Eskimo Sister

Fun, Frustration, and Satisfaction

2011-08-15T08:32:00.001-07:00

I remember a friend of mine asking me, while I was playing a particularly difficult game--the specific one escapes me at the moment--"why do you do this to yourself?" She was referring to the fact that, for at least two hours, I sat there swearing at the console without a break, just trying to conquer some difficult segment. Because, as conventional wisdom states, games are supposed to be fun. They are a form of entertainment, source of amusement. If they aren't, they are failures, or poorly made.

This, I think, is wrong. Games are not always fun. But this does not in any way make them bad games.

That's because games also provide another positive emotion beyond the sensation of having fun, which is satisfaction. It's a pretty simple formula: achieve a goal, experience satisfaction. The more difficult the goal is to achieve, then generally speaking the satisfaction will be greater as well.

Difficult boss fights where you die eleven times before finally winning can yield tremendous amounts of satisfaction. Competitive multiplayer scenarios, particularly one versus one, gives a lot of satisfaction to the winner, even moreso if the players are of equal skill. And that sensation of satisfaction is what keeps people coming back to certain games even when they aren't having the remotest trace of fun.

Then you have the adversary of satisfaction, which is frustration. Frustration is the obnoxious enemy that pushes you off cliffs and into pits, killing you in one hit that you didn't even see coming. Frustration is the boss that stun locks your character in a corner. Frustration is a difficult jump with a two frame window. Frustration is a cheesy rush in an RTS. Frustration is a timed underwater escort mission.

And while it sounds like frustration is something you should actively seek to remove from your games, it's important to understand that an element of frustration is NECESSARY for there to be any meaningful amount of satisfaction. As Snoop Dogg once said, "that which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly."*

Games that are too easy don't really satisfy people. Because fun is distinct from satisfaction, it's also mostly isolated from difficulty. It can be isolated from winning and losing. It can be isolated from doing anything at all, in fact! People have plenty of fun passively enjoying other forms of media, so it's silly to think that the actual game is necessary for it to take place. Fun comes generally from surprise, from the presentation of things we think are cool. Fun happens when you're playing a physics based flash game and you get nuked by a rocket launcher and your character spazzes out uncontrollably. At the end of the day though, the key difference between fun and satisfaction is that while fun is typically at odds with frustration, satisfaction relies on it and plays off it. This isn't to say something can't be fun AND satisfying; finishing off an extremely difficult boss fight with an awesome finishing move while you get to listen to a rocking electric guitar track would, I assume, be fun AND satisfying. I guess if you had to tack on an unneccessary definition to THAT emotion, you'd call the fun-satisfaction hybrid "exhiliration."

(It also bears mentioning that what people find fun and satisfying does vary from person to person)

This is, I think, where the terms casual and hardcore come in as they apply to games. Casual games focus primarily on fun, and hardcore games focus on satisfaction. Likewise, casual players focus on maximizing their fun from games, and if a game becomes too frustrating or just isn't fun enough, they will typically drop it. Meanwhile, more hardcore players will not even notice if they aren't having fun, provided that when they beat a level or win a round or whatever, they experience commensurate satisfaction.

Please note that I'm not really trying to pin any one definition down on any player or game. Some people become more hardcore about different games and endeavors. Certain games hit a decent middle ground, and some games have a variety of modes that appeal to both ends of the spectrum.

So what's the point here? Well, for all game designers who think this is actually worth paying attention to, look at it this way: games that have high levels of fun AND satisfaction will appeal to wider audiences and be more successful. But if satisfaction increases based on frustration and adversity, what's the answer?

For starters, you can try and turn the failure into fun. One of the primary tenets of a party game is that everybody is a winner in some form or fashion. And since you just KNEW that I couldn't go one post without talking about Smash, we can look at it as a prime example. Somebody takes first place in every game of Smash, and will experience some measure of satisfaction. But in the chaos of a four player game with explosions and crazy effects, most people--those focused on fun--will not really NOTICE failure and frustration provided the outcome is cool enough! Or, at the very least, the frustration will be heavily minimized.

How effective is this approach? Well, in the case of Melee, people still played it religiously (and we're talking outside of the tournament scene) for years and years after its release purely because it could provide fun and satisfaction for everybody involved. And the best part is, it didn't force people to play a particular way. This let the audience define its own experience, which is how the tournament scene was able to grow from a casual party game environment.

That element in itself is another excellent example of how to expand an audience; permit the audience to define its experience and allow a variety of options. Different game modes, difficulties and options let people decide how they plan to play the game. The difficulty of this is, of course, that you run the risk of spreading yourself too thin and you end up with a bunch of poorly realized features, none of which end up delivering.

Another way to mitigate the downsides of frustration is simply by having a good soundtrack. I believe that the reason older game music is focused heavily on catchy and simple melodic hooks--apart from hardware limitations--is that if the song wasn't catchy, it would drive people crazy to have to listen to it while they replayed the same levels over and over again.

More to consider: a game's frustration and satisfaction both need to be paced properly to create a proper emotional payoff. A level that is insanely frustrating followed by a boss fight that's as mind-bogglingly easy and boring as the stage was obnoxious has limited impact. It will typically create a sensation of, "what the hell, that's it?" when you win, followed by "well at least it's over..." And if people are saying "at least it's over" when your game is finished, then you've probably done something horribly wrong.

Let's go in a different direction now. One of the ways to enhance both fun AND satisfaction comes from, surprisingly enough, the game's aesthetics. Appropriate graphics and sound effects do have an effect on how fun and/or satisfying the game is.

Let's say you're playing Adventure of Action 3, Quest For the Thing. And you are running around beating stuff up with a wooden stick, which we will call the Newb Stick. It makes an amusing "bop" noise and when you kill things, they fall over. This is all pretty much in line with what you would expect a stick to do. It's not the most exhilirating experience in the world, but it's a stick so no big deal.

Now you find your SECOND weapon, the Punch Launcher (which launches punches). When you hit a Derp Goblin in the chin with it, it makes a metal "KCHANG" noise and the enemy does three backflips through the air. Suddenly, fun. Fun enhanced by multiple things: the new animations that clearly display progress and the new sound effect that vividly communicates the action. These aesthetic upgrades over your Newb Stick create satisfaction on multiple fronts; you can kill Derp Goblins faster, and the new method communicates an increased sense of power.

And if the animation is done well enough and the sound effect isn't horribly equalized or whatever, some players will want to run around ignoring level objectives just to hit stuff with the PL.

How could you ruin the Punch Launcher? If it made the same sound effect and had the same death animation for the enemy as the Newb Stick and the difference was purely in the gameplay element of having a projectile weapon, it would not be as fun or satisfying to use. Sure, you have the benefit of your new gameplay mechanic--a way to engage enemies from range. A lot of people say that all they care about is gameplay, and sure enough, the sound and the visuals don't have an actual effect on it. Their novelty will wear off after awhile. But that initial impression and hook are important to keep people playing your game and feeling those emotions that create a sense of progression.

And don't forget, the mark of a good sound effect is that it doesn't get annoying. An obnoxious sound effect is funny at first, but if you force a player to rely on an item with such aesthetics for an extended period of time, it will piss them off.

Good upgrade scaling is also important. Getting the Punch Launcher after the Newb Stick is great. Getting it after the Ragnarok Shatterbomb Cataclysm Thing? Eh.

Hope that was interesting. I have more to say on the subject regarding particular games and features, as well as the types of players, how they experience games, and what they expect from them. Look forward to the sequels!

Peace.

*I MAY have confused Snoop Dogg with Thomas Paine. But I doubt it.

Implementation Lag

2011-07-24T14:42:00.000-07:00

First, this post is coming fresh from Genesis 2, which was pretty darn awesome. I got lots of advice, played lots of people, and realized what my next step will be in Melee.

I have mainly two people to thank for this. The first player is Lovage.

During our friendlies and tournament sets, I found myself making... mostly decent decisions. The problem is that I always seemed to be a few frames too slow, while Lovage was ALSO making lots of good decisions, but without any hesitation. So he had a tendency to get the shine or the aerial out just a little bit quicker than me, and I couldn't really figure out why. Was it a Fox thing, or were my reflexes just too slow?

And of course, there was the usual specter of my little technical flubs and clumsiness hanging over our games. But we'll get to that in a moment.

The second player I have to thank is Armada. First off, watching his games was pretty much a great experience. He is extremely sharp, makes intelligent decisions, rarely makes any technical errors despite playing at high speed, and he changes up his playstyle constantly. So he's like, pretty good or something.

But the reason I bring him up is because at one point I asked him what he thinks about while he plays, and he said, "nothing." He doesn't think about his tech skill and he doesn't think about winning or losing, he just plays in a blank mental state.

Which pretty much corresponds with what most people have said forever about... everything. The best mental state for execution and decision making--according to a variety of sources, from old Chinese dudes to modern psychologists--is one of emptiness. After a long enough period of training and practice, any given task turns into instinct for you. You do not stop to think, "I am going to swing my sword," but rather, thinking and doing become the same act! Or as close to it as possible.

So the title of today's blog becomes clear. Implementation lag is the distance between making a decision to do something and doing it. With training and focus, implementation lag decreases. I believe one of my problems has been a lack of focus during practice, where I will practice a variety of things sporadically. None of them become ingrained enough into my brain, which is why I always feel like my reflexes are so slow.

Furthermore, this is--I believe--part of why I make so many technical errors! Not only am I taking too long to think about it, but the conscious thought process interferes with the action and increases the likelihood of failure.

There are times, however, where I know EXACTLY what I will do given an opponent's action and my own speed surprises me. Stuff that I rarely mess up.

So today's big point is that if you focus on practicing things enough, and you rehearse them and understand them enough, you will act automatically when the appropriate situation arises. And the odds of you screwing up are lower, because you are not consciously thinking about it, which means your body can get on with things without your brain getting in the way.

This is where I want to advocate a practice method that really needs to be used more often--by myself included--where instead of just playing 4 stock matches over and over again, you set the mode to Time but make it infinite. This allows you and your practice partner to train certain scenarios without worrying about the outcome; you can play as Falco against a Fox that wants to camp the edge, or be a Marth that wants to stop Sheik from ledge-stalling, or just get someone to platform camp you for 30 minutes while you test out various solutions.

This method allows you to focus heavily on a particularly isolated aspect of the game and improve at it more quickly than if you only get the sporadic training that is characteristic of a regular match.

