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Playing
to Win, Part 3.
Not
Playing to Win
Ok, ok. I’ll let you in on the secret:
“playing to win” at all times is counter-productive. If you want
to win over the long-term, then you can’t play every single game
as if it were a tournament finals. If you did you wouldn’t have
time for basic R&D, you’d never learn the quirky nuances that
show up unexpectedly at tournaments, and you are likely to get stuck
honing sub-optimal tactics.
Basic R&D
Playing to win and playing to learn are often
at odds. If you play the game at hand to maximize you chances of
winning, then you won’t take the unnecessary risks of trying out
new tactics, counters, moves, patterns, or whatever. Playing it
straight is the best way to win the game at hand, but at the cost of
valuable information about the game that you may need later, and
valuable practice to expand your narrow repertoire of moves or
tactics.
Here’s a simple example from Street Fighter.
Let’s say I know for a fact that one split second from now my
opponent will do a particular “super move.” To win the game at
hand, the smartest thing to do is just block the move, but that
doesn’t teach me a whole lot. How invulnerable is his super move,
anyway? Could I have stuck out an early kick that would knock him
out of his super? Or could I have waited for the “super flash”
to happen (signifying the beginning of his super move) and then done
an invulnerable dragon punch 1 frame later? Maybe my invulnerability
will last longer than his and I’ll knock him out of it. Maybe his
will always win. That’s valuable information to have for the time
when you have zero energy and the opponent forces you to block the
super move and die. This situation will happen in the tournament, so
you better know what your options are.
Very often in “casual play” I will forgo
the safe option in order to try possible counters to certain moves.
Even if I lose a game when a possible counter turns out not to work,
the knowledge gained is well worth it, since I’ll never make that
particular mistake again (I hope!). If you really want to play to
win, you have to know all the options open to you at every moment,
and that doesn’t happen without a lot of disastrous experiments.
This concept applies to pretty much any game,
of course. “Will my 6 corsairs really beat his 12 mutalisks in
StarCraft?” Or, “I know I have the flak cannon, but will the
shock rifle combo work just as well around corners in Unreal
Tournament?” You will never know unless you try it.
Honing Sub-optimal Tactics
Early in a game’s life, players have not yet
figured out which strategies and tactics are actually the
best…though many players will claim to know all. Those players may
very well know better tactics than other players of their time, but
games evolve. New things are discovered that obsolete old tactics.
Usually, radically different and better tactics are discovered that
put the old ones to shame. Sometimes, new counters are discovered
that can entirely defeat the old “best” tactics. In a fighting
game, you also have the concept of figuring out which characters are
the best. It can take months (or years!) for players to figure out
that character X, though widely thought to suck, is actually able to
abuse bug/feature Y in such a way as to be nearly unbeatable.
So how does all this relate to playing to win?
The hardcore “Play to Win” player will choose his one character,
his set of powerful tactics, and hone them to perfection over time.
He’ll know all the tricks for that character to perform those
tactics. For example, in the fighting game Marvel vs. Capcom 1, he
might pick Mega-man and learn the “rock ball trap.” This a
pattern of attack where mega man creates a soccer ball (“rock
ball” in Japan), kicks it diagonally across the screen, then fires
one blue projectile in the air, then one on the ground. That’s 3
projectiles total controlling the play field. While the opponent
deals with that, Mega-man has time to summon another soccer ball and
repeat the pattern.
A serious Mega-man player will learn the rock
ball trap variations needed against Chun Li, the different
variations needed against Venom, and so on. Other players will find
tricks to negate the usefulness of the rock ball trap in general,
then the Mega-man player will find the counter-tricks that allows
him to keep the pattern going. This will feel a lot like “Playing
to Win,” but in the end, this player will do precious little
winning. He will have mastered a sub-optimal tactic that in the end
is not bad, but isn’t 1/10th as good as other things
that other characters can do.
I think of a game as a topological landscape
with lots of hills and peaks that represent different
tactics/strategies/characters. The higher the peak, the more
effective that strategy is. Over time, players explore this
landscape, discover more and more the hills and peaks, and climb to
higher locations on the known hills and peaks. Players can’t
really add height to these peaks; they are only exploring what’s
there. The problem is, when you reach the base of a new peak (say,
the rock ball trap peak), it can be very hard to know that the
pinnacle isn’t very high. It might be really difficult to climb
(lots of nuances to learn to do the trap), but in the end, the
effectiveness of the tactic is low compared to the monstrous
mountains that are out there. You have reached a local maximum, and
would do better to exploring for new mountains.
In other words, playing to win involves
exploring. It involves trying several different approaches in a game
to see which you are best at, which other players are best at, and
which you think will end up being the most effective in the end.
When you are perfecting your rock ball trap (your best chance of
winning at the time), you have to realize that “playing to win”
might actually involve taking up a new character you know nothing
about…a character that you will eventually play 10 times better
than you could ever dream of playing Mega-man.
