Disc Twitching

In extreme cases disc twitching can lead to wishful thinking

What is disc twitching?

Well according to the urban dictionary it’s the following:

Disc Twitching is something gamers do normally in the run up to the launch of a new game. It’s caused by not having anything to do or any new games to play. A symptom of which is putting in old games and playing them for anywhere between 5 minutes and 1 hour but never enjoying any of them. Severe cases of disc twitching can result in the gamer playing the dashboard game which doesn’t even involve playing a game, just flicking around on the NXE dashboard making your Avatar’s eyes spin.

Example

Lee is now playing Mass Effect
“nah don’t wanna play that”

(10 minutes pass)

Lee is now playing Gears of War
“I knew I stopped playing this for a reason”
(20 minutes pass)

Lee is now playing Lost Planet
“I don’t remember buying this”
(3 minutes pass)
/sigh meh
Lee is now offline.

Adam: “lol Lee is disc twitching again”

Raptr updates... they aren't annoying in the slightest.

I know that’s the definition of disc twitching because I just submitted it before staring this article. I also currently have the top result on Google for it but it wouldn’t be fair of me to take credit for it. Adam from the excellent gaming website gaminglives.com was the one who coined the phrase on the Saturday before Mass Effect 2 at 16:50 pm, I mentioned it in my Answer to life the universe and everything in it article (you can read it later) it’s not often you read the birth of a phrase is it?

I'm afraid I can't do that Dave

Disc Twitching is without question the worst thing that can happen to a gamer, even worse than getting the Red Ring of Death and your mum lending you her Wii and copy of Wii fit while your Xbox is back in Germany at the Xbox hospital. It’s horrible but it only seems to happen before a Triple-A game. I can quite easily play Mass Effect 2 on insane during the summer drought, well I say easily… it’s bloody hard work in places, but I popped it in on Saturday and just couldn’t get into it. It was nice to hear Kelly tell me I have email again, oh Kelly how I missed you (yes I know I mention it in every article). I managed to get about an hour in before I got stuck on the Collector ship at the floaty platform ambushy bit where about twenty Collectors come at you and those big fat purple tank gits shoot blue goo at you from afar, and I couldn’t do it so turned it off in a fit of rage. I knew I should have taken Garrus! Have you ever known a Krogan to get dropped so easy – it’s like he doesn’t even have a shield?

Then I played The Ballad of Gay Tony, base jumped off one sky scraper then turned that off. I know… I’ll play Portal! I played one level -  one of the advanced levels where you have three buttons and one cube, I’m still not entirely sure how I did it. Forza 3 next! Man this game likes to load. Ohh next race twelve laps of Silverstone GP, that’s why I turned that off – I didn’t even race!

Xbox live Arcade… there are loads of good games on there I haven’t played, I just about managed the demo for Toy Soldiers before getting bored of that. Not because it’s rubbish, it’s actually a very good game, a good Sunday game (note to self  put “Sunday Game” on urban dictionary). In the end I settled on going for the Realistic achievement on Splinter Cell Conviction – I stuck with that one for the rest of the weekend until I finished it, only to be shafted by a bugged achievement and was done out of 50 bleep bloops. This had put me in a bad mood I’d only done it for the achievements, not that its hard. Mark and Execute made that game way too easy.

Fenceposts don't die, they're just missing in action.

Ah sod it I’ll play the Reach Beta.
Now it’s no secret I’m a Halo Fanboy I even went as far as purchasing a green fence post with the numbers 117 stencilled on from a bloke on a forum which was stupid for three reasons
1) it was expensive
2) I’m not entirely sure it was a genuine licensed product.
3) I don’t have a garden

But when playing the Reach Beta at certain times of the day you can’t help but make the following noises
“gah”
“cock”
“tea baggin little prick”
“jesus titty fu…..”
“go’ jes’ fu’ cun’ basta’ bollocks”

Why is there not an option for only playing with the grown ups on Xbox live? Those bloody kids keep killing me and now I know how that grumpy old bloke who lived near the conker tree felt when the football kept landing in his garden. I would tell them to “go play up their own end” except I can’t threaten them with the knowledge of “knowing where their dad works” or sticking my knife in their ball, and without them the “go play up your own end” line is useless. I am, if I do say so, extremely good at killing myself in the Reach Beta, oh and taking pictures I’m good at that too.

I can’t remember what I did after Reach… I recall playing the dashboard for a while. The dashboard game is a game which involves clicking around the dashboard on the Xbox listening to the various click’s and tock’s. We have all played it for longer than we should have. it’s not as good as the old dashboard game is it though? The old one gave you an odd satisfaction from hitting the bumper buttons quickly and hearing that swishy-swooshy noise. After ten minutes of that I just resorted to rolling around on the floor under the coffee table in a Haribo and Fanta fuelled fit. To try and quench my boredom I did that thing where you pull your shirt up over your head for a while, why does that never help?

I’m starting to give serious consideration to playing Wii Fit…
See what you made me do John Marsden??? Damn you to HELL!

Oh wait, I’ve just had an email from Urban Dictionary

Bunch of fuc....

Bunch of fuckers!




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15 Comments

  1. Rook says:

    It doesn’t have tro be a lead up to a new game coming out. There have been times I have been disc twitching: don’t want to start something new, don’t want to try for an achievement, don’t want to play that game I’ve been playing recently. Then there’s the non disc twitching side too: can’t be bothered playing something on XBLA, can’t be bothered trying that demo I downloaded.