I hope these thoughts prove interesting and useful to you. I intend to start training a lot harder and more focused than I have before. It's kind of funny because it's actually all advice I've given in the past, but never really followed through on for myself. But this really does feel like my next step, and I hope to surprise everybody at the next big tournament with improved focus and tech skill from my corner :)

Take care everybody.

PS I did not proofread this. Sorry for all crummy writing errors.

Critical Hits

2011-07-05T12:38:00.001-07:00

Not all mistakes are created equal. A Peach getting hit by a soft Sheik b-air while on a platform and taking needless damage is an error. Messing up a powershielded laser against Falco is another error. They cost you a bit of percent, but they generally aren't that big of a deal.

On the other hand, missing a tech against a Pikachu on FD when you're playing as Fox is a HUGE mistake because he's going to CG you from zero to death. Letting Puff u-tilt you at 10 percent without CC'ing it is big mistake. Falco burning his double jump somewhere, then finding himself beneath the edge of the level is a massive mistake. These are the kinds of errors that will cost you an entire stock in the blink of an eye. So, to repeat: not all mistakes are equal.

Look at this from two perspectives. First, as a player, your goal in a match is to AVOID those critical mistakes. Knowing the matchup that you're playing is pivotal for this reason, because it tells you what mistakes are huge, earth shattering, game costing errors, and which ones are not. And that will generally give you information about how you should be playing your matchup! You can also learn ways to reduce certain openings and minimize damage on you; CCing, DI'ing combos so they can't land efficient finishers, and just staying in positions where your opponent can't land combo starting moves. It's an underrated defensive skill, but minimizing damage to yourself is something a lot of good players have. It's why you don't see them get hit by lots of stock ending combos; not just because they don't get hit, but because they are good at minimizing damage through intelligent decision-making.

Second, your OPPONENT will be making these mistakes as well. Knowing what they are and knowing how to capitalize efficiently can make you a nightmare to play against in those matchups, because it creates an ever-present threat that any mistake can end the stock. M2K's Marth against Fox or Falco, for instance, is one of the most shining examples of this. He practically earned a living by chain grabbing, comboing, and gimping spacies off the most inoccuous of hits. Of course, this earned him a reputation for "playing gay," but when you get right down to it, every player wishes they could be as efficient at murdering Fox and Falco as M2K was. It meant that every match against him was close, even if you were 3 stocks ahead, because you were always a few mistakes away from losing the game. So not only is it a skill to see these mistakes and capitalize, but it's also a skill to convert smaller errors and openings into bigger ones with good resets and reads.

Remember, your job--and your opponent's!--is to turn every hit into a stock when possible. Likewise, you also must avoid letting little openings snowball into bigger ones, and learn how to read when your opponent is going for big punishes so you can dodge them.

Sometimes stock-ending decisions can just come from a really solid read. They aren't necessarily mistakes, but simply positions where certain options have nasty consequences if the other guy guesses right. In this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qwKHr-5wyk#t=6m59s

I hit ARC with an f-smash, and read his up+b to the edge, and just go for an edgehog at 54 percent. It's not really an error on his part; getting the edge is an excellent idea for spacies, and up+b'ing high can give them lots of recovery options. But if you can get the read in a critical situation like that, you can take stocks without even touching the other guy. Then my next stock on him is him allowing the ICs to land a synchronized grab near the edge, then not escaping the d-throw d-air, two pretty big errors for a space animal to make in that matchup.

One of the nice things about landing these critical hits is that they have a tendency to send the other guy on tilt. It gets him thinking that you got lucky, that the matchup is stupid or lame, and that can lead to hasty thinking that lets you exploit more of these nasty mistakes. And again, the flipside is to understand that every matchup has these and it's entirely possible you may fall victim to them, and shake it off when it happens.

So, how can you get better at seeing these situations and capitalizing? Here are some general tips:

--if you have a chaingrab of some kind, you should spend some practice time trying to link your hits--even really stupid, lame, lucky ones--into grabs. Resist the urge to go for smash attacks as your finisher, and try to look for ways to extend your combos.
--if you have the option of sending someone off the edge, consider using weaker hits that will send them low, rather than a more powerful one that lets them DI upward.
--if your opponent really likes going for the edge, give them a little time to decide they're going to go there, then just take it from them.
--if your combo can either keep going or you can end it, mix it up! For isntance, a badly DI'd knee from Falcon can end the stock on a lot of characters at 40 percent, and if they're certain you plan to go for up-airs instead, you can cheese out a stock off one powerful hit.

Remember this and learn how to spot those really big mistakes in the blink of an eye, and soon you will need to go on a diet from eating too many free stocks. Good luck!

Urgh

2011-04-13T11:15:00.001-07:00

Another practice session, more mixed feelings.

I honestly can't make heads or tails of my tech-skill difficulties. I have to be honest with myself about some of my shortcomings and things that I need to work around in order to solve this problem: I have essential tremors, which basically means that my muscles are *always* jumping and twitching even when I'm really relaxed. It's not major (unless I'm really nervous or hungry), and I don't really have a problem doing any day to day activities, but it makes fine muscle control really difficult. It certainly doesn't help when I try to play piano in front of people, or Smash in competitive environments.

I also have to accept the fact that I'm horrendously ADD and that makes it hard to focus. I'll be playing matches, even important tournament ones, and not even be thinking about them at all. I can get a bit of a boost in concentration by drinking a crap-load of caffiene in the form of soda or an energy drink, or I can take Adderall, but unfortunately stimulants directly and negatively impact my tremors.

I've sorted out a lot of my mood issues, I think. I get frustrated but I've found ways to shortcircuit both my angry and depressive spells.

The question is, where do I go from here?

Last night I played about 7 hours worth of friendlies with DoH, and as usual I was all over the place. I would go one match nailing everything, feeling really good, and feel like I really understood how to interact with the game. Then the next game I would miss my jump button, randomly double jump with my joystick a few times, wavedash straight up (which doesn't actually work in case you were wondering) or accidentally overshoot my B button while recovering and brush the c-stick instead. Usually games were somewhere in between, but it's really hard to understand how I'm supposed to play when I can't actually interact with the game.

This is something I've struggled to explain to people many times. I honestly have times, entire matches, where I just can't do *anything*. I will try to dash and jump instead, I will screw up five wavedashes in a row by airdodging horizontally, I'll miss every L-cancel, I'll try to do a basic grab combo with ICs and just whiff my c-stick completely. I will be the first to admit that I make some really DUMB decisions when I'm under pressure, but at the same time many things that appear to be bad decisions are the result of me being incapable of doing things I want with the controller.

My recorded friendlies at APEX with Armada, for instance, showcase him absolutely raping me. And that outcome was not entirely unexpected, truth be told. But when I walked away from the TV and projector frustrated and people tried to calm me down by telling me "dude, it's Peach vs ICs, and it's Armada, relax," I wanted to tell them that they probably don't know what it's like to try and full jump an aerial and roll, then want to bring up their shield and jump out of it because they're spazzing on the joystick, then get raped while a bunch of people are watching and have no idea what my hands are even doing. At that point it barely matters who my opponent even is, I just don't know what the hell is going on.

Later Armada and I played more friendlies and they were significantly closer; I never actually won, but I was actually executing combos and moving more how I wanted to, and the end result is a bit more of what I expected/hoped for--him beating me 15/15 games, but me managing to bring him down to 1 and 2 stock in most of them. Against such a smart and consistent player, who is so skilled with a character I've always struggled against, that was a huge achievement and it made me feel much better about the tournament.

The real kick in the pants though, was my set of friendlies with Chu Dat. I went through a similar experience to my very personally memorable set with Axe, where I just wasn't screwing up tech stuff, I was thinking clearly, and I was relaxed but energized. I think at that time during those IC dittos I may have played my absolute best Melee ever, period, from a mental and technical perspective.

What frustrates me about experiences like those is that, while they are truly amazing in themselves, they make all my other experiences damaging to my confidence. Why is that maybe, once in an entire year, I can just zone in and play the way I really want to? Where I'm thinking straight and having fun even in the games I'm losing, where my hands and I aren't at odds with one another, where the game just makes sense to me? And then every other time I sit down to play, it's an exercise in inconsistency and frustration?

For the longest time I've been of the opinion that if a feat or mindset can be achieved once, then it can be duplicated. Back when I was a Fox player and I wanted really badly to learn how to SHDL, and I saw videos of Thunder from Japan just busting them out left and right across the level, I was convinced that I simply could not do it. That I never would be able to. Then randomly, while messing around, I did it (just with my thumb, without using two fingers to jump and fire, just my normal configuration). I stared at the screen and started jumping up and down all excitedly, and then I just tried to do it again for an hour and couldn't even get one and got dejected again.

But then I thought, "if my hands are capable of moving quickly enough to do that ONE time, then there's no reason they aren't capable of doing it again." So I practiced and just studied my hands and fingers while I did so, trying to figure out what I did that made it work, and then I got another one. And another and another and another. And soon I could do it over and over again, bolstered by that confidence that one time could equal a million times if I wanted.

Right now, I'm in that same state. Where I will have a moment thinking that this game makes sense, that I am a good player and I can do what I need to do to win, that if I went to a major tournament right now and played like this I would shatter my pools and make top three easily, even with the unbelievably difficult competition facing me. Then the next game I'll wonder how I've ever won any money at all, even at the smallest of tournaments.

When it comes to mindset and playing well, I've mostly achieved what I've wanted to achieve, and felt like I've wanted to feel. It's happened a select few times over the course of my entire career. So the question that I have been asking myself, over and over again, is why are those feelings so elusive? And why is it, that no matter how much I seem to practice and study and think and meditate and work, the only thing remaining consistent is my overwhelming inconsistency?

I dunno. That's what's on my mind right now. I know most people read this thing for my thoughts on the game but I guess today I'm just kinda whining. My apologies.

Peace.

*

Oh, also, I think I won't be doing any more of the Vlogs. Almost nobody's watching them and I'm kind of at a stage where I feel like my opinion on most stuff really isn't going to help people. I guess in the future if I really just feel like doing one I will, but for now I'm just going to abandon the idea. It was kind of fun though.

Mindset, preparation, and bracing.

2011-03-09T13:57:00.000-08:00

In Part 1 of my most recent video log (view it here), I discussed getting into the right mindset.

There's something I'd like to add to it, something I've touched on before, which is an element of mental preparation that I call "bracing." Bracing as in bracing for impact, for instance. The idea here is that, when you are mentally ready and accepting of a negative experience, its effect on you is lessened if not negated entirely.