Learning Secret Lore
Tournament play often creates critical moments
of decision when you are exposed to a very strange situation in the
game. In a tournament, the best players get to play each other,
often with a clash of play-styles. They each have their own tricks
and must find immediate answers to the tricks of their opponents.
And it’s not just for fun anymore, it’s “real.” It matters.
Under this pressure players find creative and unusual solutions to
they tricky spots they get put into.
When these strange situations come up, will you
be familiar with them? Do you know the options and the risks
involved? Knowledge of “secret lore” or unusual interactions in
a game often means the difference between winning and losing.
And how will you learn this secret lore?
Perhaps you are preparing for a tournament, practicing, playing to
win. What will you practice? You’ll practice the things you know
you need to do the most in a match. You’ll practice against the
things that you know you’ll face? Basically, you’ll do it all
“by the book.” Consciously preparing for a tournament is pretty
much the opposite of exploring “unusual situations.” In your
practicing, will you seek out a player of a character you think
sucks? Will you play characters you have no intention of playing in
the tournament? Probably not. But what happens when a mysterious
player out of nowhere shows up with that “sucky” character, and
shows everyone how good that character really is? That other
character you were messing around with might be just the thing you
need…too bad you didn’t explore that. You were “playing to
win.”
The Karmic justice of it all is that love of
the game really does count for something. Those who love the game
play it to play it. They mess around. They pick strange characters,
try strange tactics, face others who do the same, and they learn the
secret knowledge. Those who play only to win can’t be bothered
with any of that. Every minute they spend playing goes toward
climbing their current peak, attaining their local maximum. Perhaps
they don’t even like the game enough to be bothered with anything
except the most mainstream character and the most mainstream tactic
with that character.
I practiced pretty hard for a tournament in
Super Turbo Street Fighter that occurred on August 9th-11th
2001. Before the tournament, I decided to play only Dhalsim and to
practice him a lot against whoever I could. I also happen to
actually like the game, and I’d sometimes mess around with my
“fun characters” of Honda and Ryu, and occasionally with my
“professional” character: Bison. Dhalsim was my focus, though.
When the actual tournament came around, I would
have never guessed what it all came down to. My Dhalsim did well,
and it came time for me to face a well-known Japanese player who
plays T-Hawk. T-Hawk is known to be terrible, especially against
Dhalsim, but this was a prime example of a player who could work
magic with a “sucky” character. After one game, my Dhalsim was
utterly destroyed, and I needed a change of plans. I figured that my
“casual play” Honda would do well, since I could sit and do
nothing the entire game and be safe from T-Hawk. If he ever got
near, I could head-butt and knock him away, then sit and do nothing.
(See my article on The Art
of War: The Sheathed Sword.) Anyway, my performance, a true
exhibition of stubbornness and boringness in tournament play, paid
off. I defeated the Japanese player in an utterly ridiculous
character matchup that no one would ever predict actually happening
in a tournament. I went on to lose another ridiculous character
matchup against a different Japanese player, but that’s another
story.
The unlikely moral here is that playing to win
is often counter-productive. Those who love the game and play to
play will uncover the unusual nuances that might be important in a
tournament. Those nuances might never be important, but the “play
to play” player doesn’t care. It’s all for fun, and he’s
happy to accumulate whatever knowledge he can. The “play to win”
player might lock himself into perfecting certain
tactics/strategies/character that will eventually be obsolete, as
hard as that will be to believe at the moment. Meanwhile, the player
who is able to take a step back and mess around will either discover
new mountains to climb, or at least take a stab at climbing some
other known mountains. The joke’s on you when his mountain turns
out to be 10 times higher than yours.
Postscript—
Months after writing the above article, I
traveled to Japan in March 2003 as part of Team USA, representing
the US in Super Turbo Street Fighter. I also played a bit of Capcom
vs. SNK 2 over there. One interesting thing about Japanese players
is that they stick with just one character (or one team of
characters in CvS2), since their tournament format requires keeping
the same character the entire tournament. In the US, we can switch
characters between games, giving us an incentive to learn at least 2
to 4 different characters.
The Japanese players definitely proved to me
that by sticking to one character and learning EVERYTHING about that
character, you win the unwinable matches. In both Street Fighter
games I played in Japan, I saw Japanese players who devoted
themselves to supposedly weak characters and demonstrated the
topological peaks for those characters are miles higher than I had
realized. One might think that invalidates some of the points I made
in this article…yet the winner of the CvS2 tournament used the
same old unfair, broken characters and tactics that we’re all
aware of (A-groove roll-canceling Blanka/Sakura/Bison for those who
care). That same player, Tokido, won the CvS2 portion of the 2001
tournament I mentioned above, so perhaps he’s proved my point
after all. He’s identified what many players agree is the highest
peak of that game, and devoted himself to perfecting it.
Unfortunately he’s an incredibly boring player, but nonetheless a
boring player who won the US National and Japan National
tournaments!
--Sirlin
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