Map memorization.

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My gaming experience in the last decade or so has been almost exclusively first person shooters. Halo 1 on the original xbox. LAN parties at my apartment. and now into battlefield 4 beta. All the FPS games along the way.

Memorizing maps has always been something I jumped into with both feet. There's a phrase my diagnosing professional says to me often when something strikes him as peculiar. He says, "That's normal for you."

I took this phrase, normal for me, and thought about how I played these large map first person shooter games, and then an "Ah Ha" moment occured. I normally named myself all these gamer tags with "camper" or something in the name. It was as though I was a bird that had flown all over a map, poked around piecing parts into a whole, until I memorized intersecting points and spaces and objects. Then I'd either camp in a spot knowing the bottlenecks, or I'd charge ahead knowing others to be stuck in a space.

Has anyone else ever been a map memorizer with games? I know my ability to remember spaces shoved me right to the front of the line in winning games or doing very well otherwise. I could almost feel where the opponents were.
thanks for reading.

I would think most people have a skill for memorizing locations...otherwise you'd get lost coming home from the supermarket or something.

Though it is pretty hard to memorize levels in games that are poorly designed, with no landmarks or anything to distinguish one area from the next...

I would not say that I am perfect at memorising maps, but I do like to at them, and I guess that I enjoy analysing them for things like weapon spawns and such. I would say my ability may work better with figuring out tactics when someone is trying to flank me, like what parts of the map are the likely spots. In some multiplayer games I have taken to the navigation role and memorising key locations, although I can still get lost making plans on a map is fun.

Probably also works into the fact I like to flank and ambush myself.

It's normal for me to memorize maps. I was known for this. On Halo 1, there was that map with all the teleporters. I had that memorized, and all of my family who gamed with me refused to play that map with me because I would just outmaneuver everyone through the map and rack up the kill counts. I would also screen look and be able to identify where they other players were at, and I knew what series of teleporters to get through to get to them. No one else I know of that I gamed with at that time could do that. Two of my cousins were better players, but I could out maneuver them and get the drop on them regardless of their skill.