    Thankfully it doesn’t last more than a day, otherwise I’d end up crazy.

  2. Samuel The Preacher says:

    You magnificent bastard… “3) I don’t have a garden” just made me laugh so hard I nearly ruptured my stitches.

    I don’t have this problem often. I tend to play a lot of older games between new releases purely because I want to play them anyway.

    Actually, this disc twitching malarkey sounds more like it should be renamed to “GADHD”, or Gamer’s Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

  3. Richie Richie says:

    I’m in a similar phase at the moment. Usually my play is more focused (on achievements mainly) but occasionally things get soooo bad that you end up finding the worst kind of shit in your collection.

    Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this week I played Kengo: Legend of the Nine. Fuck my life!

  4. Ben Ben says:

    Never fail to make me laugh Lee, quality as usual :)

  5. Ste says:

    Been there and I hate it! Nice article

  6. Lee says:

    I forgot to mention the part where i waited all afternoon for the civ pack to download off steam because i thought it might cure the problem – it took ages to download and i still havent played it

  7. Adam Adam says:

    When I’m home I’m normally sat on his Sofa with my laptop and you literally can watch him switch through disc after disc, then back to channel hopping then its on with a DVD.

    I’m guilty of the same but I do it in a far more discreet fashion as I go from my Steam list and so I rarely have to ever look for a disc :p That said, If Raptr’s running in the background, I soon give the game away with it auto posting to Twitter every 5 minutes about how I’m switching between Warcraft, L4D2, GTAIV, Bejweled, Uplink and Peggle.

    I have the attention span of a fish some days…

  8. Lorna Lorna says:

    Another great article, Lee. I am guilty of this myself but usually not pre-release…just through boredom or inability to work out what I actaully want to be playing. I play the dashboard game a LOT. Just swooshing though the menus, looking at what everyone is playing, looking at all the demos that I downloaded and haven’t tried…then rinse and repeat.

  9. Mark R MarkuzR says:

    This is totally alien to me… disc twitching?! I mean… no… surely you put a game in your drive and then play it for six months before wondering if you should move on to the next, especially considering you’ve probably finished all that there is to do a month or so beforehand? I don’t get it.

    I treat my games the same way I treat albums, at least before the mp3 revolution, in that they get put in the machine and stay there until you actually remember to change them. When Dream Theater released Awake in 1994 I would start playing it as soon as I sat down at the computer in the morning and wouldn’t turn it off until I stopped work in the late evening.. and that disc stayed in the drive until the next album (A Change of Seasons) came out a year later.

    Playing as I do is actually quite a destructive way to operate though, as everyone else moves on from one game to the next while I’m still hanging around the same game from six months before, or longer… as was the case with Oblivion. We know a disc twitcher, probably the worst that you could ever come across… even in company when a whole bunch of gamers get together he can get up after just a few minutes and whip the game out of the drive for another. Does my head in like you wouldn’t believe. If you’re on your own, it’s fine… but when you’re in the company of other gamers trying to enjoy a game, it’s infuriating. Thankfully, I’m only ever spectating and manage to bite my tongue :)

  10. Adam Adam says:

    I think whats most worrying is that a lot of disk twitching occurs with new releases where you can sit and play out the 8 hour story and then within a week of that, theres nothing left to do on it yet you still want to play it.

    Most of my disk twitching is done with games I’ve been playing over a period of 4 years and I find myself dipping in and out of each one for an hour at a time

  11. Neovampyre says:

    I agree with Rook, I’m a bad Disc Twitcher. I usually invest most of my gametime playing only one game at a time and have a very limited taste in the style and genre I enjoy playing – I’m more RPG than FPS. But usually after investing so much time solely in one game I always have difficulty having the will to move on to another indever and stop playing ‘a dead horse’. For example I just spent 4 months solely playing Borderlands. Not that thats my only problem, with a sheer lack of varied new releases and any new releases what so ever I often get stuck in a dry patch for weeks and even months and end up sometimes playing the ‘OMG, why did I buy this’ games I have avoided for ages. For example, right now there is nothing new to interest me till end June/start July (1 or 2 games) then nothing till spetember and for someone that plays 7-10 hours a day and have only 4 very bad uncompleted games in stock – I’m already twitching!

  12. [...] gaming feet. We started off simple but now titles like Lego Indiana Jones are being disc twitched (Copyright Lee Williams©) along with Kung Fu Panda and the Viva Pinata series – it’s like an evolutionary tree of a [...]

  13. [...] un-trademarked words: ‘Disc Twitching’. If you’re not familiar with the term, hit up Lee’s post defining the syndrome, but this is pretty much how I spend most of my time. If I’m running the 360, chances are I [...]

  14. [...] gaming feet. We started off simple but now titles like Lego Indiana Jones are being disc twitched (Copyright Lee Williams©) along with Kung Fu Panda and the Viva Pinata series – it’s like an evolutionary tree of a [...]

  15. [...] gaming feet. We started off simple but now titles like Lego Indiana Jones are being disc twitched (Copyright Lee Williams©) along with Kung Fu Panda and the Viva Pinata series – it’s like an evolutionary tree of a [...]

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