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Playing
to Win
Playing to win is the most important and most
widely misunderstood concept in all of competitive games. The sad
irony is that those who do not already understand the implications
I’m about to spell out will probably not believe them to be true
at all. In fact, if I were to send this article back in time to my
earlier self, even I would not believe it. Apparently, these
concepts are something one must come to learn through experience,
though I hope at least some of you will take my word for it.
Introducing...the Scrub
In the world of Street Fighter competition, we
have a word for players who aren’t good: “scrub.” Now,
everyone begins as a scrub—it takes time to learn the game to get
to a point where you know what you’re doing. There is the mistaken
notion, though, that by merely continuing to play or “learn” the
game, that one can become a top player. In reality, the “scrub”
has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually
going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it
starts. He’s lost the game before he’s chosen his character.
He’s lost the game even before the decision of which game is to be
played has been made. His problem? He does not play to win.
The scrub would take great issue with this
statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he
is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that
prevent him from ever
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Historical
Scrub: Neville
Chamberlain. He didn't even try to win,
instead offering "appeasement" to Hitler. |
truly competing. These made up rules vary from
game to game, of course, but their character remains constant. In
Street Fighter, for example, the scrub labels a wide variety of
tactics and situations “cheap.” So-called “cheapness” is
truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone often
called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an
opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending
against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw
is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and
doesn’t attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an
integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the
scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that
state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking.
The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield which will
protect him indefinitely. Why? Exploring the reasoning is futile
since the notion is ridiculous from the start.
You’re not going to see a classic scrub throw
his opponent 5 times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is
strategically the sequence of moves that optimize his chances of
winning? Here we’ve encountered our first clash: the scrub is only
willing to play to win within his own made-up mental set of rules.
These rules can be staggeringly arbitrary. If you beat a scrub by
throwing projectile attacks at him, keeping your distance and
preventing him from getting near you…that’s cheap. If you throw
him repeatedly, that’s cheap, too. We’ve covered that one. If
you sit in block for 50 seconds doing no moves, that’s cheap.
Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime
candidate for being called cheap.
Doing one move or sequence over and over and
over is another great way to get called cheap. This goes right to
the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so
obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Is he
such a poor player that he can’t counter that move? And if the
move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then
wouldn’t I be a fool for not using that move? The first
step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win
means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. The
game knows no rules of “honor” or of “cheapness.” The game
only knows winning and losing.
A common call of the scrub is to cry that the
kind of play in which ones tries to win at all costs is “boring”
or “not fun.” Let’s consider two groups of players: a group of
good players and a group of scrubs. The scrubs will play “for
fun” and not explore the extremities of the game. They won’t
find the most effective tactics and abuse them mercilessly. The good
players will. The good players will find incredibly overpowering
tactics and patterns. As they play the game more, they’ll be
forced to find counters to those tactics. The vast majority of
tactics that at first appear unbeatable end up having counters,
though they are often quite esoteric and difficult to discover. The
counter tactic prevents the first player from doing the tactic, but
the first player can then use a counter to the counter. The second
player is now afraid to use his counter and he’s again vulnerable
to the original overpowering tactic. (See my article on Yomi layer 3
for much more on that.)
Notice that the good players are reaching
higher and higher levels of play. They found the “cheap stuff”
and abused it. They know how to stop the cheap stuff. They know how
to stop the other guy from stopping it so they can keep doing it.
And as is quite common in competitive games, many new tactics will
later be discovered that make the original cheap tactic look
wholesome and fair. Often in fighting games, one character will have
something so good it’s unfair. Fine, let him have that. As time
goes on, it will be discovered that other characters have even more
powerful and unfair tactics. Each player will attempt to steer the
game in the direction of his own advantages, much how grandmaster
chess players attempt to steer opponents into situations in which
their opponents are weak.
Let’s return to the group of scrubs. They
don’t know the first
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Historical
Scrubs: The British Redcoats. The ultimate example of being
too bound up by rules to actually fight. They fought
"honorably" by marching into gunfire. |
thing about all the depth I’ve been talking
about. Their argument is basically that ignorantly mashing buttons
with little regard to actual strategy is more “fun.”