For instance, you are a relatively new player about to go to your first big tournament. You hear that 3 of the top 5 players in the world are going to be there. Wow. You also realize that, as an unseeded player, your odds of running into them early are pretty high. But you decide you're going to go anyways, because you can see what it's like playing them.

Or you go to a smashfest with some really really good players that you rarely ever beat, and you lose maybe 95% of the games you play that night. But you have a lot of respect for these players and going into that evening, you know they outclass you and that you're going to be learning from them rather than winning.

So in either case, going to your tournament or smashfest, you are mentally prepared to lose, to be eliminated quickly, to have very few victories. Prepared as you are, the losses don't feel all that bad.

Better players could learn from this. There's an element of ego involved as you improve, where you start separating and classifying players by skill based on observation and past experience, and you decide that you rank above certain people and beneath others, and you're really good at X matchup and you never lose on Y level and so on. If they lose when they expect to, even pretty good players tend not to get upset. I mean, they knew it was going to happen and they played anyhow, so it's not like there's any mystery, right? However, when somebody is convinced they will win or do well and they don't, that's when self-destructive attitudes set in and people begin to crumble.

So here's the idea: if you aren't ready to lose, you aren't ready to play. If you're only going to enter the tournament because you think you'll get first, then mentally speaking you are not prepared. You are setting yourself up to make mistakes, get sidetracked, and lose your cool at important moments. You're creating the perfect environment to lose all the games you "shouldn't."

I'm not saying you should expect to lose, or you should *want* to lose or screw up. I think that defeats the point of competition, self-improvement, and striving to be better than your opponents. But I think it drastically improves your outlook and your ability to recover from negative situations when you understand that these things are in the realm of possibility, and that you are ready to play and have a good time regardless.

So here's a question: if I told you that at the next smashfest, or the next time you play, you would lose 20 matches and win zero, would you still be willing to go?

I've come to believe that if your answer isn't "yes," then you aren't mentally prepared to play your best.

Lemme know what you think. Peace.

Progress?

2011-01-30T23:58:00.000-08:00

So I have a few thoughts.

My blog is partially about the game and my thoughts on it, but also my journey towards becoming the kind of player I want to be. As most of you know, I struggle with a lot of different aspects of it; even though I've reached a decently high level, I still want to get better. But in truth, my real goal is this: I've had some amazingly positive mental and emotional experiences in this game that I want to recreate. States of focus and calm that made me feel... tranquil, yet energetic. Very focused but still relaxed. Basically it's "the zone" magnified.

Playing recently, my entire goal is to coax my mind into that state as often and consistently as possible. Unfortunately, I can't seem to maintain it for more than a short period of time, and afterwards I feel incredibly drained. I know I have an "official" (and I'm sure that means something worthwhile) diagnosis of ADHD-Inattentive, which is very frustrating to deal with, but what confuses me is if I do have such a condition, why I'm still capable of entering this state at times. The first time I ever experienced it, it lasted for hours; how does that jive with what I think I already know about myself and this mental state?

Playing for a long while yesterday I managed to get into that zone for maybe a few games out of a hundred. So on the one hand, I've been reaching it more often than I had before, even though it's still very infrequent. On the other, it's such a brief experience, and parting with that feeling is so bittersweet, that it's almost more upsetting to get it and then lose it than to play all day without feeling it at all.

Without a doubt I play my best while in that state of mind, so the upshot of reaching that mental state a lot will be improved play, and maybe I'll have a decent performance and my next out of state event. But it's unlikely I'll go to one in the future, and it's pretty unlikely that mindset will sync up with any major matches I get, so I wouldn't be expecting too much from me.

This isn't really about winning or losing anymore. This is more about trying to understand my own mind and what it takes to hone it. I think I might be getting closer, but I can't really know for sure.

Oh well. I should be doing my next installment of the video log soon, maybe tomorrow after work. Take care everybody.

VLog is live!

2011-01-12T21:06:00.000-08:00

The first VLog is now up! It has been named Eskimo Brother because I suck at names.

You can go here to enjoy it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg-M0HA0zx0

If you want a question answered in a future vlog, ask it in the comments or in the IC Blog thread on Smashboards. Thanks for sticking with me folks!

And sorry its quality is kinda lame. The video and sound, not what I say. That part's awesome. F'realz.

...

2011-01-03T18:38:00.001-08:00

I just watched the movie Waiting For Bobby Fischer, and it made me think about a few things regarding winning, losing, what competitive games do to you, and what we do to them.

Let me start by saying this: the more you add to a game, the more you take away from it. Not the game itself, but the event, the playing. Say you add sponsorships, crowds, tickets, merchandise. You add titles. You add a crowd. You add hype. You add rivalries and spectators. You add ego.

Adding these--not always, but often--subtracts from focusing on the game itself. The reason most people play a game, and devote themselves to its rules and intricacies and advancement, is for a single reason; they like the game. Sometimes the initial interest turns into a passion, an obsession. These people can't quit no matter how bad they think they want to. You think you quit, you'll be minding your own business, and then somehow somebody reminds you that the game exists and you are drawn back into it. You can't resist it. The only way to leave is if the fire dies down on its own. It's a trick candle of the heart.

Because to you, thanks to whatever weird genetic/cultural combination that crafted you, the game is just beautiful. Some games are fast paced, some are slow. Some require twitch reflexes and some require snail-paced planning. Some are intuitive and some are analytical, though just about all are really a mixture of both. Different games call to different people, and most of the time we can't help ourselves. We're weak to those games.

And it's kind of stupid, even. You started off playing for fun, and then you'll go off by yourself to practice for hours and you won't have even a smidgeon of fun, just so you can be a little bit better the next time you play. And sometimes the game drives you up the damn wall for whatever reason, and you can't help it. It's a habit. An addiction to play, because something in there is just too beautiful for you to let go of it.

Most of us want to be better for no reason beyond a simple inexplicable want. At least, initially.

This is where it gets weird and a little sad to me. You have the game, and you have the players, and it's pretty awesome all in all. But the moment you add things like hype, spectators, tournaments, championships, and titles, something both amazing and terrible happens. The spectators develop a sense of entitlement. They make demands on the players. They start dictating the shoulds and shouldn'ts of the game for the people who are actually playing it. They add foreign elements of pride and ego and territory into these events that, as far as the game is concerned, don't exist.

Players begin to worry about who is watching, and by the mere act of observation, the game is changed. Players act more aggressive or defensive. They become afraid to lose, in some cases afraid to win, or even to play at all. And then people start telling the players what to do. You have to play man. You have to win. Show them what you're made of, you're the best, prove it. No, don't play like that, give us what we want to see. You have to.

Says who? Who says anybody has to do a damn thing? The passion didn't start with somebody saying "you have to be amazing at this." It came from within. That passion is what got you up there, and then somebody else just encroaches on it. Who the hell are they to tell you what the game is about, and what you have to do when you play it?

But truthfully, I can't hate on the crowd because when you love the game, both playing *and* watching, then you can enjoy it no matter what you're doing. I love watching high-level play of most competitive events just because it's kind of awesome to see craft at its finest. To share the experience with other people who feel the same, to have somebody to talk about it with, just amplifies the experience of seeing players who are good and amazing weave magic with their chosen game.

And being good, being amazing, that really was kind of the root of the game at first, wasn't it? You loved the game and you wanted to understand it, and with understanding came more skill and with more skill came a new way to appreciate an old pastime. And some people just want to watch and enjoy it and sometimes it's not any kind of act of malice or spite or bias but it simply *happens* that the game changes.

But let's say you add a title. Suddenly you aren't thinking about the game anymore. You aren't playing for the sake of the game or yourself but because somebody put something else on the line. And while some people are immune to these kinds of pressures, most aren't.

You really can't account for how these things affect everybody. Some people like winning just because it makes them feel superior. Some people just want to be flashy, or some people just want to relax and have a good time. And the best part is that the game doesn't care what your intention is, so there is room for you to play how you want and for the reason that you want. And some people only play their best with those external pressures egging them on. Sometimes the game can only advance because people, in the desire to win and be better, use those pressures to push themselves to the next level. So who even knows.

What's the point of all this? Well, I tricked you, because you read all this way only to realize there really isn't one. I like crowds and hype and spectators and tournaments and championships and big games where everybody says "this is for all the cookies," and everybody screams and it comes down to the wire and the crowd is going nuts and you end up telling the story five times to the same person who doesn't even give a shit because you can't get it out of your head, it was that amazing.

But in some ways I also kind of lament it. Because there's something utterly fantastic about playing without a purpose or a target or a title or a crowd, where we aren't inflicting needless expectations on the players of the game. Where you can just explore the gamespace and go crazy playing how you want to play, constantly chasing that element of the game that set you on fire in the first place. And the irony is that when you combine the first and the second, when the players up on the big stage forget about the crowd and play like nobody's there, is usually when everybody in the room ends up winning.

Happy New Year, everybody!

2010-12-31T21:42:00.000-08:00

I'm not really good at doing the whole ball-drop timing thing. But happy new years to the people who still read this thing (:

Also, I was thinking about maybe doing vlog stuff in addition to this so you can all laugh at my silly face while I say things. And I can emphasize my points and posts with meaningless hand gestures. We could do Q&A type stuff, I could just rant, and I would save this writing section for more analytical stuff.

Anyhow, to reiterate:

Happy New Year!

Two thoughts in a row!

2010-12-01T21:30:00.000-08:00

Cons of living in Dallas, TX:

Only two people to smash with on a regular basis.

Pros:

Those two players are DoH and Darkrain.

So I spent the evening practicing with Darkrain, and I've come to a few conclusions. The first is that I'm not very good with Sheik.

The second is that the moment I start wanting to really win, I start playing awfully. And unfortunately, my strategy of trying to convince myself that "I'm going to lose, I will make mistakes, it's inevitable" and using that to keep my nerves down, doesn't work. I still get way too upset over my errors and my mistakes.

I think I was in a much better place years ago when my focus was exclusively on maintaining the right attitude while I play. I had a string of matches tonight where I was completely in the zone, and except for the occasional chuckle or "wtf was that" when something weird happened, I pretty much felt... blank. It was kind of nice. There was a moment where I thought, "I'm not really angry or happy," even though during those matches I was actually playing unbelievably well. I just KNEW the right thing to do in--it seemed like--90% of the situations. After about four or five games of this, I started thinking, "wow I've got it I'm doing really good heck yeah" and then it promptly faded and I went back to air-dodging off the level like normal.

