in Ninja Fagdens and so I put on the hamster dance and soon enough I was past that and beyond. So now you know my secret gaming rituals. Hope you enjoyed them! (Or at least had a good laugh at me!)