An interesting article popped up on Penny Arcade a couple of posts ago... an article about Playing to Win. At the risk of paraphrasing a summary, it's about how a truly great video game player will take advantage of any and all opportunities to win the game. The article uses Street Fighter as its visual aide, but the lessons here apply to just about any game, particularly multiplayer video and card games. Go read it for the full, true flavor.
Now. That guy is a dick.
His theory justifies everything that is wrong with the contemporary multiplayer gaming scene. In fact, taken one step further, his arguments would allow the use of cheat codes as long as all players have equal access to them. And you thought WarCraft 3 couldn't get any more fun. Let's start at his beginning.
His beginning is an insult. (That's why I started with one too.) He defines the term "scrub," which is "a word for players who aren't good." Scrubs, according to this gent, play games according to a arbitrary set of mental rules that prevent them from actually competing. There's an insult in that as well. I would more gently describe a scrub as someone who plays by the rules of the game at pure face value, and perhaps hasn't delved into some of the deeper structures and opportunites that the game provides. The author chooses to insult scrubs (non-good players) because he no doubt feels insulted by the scrubs' clarion cry: the word "cheap."
Cheap moves seem to exist in every multiplayer game. In StarCraft, the rush tactic is cheap. In Doomtown, playing the Shadow Man/Puppet combo is cheap. In any FPS, constantly jumping up and down is cheap. The author presents a Street Fighter example: doing a throw move five times in a row is perceived by scrubs as cheap.
The defense is that doing a throw five (or fifty) times in a row just may be exactly what you need to do to win. Winning the game is the only result that matters to this guy, and he proves it by nerd-permuting all the old testosterone-drenched NFL cliches... "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." As if winning a tournament is the only valuable goal for gamers.
When I play multiplayer games - any multiplayer games - I'm more concerned with the ride than the destination. Sure, I *intend* to win, but I'd rather win through overcoming incredible odds or by some sort of ingenious play... not by taking the advantage in the first few turns/seconds and leading the game to an unstoppable conclusion. The best games, the most remembered matches, are the games where the "lead" went back and forth several times. These are games that told a story, an epic struggle between powerful forces. Blowouts should be boring for both players, and only the most immature of gamers will enjoy a quick, boring, landslide of a win.
Speed seems to be fuel behind the driving force of winning. Win as soon as you can so you can go win against somebody else. Fun be damned. Rise up the tournament ladder!
Paradoxically, the author also has posted an article about the problems of "slippery slope" style games, where one player can take the advantage early and thus make it very difficult for the losing player to bounce back - like Chess, where every lost piece is a lost attack option. In this article, the author claims that fighting games have little slippery slope... despite his recommendation in the other article that players should perform throws five times in a row (or whatever) so they can win as quickly as possible.
A major problem with his thesis (aside from absurd assertions like "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") is that he posits no real end to his plan. He only mentions game-stopping "bugs" as the ceiling. Some bugs - like Iceman's slower-fall trick in Marvel vs. Capcom 2 - are okay and acceptable strategies for that Big Win. But others, like Super Turbo Street Fighter's secret Akuma character, "are considered unfair even by non-scrubs." Or a bug that actually turns the game off. That's unfair too.
I have some tactics I'd like to use in my next Street Fighter tournament. I'm going to punch my opponent in his kidneys. His real kidneys. Or I'll knock his glasses off his head. Or I'll hire the Hooters waitresses to sit on his side of the monitor. I'm sure the author assumes that his argument only applies to in-game techniques. Hey, I'm "playing to win," fucker. You're the one playing under an arbitrary set of mental rules that do not include pinching your opponent's ass while he's trying to execute a throw for the fifth time in a row.
That's a facetious response, obviously. I wouldn't suggest stepping outside the virtual confines of the game any more than the author would. I hope. But by taking advantage in the ways he suggests, he's certainly stepping outside the viable use of the game and degenerating it down to a shadow of what it should be. Most of his article talks about how well he can defeat a scrub (congratulations, ace), and how his strategies ought to inspire the scrub to learn how to defeat them, not just complain about "cheap moves." I agree that progessive improvement ought to be a part of any serious, continued gameplay. But to what level is the scrub supposed to aspire? To become a player who can win in under two minutes by sending out his first six Protoss to demolish the opponent's base? To learn how to perform one of those big unblockable Custom Combos so he can hurry up and clock sixty wins by lunchtime? To build the exact same deck as every other player, so the game becomes a race to see who can get the first power card down on the table?
That last example is one of the reasons why collectable card games develop as they do. In games that have shown to have a degenerative metagame (Magic, Pokemon, others), the tournament organizers have to create changing sets of rules and card sets. If the Magic people had never enacted this plan, nobody would have ever progressed past the Power Nine cards of the game's first release... and I think we can safely assume that the game would not be the goddamn industry leader that it is today. Who wants to continue to play a game that never changes, because the top players are so venomous to win that they will perform the exact same plays as many times as possible? More importantly, what new players want to get involved when the bar is raised so impossibly high? ...either by requiring the bulk use of expensive, ultra rare cards ...or by mastering abusive unblockable combos that reduce the game to a coin flip if both players pull them off simultaneously.
At the least, this style of "playing to win" is not laudable or in any way impressive. No one enjoys a blowout Super Bowl. At its worst, it's the same argument that convinces professional athletes to use steroids. But as a gamer, it offends me to hear the so-called "experts" justifying their get-rich-quick skills at the expense of newer/younger/worse players. Games are supposed to be fun. Simplifying any game to a mere win-loss statistic, and therefore you must take whatever means to achieve a win, is an insult to both the games and the players.