I guess I'm going to try and stop thinking about anything except being calm and empty. Before I even play, work myself into a state of as little emotion as possible, and focus on staying in that place.

I had a thought

2010-11-30T22:22:00.000-08:00

People have a tendency to make mistakes when they are nervous. You know, people like me.

I also know that I play much better when I'm relaxed, and sometimes when I'm simultaneously relaxed AND into my match, I go into a very focused state of destruction.

So, it finally occurred to me to ask myself, what is it that makes me nervous? I typically make smart decisions, but when I start getting antsy, I also begin to just go for blind attacks. And I often screw them up technically. Nothing goes right. What is it that makes me so nervous and tense, even in friendlies?

For some people, it's not wanting to lose. I know that I hate losing, but it happens a lot so I'm kind of used to it. I'm also pretty used to the crowd booing against me, but it gets to me the most when I feel like they shouldn't be.

Recently, I went into work thinking "today is going to suck." But it wasn't exactly a pessimistic "everything is going to go wrong today," kind of thought. It had a more matter-of-fact spin to it. I was kind of tired, I had to work a lunch rush in the most hectic position, and I was scheduled with several people I didn't like working with. It seemed very likely that my day would not be a good one. That was my logical assessment.

For some reason, that day I didn't get angry about anything. The normal stuff that bothered me I just kind of took in stride, thinking "yeah, that's pretty much what I expected." When my workload lightened slightly, I thought "hey, this isn't so bad," and became energized, and actually did my job BETTER than normal.

Most people have told me that I need to have more confidence when I play. I think... this is kind of true, and kind of not. I DO need to stop beating myself up about random things that go wrong. But what I really need to do when I play, if I want to play better and win more, is stop thinking about winning. I've found that the closer I get to winning, the more nervous I get. The more I expect myself to win, the more my mistakes bother me, which snowballs into causing more mistakes.

I'm not really that scared of losing, especially not if I think it's likely. I remember going into my matches against Mango at APEX thinking that I was 99.9% likely to lose; I'd just watched him play Vanity Angel and pull out some pretty ridiculous combos with Falcon, even while hungover, so I was pretty sure that the real Mango was hiding in there somewhere, ready to jump out and yell "ahh, rape."

I went into that match with ZERO confidence and what's weird is that, not only did I win, I did it with almost NO technical errors. I made a few, sure, and I made judgment mistakes and in the end I only one-stocked his Mario with infinites legal, but then he brought out his Falcon (which had murdered me last time we played) and I three stocked it. Again, he was hung-over, so that obviously had a lot to do with it. But at the same time, the things I was doing were coming out right. No flubbed wavedashes, no botched short-hops.

My match against Silent Wolf was remarkably similar. I was sure that he was going to slaughter me because I'm just not that great against people who play really fast. And I was so certain that I would lose that I wasn't really that nervous to play. And I wound up winning pretty soundly.

I guess in a weird, counterintuitive way, I'm more nervous about winning than I am about losing. The more I remove victory from my mind, the more I focus on the moment. And I've been finding lately that--at least while practicing--my skill goes up when I tell myself "you're going to make mistakes." I stop worrying about them, stop thinking "I have to get this right," because I've already accepted the error in advance. And I DO screw up still... but now it doesn't bother me. I just think, "oh right, I was just hitting L too early because my fast fall didn't come out," and the error suddenly goes away.

Will this work in real matches? Time will tell. It'd be pretty cool if it did, huh?

PS: a big thanks to Unintentionally for reminding me of something I actually wrote awhile ago, about accepting the possibility of your loss beforehand while you simultaneously play as hard as you can to win. It seems I have outsmarted myself, lol.

Frustration

2010-11-23T22:41:00.000-08:00

Okay. I've been here before, in many respects.

Over the years I've improved slowly and painfully, then plateaued, wanted to quit, and forced myself through it. I broke through those walls and became better, even if it was only a tiny margin at a time.

I want to believe that I can still improve, and that I can finally break down this one barrier that's been eating me alive for so long, which is my technical inconsistency.

I can't seem to communicate to people just HOW BAD this problem is. I don't really get frustrated when I lose, I get frustrated when I play poorly. Particularly when I make lots of stupid technical errors that I shouldn't be making after playing for 6 years.

Things like trying to wavedash, and failing, then attempting to fast fall to avoid eating the aerial that I'm now in range of, and double jumping with my joystick. Or trying to waveland onto the stage, but just standing up; then when I try to wavedash back onto the edge so I can try again--and see if my controller doesn't need resetting or something--then I roll by mistake. Then I decide "whatever," and try to short hop and get the edge, only to full jump.

Somebody said that I make lots of bad decisions, and it's hard to explain to people that your decisions aren't really your own when your hands don't cooperate. I'm constantly at odds with my own body to actually communicate my desires to the game. Some games more than half of my attemped inputs come out as errors.

This is not an exaggeration. WD d-smash becomes WD f-smash because of a c-stick flub, followed by an attempted roll that turns into a spot dodge or jump because I spaz on the joystick. My next JC'ed grab is a full jumped f-air to which I then miss the fast fall (and subsequent L-cancel). Upon landing, I airdodge horizontally, failing to wavedash again. My next short hop n-air is a dash attack because I miss my jump button. And so on.

Again, not exaggerations; these are specific examples taken from recent smashfests and friendlies I've played. And when I tell people that I'm frustrated because these mistakes are getting me raped, they say things like "everybody has bad games." I am trying to explain that this goes beyond most people's definition of a bad game, and it happens with a consistency that people think I'm embellishing.

This would not be as big of an issue if I had some safe baseline to fall back on, some technical elements that I NEVER mess up so I can play safe while I calm down... except I don't. I cannot handle the controller without some risk of missing buttons or slamming the joystick in some random direction. Most people find themselves overreaching their tech-skill sometimes and saying "okay okay we'll tone it down." I cannot tone it down to an error-free level.

Sometimes this is clearly tied to my mental state; when I'm frustrated or agitated I often play worse, and when I'm calm and focused I typically play better. Durr, obvious I know, but yeah. However, even when I'm practicing solo in a relatively calm state I will still make these silly mistakes. When I'm nervous, in high-pressure tourney situations... well, most of you have seen what happens.

I have accepted that I don't really have a talent for this game beyond my obsessive nature. But this is at an extreme that I don't know how to cope with anymore; the amount of practice I invest does not seem to correlate at ALL to my technical proficiency, and I'm starting to lose hope. I come up with new systems and ideas to try and rectify it, but nothing's working. My past month-plus of dedicated practice, of going back to basics and hammering them in with constant repetition, has yielded absolutely nothing. I still screw up these fundamentals at a rate far beyond what is acceptable for any player trying to legitimately call themselves good at this game.

The worst part is that I can't just give up and call it quits because there's something inside me, a small petulant voice made of spite and ambition and idealism, that refuses to let me. I'm not going to keep playing if I honestly believe I can't get any better, and apart from this voice, that's what I'm coming to believe the more and more I practice.

tl;dr: bah. If somebody has any advice on how to fix this nonsense, please send it to me.

Smash Workout

2010-11-02T10:56:00.001-07:00

Warning: long post ahead. It's also rambly. Beware of "magical philosophizing."

So one of my recent hobbies--being pretty isolated in Texas, with me, Darkrain and DoH all being on completely different work schedules--is working out. Mostly I do a lot of bodyweight stuff, working my way towards one-armed pullups and pushups, hanging V-raises, one-legged squats, stuff like that. And, massive nerd that I am, I've thought about it and want to see what I can apply to Smash.

My most recent tournament, TO6, was pretty depressing for me for a couple reasons. One, I'd just taken 5th at APEX and had 3 1st place finishes in tournaments before that, all of them with pretty stiff competition. I had high expectations for myself, I took 4 days off work to go, and I wasn't playing as well as I liked. That and having the entire crowd against me put me in a bad mood. I lost to Raku, a Sheik player--who was surprisingly good, truthfully, he deserved his win 100%--and thanks to my high expectations that put me in an even worse mood. I went to loser's and started off by getting stomped by RockCrock, and ended up quitting. You can call it a rage-quit I guess, but it was a quit meant to pre-empt rage. I promised myself awhile ago that if I started getting too frustrated during matches I would just forfeit before reaching a point of no-return on my anger.

So after a lot of thought I decided that my main weakness is--and has always been--my technical skill. I don't make perfect guesses and decisions 100% of the time, but often I still screw up when I do, which is a big part of why I rely on simple chaingrabs and such; I'm incredibly inconsistent across the board, and the grab-game is the easiest for me to execute, so naturally I gravitate to it. But I've been using it as a crutch for far too long, and I decided that if technical inconsistency is my biggest weakness, I will just have to train my ass off to turn it into my biggest strength. If I can couple that with my generally smart play, then I'll be a much stronger player as a result.

But how to train? How can one develop technical skill? What is it?

For starters, I think technical skill--the kind that really matters--boils down to consistency. It's not the ability to sprint, but to run a marathon. To keep a consistent pace the entire match long so that even if you can't take advantage of every tiny opening with blinding flashy speed, you can give nothing away through mistakes. And, once you can run the marathon, to improve your time. Or, if we're going to compare it to a weight workout, we're looking at low weight with high reps first. Master the basics, ingrain them utterly, and then slowly scale up.

When I first started playing competitively, I practiced a lot with Fox and he became my tournament main. I learned how to do most of his stuff via something I call the "high-score" method, which is pretty simple. Pick a technique, be it short hopping, wavedashing, whatever, and do it over and over and over again. Keep track of how many times you can do it in a row before you make a mistake. That's your high score.

Now, try to beat your high-score. Keep going, keep beating your high-score. Get to a really high number, because remember, you're going to be doing these things a LOT in any match. Can you short hop 100 times in a row with Fox? You'd better be able to if you're a serious Fox main, because you will be doing THOUSANDS of them in one day at a given tournament, and you can't afford to have an 80% success rate.

High-score method is how I managed to actually learn my tech skill originally, and I improved at it pretty rapidly. Why did I stop? Beats me. But I'm starting again. But what do you practice?

Here's another thing for weightlifters to consider when they work out: compound lifts versus isolation. A compound lift is any lift that targets numerous muscle groups and forces them to coordinate to complete the lift. A squat, for instance, doesn't only use your thighs and glutes, but you have to use your shins and calves to balance, as well as flex your back to lower yourself, then stand. A squat works a lot of muscles. In general, compound lifts are more effective for training your coordination, for giving balance in your muscular development, and even for saving you time in your workout. Unless you're a bodybuilder specifically focusing on sculpting a single muscle group, it's almost always more beneficial to use compound lifts.