Superficially, their argument does at least look true, since often
their games will be more “wet and wild” than games between the
experts, which are usually more controlled and refined. But any
close examination will reveal that the experts are having a great
deal of fun on a higher level than the scrub can even imagine.
Throwing together some circus act of a win isn’t nearly as
satisfying as reading your opponent’s mind to such a degree that
you can counter his ever move, even his every counter.
Can you imagine what will happen when the two
groups of players meet? The experts will absolutely destroy the
scrubs with any number of tactics they’ve either never seen, or
never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have
not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual
game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with
restricting, unwritten rules.
The scrub has still more crutches. He talks a
great deal about “skill” and how he has skill whereas other
players—very much including the ones who beat him flat out—do
not have skill. The confusion here is what “skill” actually is.
In Street Fighter, scrubs often cling to combos as a measure of
skill. A combo is sequence of moves that are unblockable if the
first move hits. Combos can be very elaborate and very difficult to
pull off. But single moves can also take “skill,” according to
the scrub. The “dragon punch” or “uppercut” in Street
Fighter is performed by holding the joystick toward the opponent,
then down, then diagonally down and toward as the player presses a
punch button. This movement must be completed within a fraction of a
second, and though there is leeway, it must be executed fairly
accurately. Ask any scrub and they will tell you that a dragon punch
is a “skill move.” Just last week I played a scrub who was
actually quite good. That is, he knew the rules of the game well, he
knew the character matchups well, and he knew what to do in most
situations. But his web of mental rules kept him from truly playing
to win. He cried cheap as I beat him with “no skill moves” while
he performed many difficult dragon punches. He cried cheap when I
threw him 5 times in a row asking, “is that all you know how to
do? throw?” I gave him the best advice he could ever hear. I told
him, “Play to win, not to do ‘difficult moves.’” This was a
big moment in that scrub’s life. He could either write his losses
off and continue living in his mental prison, or analyze why he
lost, shed his rules, and reach the next level of play.
I’ve never been to a tournament where there
was a prize for the winner and another prize for the player who did
many difficult moves. I’ve also never seen a prize for a player
who played “in an innovative way.” Many scrubs have strong ties
to “innovation.” They say “that guy didn’t do anything new,
so he is no good.” Or “person x invented that technique and
person y just stole it.” Well, person y might be 100 times better
than person x, but that doesn’t seem to matter. When person y wins
the tournament and person x is a forgotten footnote, what will the
scrub say? That person y has “no skill” of course.
Depth in Games
I’ve talked about how the expert player is
not bound by rules of
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Scrub
of the Future: Captain Kathryn Janeway. Voyager would have
been home ages ago if it weren't for her silly rules. (Don't
watch Voyager.): |
“honor” or “cheapness” and simply
plays to maximize his chances of winning. When he plays against
other such players, “game theory” emerges. If the game is a good
one, it will become deeper and deeper and more strategic. Poorly
designed games will become shallower and shallower. This is the
difference between an arcade game that lasts years in an arcade
versus one that lasts 4 months. This is the difference between a PC
game that lasts years on the shelves (Starcraft) versus one that
quickly becomes boring (I won’t name any names). The point is that
if a game becomes “no fun” at high levels of play, then it’s
the game’s fault, not the player’s. Unfortunately, a game
becoming less fun because it’s poorly designed and you just losing
because you’re a scrub kind of look alike. You’ll have to play
some top players and do some soul searching to decide which is
which. But if it really is the game’s fault, there are plenty of
other games that are excellent at a high level of play. For games
that truly aren’t good at a high level, the only winning move is
not to play.
