Themeattics

If you know the enemy and know yourself, your victory will not stand in doubt.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Last week I went on a tangent about my personal route into and through competitive gaming. This week, as I mentioned, I want to get into what I view are the three stages of competitive games and what makes each so wonderfully compelling. Before we get there, though, I want to make one thing clear. My own experience is tailored to mental games – tabletop, digital – but I think this holds true for sports as well. They are competitive games, after all, and it’s why I’ve been including them in the banner images. My limited experience with soccer in junior/high school brings me to the same points, for whatever that’s worth.

We start, as one of my favorite clichés goes, at the beginning. Everyone begins here, no exception. Before anything else, you need to learn what the core functions and mechanics of the game are. Baseball – what are the positions, what is the batting rotation, how many innings are there, what defines my strike zone? Netrunner – what is a click, how many do I have, what are servers, when can I play cards? -Strive- – what is are highs and lows, how do I block, what are specials, what is Roman Cancel?

I grabbed four questions off the top of my head for each, but if you know anything about any one of these topics you understand this only scratches the surface. There are dozens if not hundreds or maybe even thousands of questions that you’ll have when you get started. Things can get overwhelming right off the bat. You’ll come to understand that, whichever competitive game you’re entering, it seems to have its own language. It’s a long discover process but thankfully, we live in the age of the internet and there are endless places to help along here. Sticking to fighting games, since -Strive- is the hype of the day, Infil, a fighting game personality, spent who knows how long creating this unbelievable glossary of fighting game terms, complete with video, that can clarify all sorts of nonsense that seems to float around the genre.

Now, as I said, this is is daunting as hell. It’s like wading into a foreign country with nothing but a backpack, $5, and a dream. “Tom,” you say, “didn’t you say each of these stages is ‘wonderfully compelling?'”

I guess I did, didn’t I? So what makes this part fun? This is the stage that’s easiest to notice progression. You can feel yourself improving – learning, grasping the basics, implementing them – and since you’re so early in the process, these improvements happen rapidly. What difference does a left- vs right-handed pitcher make to me? Oh, it adds a little bit of distance to the plate based on where I’m batting – how do I take advantage of that? What does it mean when there are 2 cards face down in a remote server? Oh, there’s at least one upgrade in there so maybe I can’t get in – what could I do instead? What the hell is a Roman Cancel? Oh, it lets me act faster after an attack – how can I use that to extend a combo?

One of the greatest things about this part of the process is that there’s so much to learn you can take a small chunk, focus on it until you understand and notice that improvement, then start to expand on all the areas that touch it. It’s a vast web of improvement and it feels flippin’ great. Did I mention I like improving at things?

Sports have a bit of a different approach on this first point and probably also the second due to the fact that they remain constant for so long. The gaming end of things changes all the time – there are new mechanics or characters that are introduced to existing games which require more learning and eventually there are entirely new games released that put everyone back onto this stage. That said, those people who are steeped in the genre will spend much less time here. This is a place for newbies like myself to hang out for a long time while the experienced players hop right up to level two.

And what is level two? It’s putting that learning to use and gaining a mastery of mechanics. It’s knowing your weaknesses and training them out. It’s understanding that you get baited by sinkers all the time and putting in the time until you recognize them more often. It’s knowing that you’re playing Shaper and the opponent expects you to be so focused on R&D they might be keeping agendas in HQ. It’s reacting to an stray counter-hit to confirm into a full combo. By the time you’re here, for whatever game you’re playing, you actually understood that sentence.

To me, the compelling part here is obvious, but it’s harder to get to. This stage is the grind. It’s constant. We’re human, we can never be perfect, so it’s all practice, practice, practice. Practice isn’t always fun. Often isn’t, to be honest, but the joy of putting in the time to improve and actually seeing that improvement pay off in real time is incredible. Again, thanks to the internet, there are always people who love the hobby, no matter what it is. People who develop and update invaluable resources like Dustloop, which will show you combo paths and frame data for every character in the fighting game of your choice. People like LordKnight and RathFGC who create phenomenal video content to help you understand both the basics and complexities of those games. If you’ve got the will to improve, you can find near-limitless resources to assist.

Besides repping the hard work of fantastic content creators, there isn’t as much to talk about in level two. We all understand the grind, what it means, and what it can do. Which leaves us level three, the pinnacle of competition. What comes after mastering your games mechanics and concepts to the point where you can perform both the necessary and complex tasks routinely?

Mastering your competition.

This is where you learn the person you’re competing against. You put in the time watching videos of the next team’s play calls, the next pitcher’s corner choices. You check early servers or make risky installs to see how your opponent reacts on their next turn. You air approach a few times in a row to see if they start to anti-air.

“Tom,” you say again, as it’s the only way you seem to know how to start a point, “isn’t adjusting to your competition something that you do all the time? Why are you saying this is after everything else?”

How very astute of you, my brilliant reader! Yeah, these obviously aren’t fully separate levels. Before you’ve learned absolutely everything about a game, I’m sure you’ll be working on mastering a combo or two. Before you’ve mastered the combo routes against every matchup, you’ll be reading your opponents. All true, but the reason this is last is simple – if you haven’t put in the time to learn and master, then you won’t get much of a benefit from knowing what you’re opponent is doing. It’s all well and good that you notice the pitcher is running a curve-slider-fastball rotation, but if you can’t hit them, what does it matter? This happened to me a lot in Dragon Ball FighterZ – I’d recognize that the guy I’m playing is super-dashing too much, but I couldn’t punish it to save my life.

I did reach this point in Netrunner, though, and let me tell you, this is the most fun you can possibly have in competition. Unlike sports or fighting games, Netrunner wasn’t working on any sort of reflex timing, it was all planning and execution. The games could be fairly long and you played two, so even though they were asymmetrical rounds you got a lot of time to understand the type of player you were up against and their game plan, and you got to make all sorts of adjustments along the way. This. Feels. Incredible. Understanding something to the point where you know what your opponent will do before they do it and already being in position to deal with it, then executing on that position based on practice? Insert chef kiss .gif. I wish everyone could get here with something, it’s truly remarkable.

Anyway, I think this has gone on long enough. -Strive- is calling me from the other room. I need to figure out my character so I can get started at ground level and get back to the grind. For those of you that stuck around, if you’re not competitive by nature, I hope this helped explain those of us who are. For those that are, I hope you found something in here helpful to understand your drive. And if you just so happen to have picked up -Strive-, I’ll be on when I’ve got the spare time. Look for Venali. I’ll be playing either Ky, Giovanna, Nagoriyuki, Zato-1, or Anji in my typically long quest to find a main.

See you all next week. Have a good one.