But what's interesting is that a "compound exercise" might not be the best idea for Smash practice. It trains multiple skills at once, but sometimes it can give you the wrong kind of muscle memory. This is because tech skill in Smash is also very heavily mental!

What do I mean? Let's talk about inhibition reflexes. (told you this is long and rambly)

Normal reflexes kick in when, let's say, your computer says "click when the screen turns green" and then hey, it turns green, so you click. Inhibition reflexes involve making judgments and sometimes NOT taking certain actions. If your computer says "hit enter when a letter appears, but DON'T hit anything if it's an X," then that tests your inhibition reflexes. You have to check for a value, then decide on a response, sometimes inhibiting your decision to press Enter.

Smash matches do not follow a script. The longer and more involved a technique is, the less likely it will be strictly applicable to every scenario. Practicing short-hop turn-shine waveland fast-fall off the platform into b-air is fun and flashy, but sometimes you don't want to do that. The more you practice it though, the more ingrained that entire action becomes. The more of a habit it is to do that, the more you will have to actively prevent yourself from taking that action during a match.

But what if doing that is a great idea? What if you know you can bait them into jumping out of their shield and you'll clip them with a b-air while they DI badly? You want to be able to perform the maneuver. So maybe you can just practice turn shines in one instance (that's kind of isolated), then practice waveland b-air in another (also pretty isolated), and every now and then put them together to make sure you can do it.

Now for another fun psychological experience: attentional blink. Attentional blink refers to when you shift focus from one piece of information to another; as you can imagine, in Smash you have to do this A LOT. You have to mentally move to the next step in the match, and sometimes it happens at blinding speed. Somebody jumps up above you and wavelands on a platform, then falls off with b-air and hits your shield. It's not enough for you to think, "okay he's going to waveland and b-air me," but then you have to quickly move forward into, "now I think he'll dash-dance away then come at me with a tipped n-air."

One of the things about attentional blink is that it WILL compete with your inhibition reflex for space in your mind. You cannot consciously process two pieces of information simultaneously. You can shift rapidly between them, but you can't actually think about them both. If you have to put attention on on stopping yourself from turn-shine waveland b-airing, you will find it difficult to actually make a new decision. Because you can't come up with a good decision, you may find your hands flubbing for a response. And even if you CAN settle on a response, your hands won't be prepared to execute it well.

How does this relate to your smash workout? Well, here's my theory: if you want to have good tech-skill, and you also want to be able to make good decisions even under pressure, you must have strong isolated skills and quick attentional blinking speed. You have to separate situations into the smallest pieces possible, and be skilled at executing all of them.

SO, with all that long-winded shit in mind, here's how I'm trying to "work out" with Smash.

Wavedashes: 200 in a "set." I cannot afford to screw these up because ICs rely on them heavily every game. I find that by around 200 in a short time, my index finger is too cramped to keep pressing the trigger, so this is where I stop. If I mess up, I start over.

Short hops: I short hop for a lot of reasons, but it's important not to do the same thing out of your short-hop every time. Empty short hops, dashing short-hops, dashing into a backwards short-hop, short-hopping all your aerials, short-hopping with and without fastfalls, these all come into play for mix-ups and good decision making. I start with empty ones, shooting for fifty in a row, then I start short-hopping random aerials (with the most emphasis on my b-air and u-air, because they're the ICs most applicable aerials and the easiest to mess up).

Dash-dances: Joystick control is imperative. It's very important that ALL players are good at keeping track of the direction they're actually pressing it, for the sake of your air-control, DI, and sweet-spotting. I pick a spot on a given stage (like the center of the Pokeball in Pokemon Stadium) and dash-dance within that strict distance for as long as I can. Twenty seconds of rapid dash dancing without a flub is pretty good, and I've found it's already given me much better control with my left thumb. Can't hurt to shoot for higher though!

L-cancels: These are tricky to train because their timing changes so much depending on your given situation. If you hit two shields, a light-shield, a taller character, if you're fastfalling out of a short hop, or fastfalling out of an aerial from a different height... these all change the timing. This is where quick attentional blinking really makes a difference; recognizing how the timing changes, being ready to land your L-cancel based on new information and then quickly move on to the next step of the match.

Well, that's all I've got for now. Believe it or not, there's going to be a follow up to this!

Hope you didn't think that was too weird or stupid. Peace.

It's about time you started losing.

2010-10-11T12:16:00.000-07:00

"I've missed over 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." -- Michael Jordan

I don't like making mistakes. Anybody who plays with me on a regular basis will tell you that. I miss a short hop or an L-cancel, I have to go into mental damage control mode.

I'm a perfectionist. I hate screwing up. I hate losing. I hate the thought that people watching me will think I'm anything but a great player. This applies in friendlies, money-matches, and tournament. I've mellowed out a lot over time, but this is still very much true of me, regardless of what I'm doing, regardless of whether I've even done it before.

Have you ever worked a dish-washing shift in a restaurant? I hadn't, until about a week ago, when they stuck me in front of a sink during lunch rush and said "go get 'em tiger." I panicked. I could spray shit with water, but that was about it. I didn't know where things went, or which detergents to use on which type of dishes. What I can just rinse off, and what has to go in the industrial torrential bacteria annihilator we call a dishwasher. And every time I got something wrong or fell behind or put something in the wrong place or someone corrected me, I got irritated. Over something I had NO REASON to expect myself to do well at. Ridiculous? Yeah, I'd say so.

You can tell where I'm going with this. Losing a friendly kind of sucks, but who cares? What matters is that you learn from it. The example I give to people is this: you and a friend play 100 matches. 98 of them are friendlies, and you lose all of them. You spend them trying new stuff, practicing new techniques, figuring out what works, what doesn't, and your friend just plays the same the entire time. The other two are tournament matches, and you 2-0 him. That's 1 in 50 wins, but you advance in the bracket. Which matches matter more? Which matches do people care about?

"Oh, but I beat him in friendlies." People say it all the time, friendlies don't matter. Or rather, they do matter, but only because of what they teach you. People remember the tournament results. They remember who took first.

Here's an interesting flip side; people get mad about other people camping in friendlies, even though it's a strategy that you should learn to deal with if you want to be a top player. Friendlies are the optimal environment for testing new strategies and counter-strategies, but people don't want to practice against camping. Why? It's boring. You shouldn't try so hard to win in friendlies, etc.

Yet the very reason that those people are pissed off about camping is because they are losing to it! "You shouldn't try so hard to win in friendlies! Let ME win instead!"

Here's the point: friendlies are for practicing and trying new things, not for keeping score. You try to win them, but not because winning the friendly matters. It's because honing a skill properly so that it becomes a winning technique matters. And if you have to lose a lot so that you can actually win when it counts, so be it.

One Thing

2010-10-05T10:53:00.000-07:00

"I'll post more," he said. Takes him two weeks to post something, and it's not even smash related. What a noob.

Anyhow, I felt like posting something I was thinking about that applies everywhere. It's about self-improvement, learning, and achievement. It goes according to a rather significant quote:

"Today I will do what others won't, so tomorrow I can accomplish what others can't." -- Jerry Rice

I'm a fan of the "one thing" methodology, which is pick a single isolated skill, technique, or habit, and ingrain it within yourself until it becomes your instinct. Then pick something else, and repeat until you're done. Don't try everything at once.

So here's your homework, readers. Pick something today. It can be in Smash or school or work or whatever, doesn't matter what. Pick one thing, just ONE, that you don't normally do, or you think "I really ought to," and do it. No excuses, no johns, it's just one thing. You can manage it. It's that one thing you CAN do, but don't. Go do it.

And if you have to, be ready to do it again. That's it. You're identical to your old self except for this one thing, which you do a bit better. Now, overall, YOU are a bit better.

Now do it again.

Peace.

Brief downtime and gratitude.

2010-09-17T14:17:00.000-07:00

Even though the blog was only down for a short time, I heard from a surprising number of people (surprisingly quickly) that I needed to hurry up and bring it back. I didn't realize people actually enjoyed reading this thing!

So I'm going to try and update more frequently, even if it's with smaller stuff, just so you folks who check here regularly can have something new to read every time you stop by.

Thanks for sticking with me so far, everybody.

What do you want?

2010-09-06T17:09:00.001-07:00

This blog is not entirely about Smash, but more about life. It's about something I'm thinking about right now, and I want to encourage other people to think about. I'm writing it as much in an effort to share my thoughts as I am writing it to try and understand my own. It was inspired by this video, specifically around 1:21: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvOUVil7W5s

What do you want?

Why do you want to be good at Smash? Why do you spend your hours playing this game rather than at your job, studying math, picking up girls, working out, learning guitar, writing your novel? What is your goal? Why is this important to you?

I've asked people what their targets are when they play, I've received lots of different answers. Some people just want to make it out of pools, some people just want to avoid going 0-2, some people want to be the best with X character, some people say "I want to be a top player." One answer I liked was "you know how when people play you they're like, 'oh shit I have to play Wobbles.' I want people to say that when they play me." Nice one.

Though I didn't ask him directly, my favorite answer came from Soft when I went to Alabama. I told him, "I'm traveling a lot because I want to get as much practice as I can, since I want to win APEX." You know what his response was?

"So do I."

I guarantee you that Soft will improve faster and rise to higher levels than most other players. He didn't manage to make it out of 2nd round pools, but doesn't that make his goal more impressive? People say, "I want to make it out of my pool," "I just don't want to get last." Soft wanted to take home the whole damn thing.

Remember this. Whenever you stop to pursue a goal, in that time you exclude everything else. When you sit down to play Smash, if you have some goal like "I want to have an amazing Falco," and you don't work towards that goal, then you are failing yourself. You only have so much time in your life. You absolutely MUST spend it pursuing whatever goal is most important to you, and if you're going to spend that time, do not spend it carelessly because you are spending it at the expense of the other things you could be doing.

I wanted--I don't know if I still do--to be the best player in the world. I did not care how many Mangos and Armadas and HBoxes and M2Ks and other top players I would have to surpass to do it; it was my goal. It was stupidly ambitious and audacious to believe it was possible for me, a player who demonstrated no recognizable talent when he started. But it was my target.