Boundaries of Playing to Win
There is a gray area here I feel I should point
out. If an expert does anything he can to win, then does he
exploit bugs in the game? The answer is a resounding yes…but not
all bugs. There is a large class of bugs in video games that players
don’t even view as bugs. In Marvel vs. Capcom 2, for example,
Iceman can launch his opponent into the air, follow him, do a few
hits, then combo into his super move. During the super move he falls
down below his opponent, so only about half of his super will
connect. The Iceman player can use a trick, though. Just before
doing the super, he can do another move, an icebeam, and cancel that
move into the super. There’s a bug here which causes iceman to
fall, during his super, at the much slower rate of his icebeam. The
player actually cancels the icebeam as soon as possible—optimally
as soon as 1/60th of a second after it begins. The whole
point is to make iceman fall slower during his super so he gets more
hits. Is it a bug? I’m sure it is. It looks like a programming
oversight to me. Would an expert player use this? Of course.
The iceman example is relatively tame. In
Street Fighter Alpha2, there’s a bug in which you can land the
most powerful move in the game (a Custom Combo or “CC”) on the
opponent, even when he should be able to block it. A bug? Yes. Does
it help you win? Yes. This technique became the dominant tactic of
the game. The gameplay evolved around this, play went on, new
strategies were developed. Those who cried cheap were simply left
behind to play their own homemade version of the game with made-up
rules. The one we all played had unblockable CCs, and it went on to
be a great game.
But there is a limit. There is a point when the
bug becomes too much. In tournaments, bugs that turn the game off,
or freeze it indefinitely, or remove one of the characters from the
playfield permanently are banned. Bugs so extreme that they stop
gameplay are considered unfair even by non-scrubs. As are techniques
that can only be performed on, say, the one player side of the game.
There are a few esoteric tricks in various fighting games that are
side dependant—that can’t be performed on the 2nd
player side, for example.
Here’s an example of the grayest area of all.
Many versions of Street Fighter have “secret characters” that
are only accessible through a code. Sometimes these characters are
good, sometimes they’re not. Occasionally, the secret characters
are the best in the game, as in Marvel vs. Capcom. Big deal.
That’s the way that game is. Live with it. But the first version
of Street Fighter to ever have a secret character was Super Turbo
Street Fighter with its untouchably good Akuma. Most characters in
that game cannot beat Akuma. I don’t mean it’s a tough match—I
mean they cannot ever, ever, ever, ever win. Akuma is “broken”
in that his air fireball move is something the game simply wasn’t
designed to handle. He’s miles above the other characters, and is
therefore banned in all tournaments. But every game has a “best
character” and those characters are never banned. They’re just
part of the game…except in Super Turbo. It’s extreme examples
like this that even amongst the top players, and even something that
isn’t a bug, but was put in on purpose by the game designers, the
community as a whole has unanimously decided to make the rule:
“don’t play Akuma in serious matches.”
My Attitude and Adenosine Triphosphate
I’ve been talking down to the scrub a lot in
this article. I’d like to say for the record that I’m not
calling the scrub stupid. I’m not saying he can never improve. I
am saying that he’s naïve and that he’ll be trapped in scrubdom,
whether he realizes it or not, as long as he chooses to live in the
mental construct of rules he himself constructed. Is it harsh to
call scrubs naïve? After all, the vast majority of the world is
scrubs. I’d say by the definition I’ve classified 99.9% of the
world’s population as scrubs. Seriously. All that means is that
99.9% of the world doesn’t know what it’s like to play
competitive games on a high level. It means that they are naïve of
these concepts. I really have no trouble saying that since we’re
talking about esoteric, experience-driven knowledge here.
I also know that 99.9% of the world (including me) doesn’t
know how the citric acid cycle and cellular respiration create 38 ATP
molecules per cycle.
It’s an esoteric thing of which I am unaware, just as many are
unaware of competitive games.
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| Biological
organisms store energy in the form of ATP molecules. When
energy is needed, it's released by breaking the bond of one phosphate, creating ADP. |
In the end, playing to win ends up
accomplishing much more than just winning. Playing to win is how one
improves. Continuous self-improvement is what all of this is really
about, anyway. I submit that ultimate goal of the “playing to
win” mindset is ironically not just to win…but to improve. So
practice, improve, play with discipline, and play to win.
Talk
back! Discuss this article in the forums.
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| "Listen
to Mister Superior talking down to us again." |
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| Throwing
is cheap! |
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"How
about kicking the guy in the shins? That should increase your
chances of winning." |
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