Introduction
Fresh in the gaming scene with your brand new, swanky-looking PC that you personally assembled? Or perhaps your parents gifted you the latest Razer laptop model from this list here https://www.razer.com/gaming-laptops to commend you on a job-well-done for your exams? Regardless of how you received your gaming setup, the bottom line is, you’re all geared up and ready to begin your gaming journey.
- Play The Games You Want to Play
At this point in time, there is an inordinate number of games in existence that only continues to grow every year. Needless to say, it can feel overwhelming for new gamers just entering the scene and have no idea where to start building their gaming catalog. However, don’t worry, every seasoned gamer you know had to begin somewhere before amassing their current empire of games. Thus, here are some useful tips to help you reach their caliber.
- Download Steam
Truth be told, if you consider yourself a gamer in the 21st Century, you can’t escape the name Steam. It’s an extensive game manager platform where you have access to probably the biggest, reputable game e-store out there together with an in-built library to store your purchased games. Given its massive size across all genres from both indie developers and mainstream companies alike, it’s almost impossible for you to NOT find your desired game.
- Be Strategic and Patient
With that being said, with great power comes great responsibility. Even though you have access to one of the world’s biggest catalog of games, you need to exercise control to not binge-buy everything on a whim. In fact, another selling point about Steam is how frequent and insane their sales are throughout the year — with discounts ranging anywhere between 15% to 80%. Indeed, their two biggest annual sales tend to be the Summer and Winter sales, where more notable game publishers push out discounts for their popular titles.
Apart from that, there are also other sites like Humble Bundle and Epic Games that either sell discounted game bundles or distribute a weekly, free game.
If you follow these steps, you’ll be able to build up a decent PC game library in no time; however, remember to keep an eye on your storage space because PC games eat up a lot of that. Hence, conducting ‘spring-cleaning’ sessions to organize your collection is good from time to time. Alternatively, you can reconfigure your installation path to another drive (either internal or external) to better manage your system’s storage.
2. Establishing Camaraderie
While games can be an independent activity, playing alone for hours on end can make you feel somewhat solitary and detached from reality — but gaming doesn’t have to be lonesome. Expand your social circle by:
- Add Buddies on Steam
Steam can be just as much as a social media platform as it is a game manager. Find and add your friends easily onto your Steam friend list by acquiring their gamer tag. Moreover, you can also choose to join communities and be part of the forums to meet new people. It’s a great way to connect with both old and new friends.
- Discord: Skype for Gamers
Discord is undoubtedly the best video-calling application made for gaming on the market right now. Its entire UI and mechanics were configured by developers for the purpose of compatible in-game usage. Thus, Discord offers a variety of functions unique to its platform only such as streaming games live with fellow users in the same chatroom along with accommodating thousands of users in a single channel at a time — it’s honestly crazy. Best of all, it’s mobile-friendly too, so you can have Discord on the go too!
- F>Gamers IRL
Once you’ve established your friendships with your fellow gamers online, the next natural progression step would be to take those online friendships offline. There are plenty of conventions like TwitchCon or ComicCon held annually in large exhibit halls, providing gamers from all walks of life with a safe and fun space to congregate together and share their friendship and a common passion for games in real life as one community.
3. Adjust Your Settings
Deviating slightly from the community aspect of gaming, let’s revert back to the technical side of things for a while. Unless you’re a casual gamer, chances are, you’d want your gaming specs to be top-notch in-game. You’d want to achieve that sweet equilibrium of quality graphics and performance.
- Customize In-Game Settings
You don’t always have to align with your in-game default settings. They’re default only to provide you with a recommended combination of settings to enjoy the game decently. However, feel free to up the ante by reconfiguring the setting specs and mechanics to your own gameplay preference like inverting the Y-axis in FPS if that’s what you’re used to. By now, most games should even have setting sliders for greater precision.
- Download Relevant Software
According to the generation of your in-built graphics card, you may either download Nvidia GeForce Experience or AMD Radeon Adrenalin, two of the bigger graphics chip manufacturers in the industry. After this, simply tweak the program settings to acquire the best performance for your PC model.
Alternatively, you can also download monitoring software to keep track of your framerates during your gameplay. Usually, modern-day PCs run at 60 FPS, anywhere below that is less than ideal for your gaming experience. Thus, downloading a CAM or Fraps or HWmonitor is useful software for monitoring your PC performance.
- Stay Clean
The last thing we’d want is for our gaming room to be a pest-infested stinkhole. It’s important to keep your gaming setup clean, both internally and externally.
Internal: Update your drivers regularly to receive the best performance quality out of your hardware. Having the most up-to-date graphics driver will help prevent any unnecessary lag issues caused by the FPS being too high. The software like Nvidia and Radeon can help update for you automatically. Don’t forget to install Windows updates whenever prompted as well. Although it’s a bothersome aspect of PC maintenance, please don’t delay it any further by “reminding me later”. It’s better to just get it done and over with sooner than later. As Yoda once said, “Patience, young Padawan.”
External: There’s nothing much to say in this area except to have a handy duster or wet wipes nearby to do semi-frequent cleaning sessions. All the sweat, oil, and dust accumulated from your grimy fingers on the keyboard definitely accumulates over time.
Conclusion
Last but not least, remember to always keep your gaming setup clean and tidy for the optimal gaming experience. Don’t let yourself fall under those unpleasant gamer stereotypes of gamers camping in their parents’ basement or being morbidly obese from continuous snacking with minimal movement as commonly portrayed in mass media. Too much of anything is bad for you. The key is to find a healthy balance between gaming and reality.