And to be honest, I did not have the dedication such a lofty goal deserved. I screwed around, I trained poorly. I've made johns and cop-outs and settled for less than my best. I not only picked a goal that I didn't work my hardest for, I did it at the expense of other things in my life, so I wasted time on multiple fronts. By some weird combination of luck and bursts of obssessive motivation, I've become one of the top players in the country. But I'm damn sure it's no stellar example of how to play and pursue your Smash career, or any other goal in life for that matter.

Don't mess around. Don't give maybes and don't lie to yourself about how you're trying your hardest but other stuff comes up. If something matters to you and you're going to spend your time on it, then don't waste that time. Every moment wasted is irreparable damage to the potential output your life could be creating. If there's something that gets in the way of your goals, then sit down and figure out how to make that obstacle fuck off. No johns, no "it's too hard," if you want it, then go for it, and crush anything in your path.

Peace folks.

Here, Fishy Fishy.

2010-07-18T16:09:00.001-07:00

Let's talk for a moment about the only man to ever beat Chuck Norris in a race: Captain Falcon.

Now, *aside* from his overwhelming manliness, how does Captain Falcon ever manage to make it back to the stage? Somebody saw fit to give the other characters some pretense of a chance at beating the Cap'n, so all he's really got is up+b. And with up+b, he can pretty much aim for the stage, or aim for the edge. He can also try and ledge-tech but once people found out you can edgehog that it became less handy. So he can go onto the level, or onto the edge. That's it. Regardless, paragon of the XY that he is, Falcon finds a way back anyhow.

The reason that Falcon can make his way back despite overwhelming evidence that he should *not* (besides being goddamn Captain Falcon of course), comes down to two things.

First is the fact that we, as players, are fish. We have a tendency to bite down on the juiciest piece of bait that lands in front of us. When we see something that makes us think, "hey I can punish this," we rarely stop ourselves from leaping in mouth-first. Impulse control is one of those useful skills that you don't talk about much.

The second is air control. There's a lot of hidden effort involved in using that one move to make it back to the stage. Let's say that you're Falcon and your opponent is a smart dude. You up+b, and right now the other guy is thinking "ah, he's going to the edge, but he wants to trick me." As you start moving forward the guy is watching you, looking for the trick, and then he sees it. You start pulling back, and so he quickly steals the edge. One stock down, three to go.

He's wrong though. You hit back on the joystick for just a fraction of a second, and when he saw you slow down he thought you were completely changing direction. Turns out you quickly hit forward again and moved into towards the middle of the level, out of range of a ledge-hop punishment.

One of the many differences between good players and great players is how they use air control. Much like how Starcraft players can always find something productive to do in just one second of dead time, great players add more dimensions to their game in places that good players don't think to look.

Most Falco players, once they fire their laser don't realize that they can still control their horizontal momentum to adjust their spacing, nor do they consciously implement this to make their approaches and zoning games more precise and safe. Watch a video of Mango's Falco and really watch his character model. Look at the tiny adjustments he makes in the air. Besides giving himself better spacing control, this has the effect of giving the other guy false information about his intentions. The slightest bit of DI in can convince somebody you'll be in shield-grab range, even though you immediately begin to DI out and they whiff the grab.

Or consider Jigglypuff. Most Puff players use a very predictable in and out rhythm of air movement. While this helps them space their moves, it also gives the opponent a handy metronome for anticipating the Puff's move placement. Once again, watch Mango if you want inspiration. Sometimes he abruptly stops in mid-air for not even a quarter of a second, giving you the impression that he's about to retreat and it's save to jump out; of course, that's when he has a n-air waiting for you. And then when you're busy watching for it, he'll spend some of the match moving in at full speed and being in range before you even realize it, clipping you before you have a chance to notice that he's up in your grill. And then sometimes he really does just completely pull back and you whiff an attempted counter-attack, letting him punish as he pleases. Once he's in your head like that, Mango can attack pretty much whenever he wants and you'll be too flustered to avoid it.

Back to the two main points: air control, and fish. As players those subtle cues in air control tell us where the opponent plans to go and what he plans to do. Why do you think that people still keep falling for Ganondorf's double-jump bait against shield? He jumps in on you with your shield up, fast falls and then jumps. The key? The fast fall.

Experience works against us here. Fast falling is a sign that you're using an aerial and you want to cancel lag on the ground as quickly as possible. It's the cue that many players use to tell if somebody is about to land, and having seen it you assume the other guy is about to land. Afterwards you think "of course Ganon was tricking me so he could double jump and stomp me in the face," but at the time throwing out that grab seemed completely reasonable, didn't it? Yes. If you're a fish.

As fish, we often react to the first piece of pertinent information we see, and use that as an excuse to go for the bait. Somebody dashes towards you, that's the cue to roll towards them and get behind them because they are OBVIOUSLY tech-chasing you away. And that open space behind them looks so damn inviting, doesn't it? Wait, why is Fox wavedashing backwards? I hope you remembered to DI his up-smash properly, little fish.

The bait can become a little more complicated. I love dashing up to a prone target with ICs and bringing up my shield, then wavedashing out to follow their roll. Because once I've shield-grabbed somebody's get-up attack eight times in five minutes, they start catching on. In fact, they lie there prone just to encourage me to run up and shield again so they can roll away, safe. Wait, why is Wobbles suddenly wavedashing backwards? Fishy fishy fishy fishy.

These situations happen a lot and they're pretty easy to understand and learn from, because the options here are very concrete and defined. Roll in, roll away, get-up attack, stand-up... not that complicated. But few realize just how easily and how often subtle air-control will bait something like a jump into an "obvious" move. HBox's air movement is full of alterations in timing and speed adjustments that make even really good and smart space-animals jump straight into his b-air.

So don't get lazy. You aren't on a fixed trajectory once you've jumped where the only difference is in the timing of your stupidly telegraphed aerial. Every character can do a little to screw with the other guy's sense of his location, and once you do, then you'll really be fishing.

Let's Talk About Being Good: A Rant

2010-07-05T00:36:00.000-07:00

What is skill? How do you define being "good" at a game?

I've got a pretty simple definition of what it means to be good at something. How good you are is determined by how often and to what degree you succeed at it. That's it. I think it's a nice, universally applicable definition that can apply to pretty much any game.

Let's say you've got some guy, a professional bowler. This guy can bowl a perfect game every time he goes into an alley. You'd agree with me that this guy is pretty good at bowling, yeah?

Let's get peculiar. Let's say this guy bowls by throwing the ball over his head with both arms at the pins. He just chucks the ball as hard as he can down the lane. Every game he scores a 300, perfect consistency. His methods are unorthodox, yes, but wouldn't you agree that he's still technically bowling well? In fact, no bowler in the world--that I know of, which isn't saying much--can get those scores so consistently, so he'd arguably be the best in the world.

Now let's say that it's illegal in the sport of bowling to throw the ball that way (maybe it already is? I don't know). You have to use an underhanded roll, and any other kind is against the rules. This guy is no longer good at bowling, because what he does is not technically bowling anymore. He's good at throwing a giant sphere of plastic polymer with deadly accuracy, but he's not good at bowling. This is important, because games are defined by their rules, and if he isn't playing the game anymore, how can we say he's good at it?

Or let's take a look at the movie Happy Gilmore. Wouldn't you agree that the eponymous main character is good at golf? Sure, he swings the club like a maniac and has a hockey-stick-shaped putter, but at the end, his score is better than everybody else's. He also--during the movie--becomes consistent enough to beat a bunch of golf pros who are significantly more orthodox than he is. So he's consistent and he wins. By my definition (which I don't think is very terrible) he's a good golfer.

I bring this up because there's a mentality in the Smash community--and a lot of other gaming communities that I've experienced--that there's a "right" way to play. There exists some weird kind of skill, called "real skill." Some players win, but they don't have "real skill." Doesn't this seem silly to you? Somebody plays by all the rules of the game, has access to the same tools, beats other people, but somehow he's actually worse. He doesn't have "real skill."

In Smash, what is this mythical "real skill?" Is it the ability to hit all your L-cancels? I don't think so. There's a stigma attached to being a technical player who doesn't adapt well; we say things like, "they're technical but they still aren't good." Is it the ability to read people? Well, not really. You can't really say that's "real skill" if you can't back it up. You can't prove you knew what the other guy was going to do if you walk into it on accident anyhow, can you?

So "real skill" probably exists, but it's really tough to define. We know it when we see it. Certain players have it, some don't. Hungrybox, for instance, does not have "real skill." I'm not sure what he has, but that's not it. He wins tournaments, takes top 3 at just about every national, beats almost every character with his Jigglypuff, but let's be clear, he does not have "real skill."

Why not? Well, he doesn't SHFFL. He clearly doesn't have any mindgames. He just spams one move and waits to rest you. Admittedly, the many other Jigglypuffs that can't SHFFL, have no mindgames and tried to spam b-air and rest haven't had nearly the same level of success as HBox, but that's not the point. He's not ACTUALLY good. No "real skill," remember?

I'm not sure how he beats people who have more "real skill" than him, actually. I guess he has a lot of fake skill? So much of it that it overwhelms all the "real skill." Which, as we've established, [i][b]Hungrybox does not have[/i][/b]. Someday we'll find the real secret behind why he wins so much, and we'll be happy because it will give us something to add to the list of what real skill is not. (I think this is something that separates SSBM from crappy games like golf. We have "real skill.")

Let's talk about skill! Being good means having skill. So what is it? (Not "real skill," we can't really define that. But we know it when we see it!)

Well, there are lots of different kinds of skills, so I like to think that your overall skill is determined by combining the individual skills you possess.

Some skills work together synergistically. They are good skills to practice together because they complement each other. I could practice shield-grabbing and SHFFL'ing b-air, or I could practice shield-grabbing and then chaingrabbing. I think that overall I would get more milage out the second combination than the other, because better shield-grabs would help me land chaingrabs, and better chaingrabs would make my shield-grabs worth more.

I also have no qualms in saying some skills are worth more than others. Some people will practice things like pivoted jab and moonwalk b-air with Fox, then be awful at sweetspotting. Usually, these kinds of people do not win a whole lot. They spend their time on skills that lack solid value and it costs them in tournament. SHDL is great, but finding ways not to get gimped four stocks per match is better. Being good at gimping them for all four stocks before they can gimp you is pretty good too.

Speaking of gimps, I just remembered something about HBox. He plays "gay," which trumps "real skill." I forgot. Silly me.

