![]() In Counter Strike, it matters every bit as much to control the spray of the rifle to let the bullets bleed from one target to the next as it does to finish a kill in a cursor’s touch. The more perfect was, is, will always be the consistent winning option. One tapping is not the way the FPS is supposed to be played. Unfortunately, the feeling isn’t always the truth. It’s gonna be weird to say, but even though I knew I was gonna be better in another play style, I didn’t enjoy it as much as my own style. I did this because that’s how I enjoyed playing this game. This is the way CS is supposed to play, to feel. There was the language of the game and the sense that aim communicated something almost religious within. Everyone did, indeed, talk about his one taps and there was a wider image there to maintain. So what was the young Belgian perfectionist who had become known for his headshots supposed to do? He had to master the one tap. In the language of the FPS-and even of esports-the headshot is the word for perfection. It’s one of the toughest, lowest-percentage shots and it’s nearly always the most damaging one. Few things in all of esports match up to it. In the world of the FPS, no sign or symbol radiates “perfection” like the headshot. Excitement aside, I get the feeling he’d rather be speaking French where he’s probably as precise as he wants to be. When I find that right word, he’s instantly excited, swaps it right in place of the less precise word, then goes on to use it. With English, he chafes more at not knowing the right word, quickly asking for the exact, precise term to complete the sentence. He comes to events well-kept, looking sharp even during that stretch of adolescence where we’re normally messy and unconcerned. Evident from everything he does, he is a person who likes to line things up as right as he can. ScreaM poured that focus into the reticle in no small part because of his love for the perfect. My warmups, my everything - I was trying to get better at this a lot.” You just get better at aiming and that’s it, you’re doing your job, you know? I was totally focused on aiming, my practice was all about this. “Most of the time, for me the game was a lot about aiming. On aim maps where he’s fully focused it’s often even more impressive. In the video below, he pings the white dots on screens with individual taps of the rifle while casually talking to w0xic. You can see as much just by searching YouTube, where his streamed practice sessions get over 100,000 views. ScreaM’s raw ability to remove a skull from its shoulders inside the server came from constant aim practice. “It’s also a little bit my personality, you know? I like when things are perfect.” That level of precision was part of what got ScreaM to 7th on HLTV’s player rankings in 2013-when he was only 19 years old. Hiko, 2nd highest in headshot rating in 2013, had. These numbers were unprecedented then and now. At international LAN tournaments, that number went up to 74.8%. In 2013, the year that his career took off, he had upped that to 73.5%. In 2012, the first year where HLTV recorded his stats, 69.1% of the shots ScreaM hit were headshots. The word “obsession” doesn’t quite carry the full weight of ScreaM’s focus on aim during his rise in CS. “When I was younger I definitely was more into headshots. Especially for Adil “ScreaM” Benrlitom, Team Liquid’s star Valorant player. Like a dunk, you know what the headshot means so well that you’ve likely got sounds, quotes, moments, and memes attached to it. Like the slam dunk, it’s a symbol that immediately conveys so many things that describing them almost takes away the mystique. That’s because, for years now, the FPS world worked the term into the cultural lexicon as the esports version of the slam dunk. It would be making a game of something far too serious. It’s so detached at this point that describing a real life shooting with the term would sound deranged. Obviously, real world violence plays a role here but the term has been so gamified that most people - even those unfamiliar with games-usually detach the word from real life. Even well outside the world of the FPS people understand what it means within the game’s setting, the precision and skill that it conveys. It needs no help from context for any heavy lifting. The headshot has the power to carry meaning on its own.
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