Adapting your play style to match your body
 

Bit of an odd topic perhaps but has anyone here ever had to take steps to change how they play certain games because of any physical problems they either had or developed?

The reason I ask is that I've always had pretty terrible circulation and since being on crutches for six weeks, I've all but lost sensation in the little finger of my left hand. I can still move it ok, I just can't feel it. I found out the other day that this has made me even worse than I already was at Guitar Hero. I can no longer rapidly tap my little finger and sometimes completely miss the blue button when I go to press it. Also, I can't hold down the red and blue buttons together properly.

Not huge issues but rather limiting on certain tunes as you can imagine. For now, I'm hoping that once I stop putting all my weight on my hands to walk, the sensation will return and I'll be back to normal but if not, I guess I might try to learn to play the game left handed. That or stick to drumming and singing...

Anyway, has anyone else ever been forced to play games differently because of something like this? I'm guessing the fatties amongst you for example don't put quite the same effort into Wii gaming as the rest of us and if anyone here only has one leg, I can't imagine you bought a Balance Board (Or maybe you did, and it's really helped your balance). Even if it was just buying a bigger telly when all the wanking finally caught up with your eyesight, tell all.

Way back, I cut my finger with a breadknife, so playing San Andreas was a bit weird, having use a middle finger for the trigger.

I mostly find myself leaning forward to see better because my eyesight has gotten bad, and leaning forward is obviously terrible for my posture, so I keep moving back and forth. For relaxing, slow paced/turn based gaming sitting back is fine, but anything requiring precision, be it driving or aiming, I have to see as sharply as I can.

Ha ha, Noos was laughing at me the other day for how much I move around in my seat when I'm gaming. I obviously don't notice I'm doing it but she reckons when it's something I'm really concentrating on like Rainbow 6, I physically lean over to see round corners and lean right forward to see better. Apparently I also pull silly faces but I think most people do when they're concentrating.

A few years back, my right hand was stung by a couple of wasps. Apparently, I'm allergic to wasp stings, as for the next week or so, said hand was an itchy, tender, barely mobile fleshy balloon. I had sensation only in my fingertips, and had to tense my fingers up for any movement. Gripping the right prong of the Gamecube controller against the palm of my swollen hand hurt like buggery, so for most of that week I had to play F-Zero GX with this weird as fuck claw grip on one side of the controller, being careful to not touch the area around my thumb against the plastic. I could hit the face buttons perfectly fine as long as I kept the pad steady in my good hand and hooked my index finger around the R button to avoid dropping it.

I sometimes do this too. Even as I'm doing it, I know that it won't help, but I guess that is just a sign of how immersed into the game I am at that particular moment. If I were an actual special operative, I expect I'd get headshot pretty quickly into my first engagement.

Half a year back or so, I somehow managed to hurt my right shoulder, and as it happened, this was during a time when I was playing a lot of Rock Band. I couldn't play drums for a couple of weeks, and it took a couple more weeks after that before I could play drums for more than a couple of songs without tiring it out.

I suppose if I like cut my right hand or something, I could just play one of the Suikodens, since they are setup so that you can play entirely with your left hand, with the L1 and L2 buttons doing the same as X and O, and select going to the menu.

I was going to mention that actually. I think one of the reasons I enjoyed the first two Suikodens was that you could play them and drink tea or smoke at the same time.