A Brain Full of Game Stuff

Some people have memories like sponges, they absorb everything. Some people have memories like buckets with holes in the bottom, so they forget everything. My memory is like a DIY water filter, filtering whatever passes through it, the water coming out the bottom pure and only the nasty, useless shit remaining. Simply put, I remember useless stuff but not important stuff. My brain is FULL of video game shit but I’m bad at remembering useful stuff.

But video game stuff varies a lot.

At my highest point, when SPUF was going full steam and I was a super awesome Medic main, I was basically a walking Team Fortress 2 encyclopedia. I could grab information out of thin air and, even if I couldn’t actually pull any of it off in-game, I was knowledgeable of most of TF2’s mechanics, major and minor. I can’t ever claim I was a pro player or anything, but dag nabit I knew a fuckton about that game.

Of course, as I stopped playing, that knowledge drifted away. It shifted into Warframe knowledge.

But in between those two games, there was Skyrim knowledge. A lot of Skyrim knowledge. Not on place names and things like that, just weird general knowledge. Thanks to mods and things like that though, and also because I was never part of a Skyrim community, that encyclopedic knowledge base in my brain never formed. Plus there’s about a billion nordic tombs which all look the same.

So yeah, my brain is full of Warframe knowledge now. Mostly just remembering the names of things, but I’m also good at mission knowledge and item locations. If you need a resource, most of the time I’ll be able to point you in the right direction. Warframe ability names though? Give me a moment.

But in all these games, numbers have been strangely absent. When it comes to Warframe, this is fair, because the numbers are all over the place, with decimal points everywhere. I remember that Volt’s Shock ability has a base cost of 25 energy but I couldn’t tell you how much damage it did, with or without mods or his passive. Team Fortress 2 numbers were always easier to remember for one reason: they were mostly whole numbers.

Numbers or no numbers, this information is useful to have while gaming. It means I can almost instantly help anyone who asks. It’s good while you’re in the middle of or are preparing for a mission.

Even then though, why IS my head full of numbers? It’s insane. I could be putting so much more in my mind. More useful things. It’s not like there aren’t guides or anything. Actually, it’s often better to check wikis, because I might be wrong. I could accidentally also start quoting songs, due to the huge number of Linkin Park tracks I seem to have memorized for no reason.

Really, it’s both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because I can do a lot of stuff on the fly and help people, a curse because I could probably put more useful stuff in my brain.

But it’s useful.

Unless I need to remember something important.