Back to skill. You can agree that some skills are worth more than others. You may also agree that your overall skill as a player is the combination of the things you have chosen to master. I think it is then logically sound to say that picking different things to master will lead to different levels of overall skill. Now, if you factor in that some skills are good against others, and it actually becomes rather difficult to tell who is "better" than somebody else. Even if somebody wins one particular matchup, they might not be more solid all-around and lose a larger number of matches than the other guy. (It probably doesn't matter much to you if you're the guy who gets eliminated, though. Then again, if you don't want the internet to make fun of you, you have to make sure everybody knows the other guy isn't actually as good you, so make sure to post about it a LOT).

But being good at certain things is worth more than being good at others, particularly if your skill choices synergize. That leads to you being better, which helps you win, which is good.

Unless, of course, you play gay. What's interesting is that even though--for instance--HBox plays gay, he doesn't camp (apparently you can be offensively gay, which isn't the same as finding gayness offensive). It's the fact that he only uses a few moves and somehow beats all these other people.

Let's get serious. There's a reason I am coming back to HBox so much. It's because people have an idea that there is a right way to play this game, and a wrong way. For whatever reason, certain players rarely receive the credit they deserve. HBox is my case study because no other player has had so much success met with so much communal ambivalence. There are other players like him though, who don't get credit because they don't play the "right way." They don't have "real skill."

Pardon me for being so emphatically vulgar, but what the **** does that mean? They aren't winning? Clearly they are, or we wouldn't even bring them up. They aren't playing the game that you want them to? Who the **** cares? In fact, if doing things you don't expect and want them to do helps them win, who's going to blame them for doing it? You? Of course you would, you lost. They're not entertaining? If we wanted the winner to be more entertaining, we would play bonus mode. They used the same move too many times? Put the abacus down, pointdexter, because you don't lose stocks for getting Stale Moves.

We do not have rules regarding entertainment. We do not have rules regarding proportionality in your moveset. You have 4 stocks and 8 minutes to put more hurt on the other guy than he can put on you and that's most of it. Nobody says you have to find every playstyle fun. I thought HBox's combo video was boring as hell. But the moment you start talking about "real skill," I start questioning your sanity. This applies to every last player in every last community. It's up to each person to master skills they believe will win, and when they DON'T win, to figure out what they lacked and then adapt. HBox can b-air like a champ, rest like a champ, avoids dying four times in a majority of his games, he rests more than most other Puffs and he gimps better than most other Puffs. Those are his skills and they help him win. Unless you're Mango, it probably means he wins more than you.

Here's my take on it. You pick the skills you want to master. You try and get them to synergize and you try and get them to give you the largest probability of winning against the largest number of people possible. After that, it's just execution (which is a skill of its own). If the skills work out and you win, fantastic. If they don't, get back to training mode and learn from your mistakes.

And don't ****ing john about it.

Selective Attention and The Empty Short Hop

2010-06-19T14:35:00.001-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

Go there and watch that video before you read.

Anyhow, the video is a meant to be a test/demonstration of selective attention. That is, in a given situation, our minds often ignore and completely blot out things that they do not expect to see, especially when our attention is focused elsewhere. About 50% of people do not actually see the gorilla in the video. It doesn't have anything to do with profession, peripheral vision, or anything like that; people just sometimes don't see it.

I brought that up because this basic thing happens all the time in Smash, particularly in doubles. Things that you do not expect to see will completely blindside you, to the point that you might not even realize they happened at all until it's too late to deal with them. Ever lose your jump and fall all the way to the bottom of the level before you realize it? You hit jump, nothing happens, and instead of anything else registering in your brain, you just watch yourself fall? Or maybe you thought you would grab on to the edge of the stage, so you just watched the edge. Somebody else got it first though, and you just stared while you plummeted off-screen. Technically, you were looking right at your character, but you never even saw it happen.

A fun example from playing with one of my friends: the very first time I used a Captain Jack grab with Mario (you know, canceling a dash attack with grab so that you hear the "Wa-hah!") he literally stopped playing. He was grabbed. But his brain was trying to tell him, from the sound cue, that he had been dash-attacked. He did not realize that he was being held, and just kept trying to see where the dash-attack was. (Afterwards, he thought this was so funny that all I had to do to beat him with Mario was send him into laughing fits by CJ grabbing)

Selective Attention--and more specifically, any inherent expectation you have regarding the match--is a liability. Like any liability in a multiplayer game, you can use it as a weapon. The most commonly used form of it that I know is the empty jump.

Tournament players learn to SHFFL aerials. It's just a thing that you learn unless you're playing one of like, three characters that don't really utilize it. Peach, Samus, and... Yoshi. I don't know.

Point is, you learn SHFFLing. You come to believe that anytime somebody is in the air, especially if they're against your shield, that they're going to do an aerial. So you watch for it, so you can shieldgrab, or roll away, or up+b out of shield, or whatever. And you watch. And after awhile, you become so conditioned to seeing the aerial that you won't realize it if the other guy doesn't do an aerial at all. You'll just keep waiting. By this point, he's landed and grabbed you. At this point, you might finally notice, but odds are you won't even DI the throw. Or, in the ICs case, mash out before I infinite you.

Another example: using the ICs d-throw d-air on Fox is kind of risky, because he can smash DI and then buffer a roll to get away. It's escapable, and can be a waste of a grab if the other guy knows how to get out.

But what if you know they're going to roll? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGq7X37ypEA#t=1m05s

In this case, Forward SDI's away and down, then rolls like you're supposed to, and I take a big risk in just dashing towards his landing spot. I d-smash him, and he DIs with it. Note the percent; grab at 30 percent, dead at 61% because he can't recover.

Forward's a good player with pretty decent reaction time. What makes somebody like that DI badly? I'm willing to bet that, because after a d-throw d-air, Popo is *supposed* to go for a grab, he didn't even realize that I hadn't done it until it was too late. He may not have even really seen me dashing towards him, or at any rate he didn't process it. The only way you can get a very good player to make errors like that is by doing things you shouldn't, and being where you aren't supposed to be. Wavelands are very useful for this for the same reason an empty jump works; you're supposed to do something in the air, and you're certainly not supposed to slide all over the place.

When does this sort of thing not work? If the other guy has a plan of action that counters your trick *as well as* the thing he expects, he might just go ahead and do it anyhow, and have it work out. An empty short hop doesn't work against somebody who uses up+b out of shield anytime you get close, because... well, he'll just up+b.

Kind of a short post, but it was something I thought of today when I read about that video and test.

Peace, folks.

What It's Like To Play the Best Player in the World

2010-03-16T15:54:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't posted in awhile. I've been hunting for a job by day and playing League of Legends by night, and on top of that haven't had much to talk about.

Recently though (especially with Nice Shot Hugo coming up, which I'd like to attend if possible) I was thinking a bit about Smash and something I'd like to talk about.

Not too long ago, I went to a Cali tournament and actually took second. I beat Lucky for the first time in two years, beat Zhu in tournament for the first time, and made it to Grand Finals against Mango where I even managed to win a round. Hats off to the TOs for letting me infinite, because I'm pretty sure it didn't hurt.

In fact, having it legal helped in more than one way. Obviously, I got to KO all my opponents off grabs, and that was certainly useful. More importantly though, it put massive pressure on my opponents not to mess up and not to give me grabs. This meant they were playing very safe, cautious, and kind of campy (which isn't an indictment, I support camping wholeheartedly provided it actually wins you the match).

I like playing against cautious players. First, I have relatively poor reflexes, so I don't handle rushdown very well. Second, because they take their time attacking me, I can take my time to figure them out, and come up with plans and tricks. When very technical Foxes and Falcos and Falcons rush in on me and don't give me room, I tend to panic and make dumb mistakes, both technical and mental.

The fear aura generated by the infinite gives me a big boost. It kept Lucky and Zhu from shield pressuring me into the ground. It gave me breathing space, and like most people, I enjoy breathing.

But not Mango. Mango has a few characteristics that are integral to making him the best player. The first one is that he's very aggressive, but he's not stupid about it. The poker term would probably be "tight aggressive." If he has an advantage, he pushes it. If he doesn't, he waits until he does. What distinguishes him, however, is that he pushes almost EVERY advantage he gets, regardless of how subtle or intangible it is.

Second, Mango is utterly confident in his play. He doesn't get shaken up. He rushes me down knowing he's not going to miss an L-cancel or space badly, and so he can continue to attack without giving in to the fear aura of an infinite.

Third, Mango is efficient. If there's a way to KO you, he does it. Right there. No messing around, no middle-man, pure destruction factory direct to you. At least, most of the time since fourth, he has a sense of humor and likes trying weird stuff, which is part of what makes him innovative and hard to read.

Fifth, he's hard to read. Sixth, he reads most players like a book. This is what interested me the most; Mango can combine technical rushdown with mind-games to a level no other Smasher can. Ken was not particularly technical in his time, and while M2K was incredibly technical, fast, and precise, most players agree that he tended to follow plans and formulas over adaptations. PC Chris was the most Mango-like of the three, in my opinion.

My strong suit, as a player, is my ability to read people. I tend to guess right a lot more than I guess wrong, and I play a character where a good guess can yield a stock, so that kind of covers the efficiency aspect too. What's better is not many IC tricks require a lot of tech skill (contrary to popular belief). Which isn't to say I don't mess up; my tech skill is terribly inconsistent even doing the most basic stuff.

Mango is really, really, really, really hard to read. Based on the people I've played, Mango is in the toppest of top tiers, mentally speaking. In the arena of reading people and being hard to predict, the only player I would place close to Mango is Chu Dat (right now, I know a lot of people would clamor for Armada, but this is based on who I have played. I would totally believe it though).

Anyhow, playing against somebody that smart, fast, and efficient is... very unusual. I think against Mango I played some of my best Smash ever, because at times (very few times mind you) I felt like I was keeping up. I was linking as directly as I could into the mind of my opponent trying to see his intentions and his patterns, and most of the time I came up blank. Nothing. I didn't even have the faintest idea of what he wanted to do, or when he planned to do it. Every now and then though, something clicked, and it landed me a grab.

Not much else to say, really. I could have had a second game from him, but I botched a ledge CG that would have linked to an infinite and earned the last stock. After that though, it was more or less over. I really hope I get the opportunity to play him against at NSH this month, assuming I go.

VVVVVV, speedruns, and being the best (bonus section included)

2010-01-02T15:03:00.000-08:00

(This article includes a special bonus section at the bottom!)

Recently released was the beta for a flash-based game called VVVVVV. That's 6 V's. You can learn a bit more about it at distractionware.com/blog. Its designer is a gentleman by the name of Terry Cavanagh.

The final version will be released January 10th and if it stays like the beta, then I can assure you this game is unbelievably terrific in many, many ways.

