Everyone is armed all the time and that’s normal, but to draw a weapon is an overt hostile act. A standoff therefore is a game of chicken because both want to kill each other and you want to draw first to have the highest chance of surviving, but even a bandit will hesitate to add a felony murder charge to their rap sheet. The whole town serves as witness when there is a pair of eyes behind every shuttered window. The hero always draws second, both demonstrating his superior skill and speed by defeating the opponent even at a disadvantage, and getting away with murder scot-free.

  • blarco@lemmy.world
    673·
    1 year ago

    You’re overthinking it. They’re both just trying to shoot the other guy first.

    • TauZero@mander.xyzOP
      40·
      1 year ago

      So what does this mean for Western gunslingers? Is it always better to draw second? Well, not quite. Welchman also found that the 21 millisecond benefit of reacting quickly was totally overwhelmed by the 200 milliseconds it took to react in the first place.

      • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
        15·
        1 year ago

        In eSport where the only physical movement is a couple mm of their hand that may be true. In the physical world where these things involve several inches or more of movement with large muscle groups…ehhh no.

        Gunfighter hypotheticals aside you can watch it play out in the real world during any soccer game. The attacker who makes the defender react to them slips past while the defender who makes the attacker react wins. The attacker who makes the goalie react has an open net, but if the goalie can make the attacker react then they block the shot (or it misses).

        No matter the physical sport, Soccer, Basketball, Rugby, Volleyball, if it has 1 v 1 elements then “juking” works and the reason why is because it makes the other player reactive.

        • Lopoloma@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          I saw a youtube of a modern cowboy shooting at stuff.
          His hand is already near the gun, like in western movies.
          When the signal comes, Iirc he simultaneously bends his knees, gets in kind of a hunching position and barely pulls the gun out rotating it in hip height towards the target and shoots.
          Unfortunately, I have no link nor a name to the channel.

          It really isn’t like it’s depicted in those pirate movies or the aristocratic era dueling movies.

      • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
        51·
        1 year ago

        You’ve got that backwards, Peakers Advantage is a well known element in competitive FPS.

        It has nothing to do with the human, and everything to do with the computer, but eSports players absolutely know it’s better to peak.

      • jjagaimo@lemmy.caEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        This lacks a lot of context as both strategies are useful in different circumstances. For a player (A) holding an angle from a far distance, this is true because the person coming around the corner (B) from a short distance to the corner is visible to to A before A is visible to B. This gives the reactor an advantage. This is usually afaik called angle advantage

        For a person who is close to a corner peeking a person close to the corner, the opposite can be true due to the delay it takes for the movement to be relayed to the other player’s computer. This means that the player peeking may in more extreme cases have a 100-200ms advantage over the reacting player. This is dubbed peeker’s advantage.

        The effects can vary with latency and distance,

    • TauZero@mander.xyzOP
      8·
      1 year ago

      That’s what I used to think as a kid - westerns standoffs are an outgrowth of Old World duels, a formalized custom performed by traditionalists, even the baddest bandit secretly being a gentleman at heart. The showerthought here is that the order of events is also perfectly explained by taking legal considerations of justified self-defense into account.