Yeah that's how my group of friends came to see it. It was just another skill we could compete with. Some of us could watch the other three screens most of the time and hardly look at our own, which led to strategies of running around while staring at floors and walls to mask our position better.

The game has a lot of tricks too as I recall. Grenade launcher grenades only explode when hitting the ground, not other surfaces, so if you know what you're doing you can kill someone half way across The Complex with one. Oh, and some guns can shoot through doors, but the door must be open(ing) for it to actually register the hit, otherwise it is just rendering a tracer. Stuff like that.

Perhaps someday I will have an opportunity to save the world with my license-to-kill, postols-only, Complex skills. Only then will my misspent youth make sense.

18 year old me would say "only noobs think this"

Yup, it's simple, just get better at the game.