Two related factors; one, it's very hard, and the music is terrific. Why are these related? Because you're going to die a lot and, consequently, you'll be listening to the same tracks looping over and over again, so the music HAS to be good. And it is.

The gameplay is simple. You can move left or right, and you can flip gravity. Hit V, and you flip up to the ceiling. Hit it again, and you start falling back down. You can't flip until you've hit a surface, so you can't just mash V and hover in place. You travel around a large world going from room to room, collecting shiny trinkets and rescuing your shipmates. It's old-school in presentation, style, and--of course--difficulty. This includes going into rooms that kill you unless you already know what is in them. I typically find this to be a design flaw, but you repeatedly run into little respawn checkpoints so you almost never lose any substantial progress from dying, and the game demands precise platforming skills so even when you know where things are you tend to die anyhow. It's just damn hard. I liked this game way more than I think I should have. I liked it so much, in fact, that I'm doing a speedrun for it, even though it isn't technically finished yet.

This is where the game's magnificent design becomes apparent to me. Almost every room seems capable of being cleared at full speed, provided you have frame perfect timing, you understand the physics engine, and you know where everything is. Some rooms you clear at ALMOST full speed by knowing just where to slow down and how to enter each room. The game is basically a giant puzzle waiting to be solved. It's a lot of fun, I recommend you check it out if you've got the $15 dollars to do so once it's released.

So this brings us to the second point; how you go about creating a speedrun. This game is rather easy on you as far as designing the speedrun goes. You never get any powers and you can't skip over levels because--in order to do a full 100 percent speedrun, collecting the trinkets scattered throughout--you simply have to go through the stages as normal. In a Megaman game, for instance, you have to pick a path for beating all the robot masters so that you can use the powers to defeat the masters and zip yourself through stages as quickly as possible. The order you do things in matters.

Not so in VVVVVV. You don't get any abilities, and rescuing one crewmate won't really affect how you rescue the others (with one tiny exception that will save you one or two seconds overall). So figuring out your path isn't that difficult.

Figuring out each room is where the real fun is. I went through the first dangerous room somewhat slowly. Over one enemy, under another, and then wait for the last one to drop so I could go over it. After a bit of experimenting, I found you can--with perfect timing--jump UNDER the last enemy on its way up. So this speeds up the room by about 1/2 a second.

Not much, really. But with hundreds of rooms in the game, those halves would add up. And if I didn't do each level as fast as I knew how to do, somebody might imitate my run EXCEPT for this one room, and beat me by a second and take my record. If you want to have the best speedrun, you have to think like that. Somebody just might care a tiny bit more than you, and practice a little bit harder, and get that half-second.

For instance, I remember reading on a board dedicated to Melee HRC and BTT a thread somebody made saying he had the new world record for the Game and Watch HRC. He had topped the other record by something miniscule, like .2 feet. All he did--I'm guessing--is inch the bag forward slightly while doing his bat-drop combos, and otherwise mimic the world record exactly. But you know what? He had the new record. .01 seconds can mean the difference between a gold and silver in the Olympics. I'm pretty damn sure an Olympic level athlete would NOT say "one hundredth of a second? Eh, whatever, I didn't want the gold that badly. What's the difference, really?"

The difference between winning and losing a close Smash match can be one more hit than the other guy. It can be hitting each other at the same time, but you were a little closer to the blast zone than he was. It can happen in the finals of a tournament. Does it matter? Yes. Absolutely. It will not be a trivial difference when it's the difference between having a record--or victory--and not having that record or victory. So yes, mastering this stupidly hard jump to save 1/2 a second really does matter.

Then I learned that you can go through this first room with the right timing so you reach the third enemy fast enough to go over him without waiting at all, and you don't have to jump under him either. I didn't know you could do that. It's actually *easier*, and saves another 1/4 of a second. That's a bit of a relief.

Next room leads you to your first trinket. There's a checkpoint in here, so when you trigger it, if you die you will return to that checkpoint. Trigger the checkpoint, drop into the room with the trinket, and then... there's another checkpoint and a lot of spikes. Reach the trinket, leave the room. Right?

Wrong. If you do the room just right, you skip the checkpoint. Get the trinket, kill yourself, warp one room back, save a second or two. And so on.

Just about EVERY room in this game has a trick like this. If you time a jump right, enter the room at the right angle, go as FAST as possible, you can blitz through this game. And kill yourself a lot in the process because the timing is NOT forgiving. Hell, the game's bad enough to do normally, let alone charging through at full speed.

But if you want to speedrun, there are a few basic tenets. One is that it doesn't matter if something is hard. If it's faster, you must attempt it, because somebody else will. Second is that there is, very often, a faster way than what you have, and it's waiting for you to discover it. You have to be willing to question what you believe is possible. "I can't make this jump." Actually, maybe you can, and you're just not doing it right. And almost all the time, your movements can be just a little sharper, you can cut each corner just a little more closely or jump just a little earlier, and save yourself that tiny bit of time. And through an entire game, it all adds up.

However... bear in mind that in a single segment run--a run where you start the game and beat it in one sitting with no saves--you are probably going to mess up, especially on very difficult games, and especially towards the end. My record for beating this game is currently clocked at 19:14 by the game's timer. The first five minutes or so, I won't tolerate anything but superficial errors. By the end, however, I will begin to accept mistakes, because otherwise I'm wasting the run and the opportunity to practice other parts of the game.

As the run goes on, I will tolerate bigger and bigger errors because the third tenet is accepting your human limits. I am GOING to make an error in the time it takes to complete this game, especially when I attempt frame perfect jumps after a long period of nonstop focus. And if I'm recording, it may still be the best speedrun I've done, even with a few dumb mistakes in it. It may be the best anybody's done, and I'm not going to sneeze at that.

And nobody says I can't replace my own run! So I can choose to do an "inferior" run this time, skipping over a few of the harder tricks in favor of safer, more consistent methods, particularly towards the end when I don't want to waste an otherwise good run. I can keep that as my current record, then I'll have something good to beat. And if nobody else does it in the meantime, I hold the record.

If you've played Mario Kart and done the time attacks (or saw the Speed Racer movie :P), you know that when you try to do a time-trial on a given level, the game races you against the "ghost" of that previous record. When speedrunning, I feel like I'm racing against the ghost of a person who does my run just a little better than me. I make a mistake, and I imagine that some invisible competitor has, until that moment, done everything exactly like me... except without that mistake. So I'm losing, and I have to step my game up.

Because this is not a blog about Speed Racer, Mario Kart, or VVVVVV, and it is a Smash blog, I should be talking about how this relates to Smash. But I think the parallels should be obvious. If you don't dedicate yourself to mastery, somebody with a little more dedication will do what you do, but better, and you will lose. You can decide NOT to practice your Fox ditto chaingrabs, but then you will play somebody who goes pretty even with you, except for those chaingrabs, which he does better. And that could be what clinches the match. Little things add up. Somebody who is just a little sharper, or faster, or a little more consistent will beat you out.

Then again, nobody is saying you have to be the best at anything. That's a personal goal that you set for yourself. But if you want to be better, you can't ignore things and say "it's too hard" or "it's not worth it." Obviously you want to pick things that give you the biggest improvement margins. I can spend my time practicing a frame perfect jump that saves me 1/2 a second in my speedrun, or I can use that time to find a path that saves me a full minute over the course of the game. If I can add a fourth speedrunning tenet, it's that solid overall play trumps highly specialized tricks. Practicing the toughest tricks that only save a tiny bit of time should be secondary to the ones that save you lots of time. In VVVVVV, there's a trick that saves a good eight seconds if you do it right, but can cost you twenty seconds if you mess it up--if you do, you might as well start the run over. When choosing between learning that trick, and one that's stupidly hard and saves me only one second, guess which one I pick. If I had to draw a Melee comparison, it would be the difference between learning to wavedash consistently and learning how to shine b-air people with Fox.

As time goes on though, if you want to continue to have the best record, you have to make your record *better*, because other people will try to improve on it. So you'll need to optimize and improve in places you didn't know were actually possible, and constantly reinvent your own speedrun. You may need to take tactics from other people, which is totally legitimate. It's not about inventing tricks, it's about having the fastest run. Developing a new method for playing the game can *help* you get the best time, but if you adopt somebody's technique and do it better, more power to you. I don't care if my speedrun looks just like everybody else's, provided it's the fastest.

*

Bonus section! So, I also promised on the IC boards to write something special just for IC players. Here it is! Some of it's going to be a little obvious, some of it less so.

Your Guide to Not Letting Nana Get You Killed

Nana is great. She's your best friend, the source of half your damage and probably more than half your KOs. There's a problem though.

Nana's dumb. Very, very dumb. And like somebody who is dumb, she does dumb things. I've become very acquainted with just how dumb she can be. So any time you're going to try and interact with her, remember: she is stupid and will try to get you killed. So here's a list of things that you should keep in mind while trying NOT to let her kill you.

1) You cannot save Nana while she is tumbling. If Nana has lost her double jump and goes into a tumble, she's gone. Forget about her. Killing me won't bring her back.

Okay, that was stupid. Point is, you can't save her from a tumble, so don't try. One important If she gets shined by Fox however, that breaks her out of her tumble, meaning you can belay and teleport her to you. The problem is that there's a Fox right near the edge and belaying leaves you open, but then again, going SoPo against Fox is eighty kinds of annoying, so the risk might be worth it.

Nana cannot break herself out of tumbles except with her double jump. She double jumps the moment her character model becomes level with the main surface of the stage (except on Yoshi's Story, where she will jump towards either the platforms or cloud, depending). If you practice in training mode against another ICs and just hit them off the level, you will soon learn the exact timing for when she jumps. The moment she uses her double jump, you can belay or forward+b, so keep that in mind.

2) When Nana is in hit stun, she will not belay or forward+b with you. Even if she is not sent into a tumble, she won't come to your aid. If you were to up+b at the exact frame she gets hit by the weakspot of Luigi's up+b, she would not teleport to you. Don't rely on her to belay and save you if she's about to get hit. That said, if you can snatch her away from getting hit by using your up+b, it could be worth your while to do so.

3) Nana will not do anything for you while she is teetering on the edge of the stage. She will not up+b with you, she will not forward+b with you. I think you can force her to act if you hit the c-stick but that's it.

4) Sometimes it's best to let her die. If Nana is really far out there and the opponent has a free edgeguard situation, don't bother helping her. It will get the both of you hit. I'm sometimes criticized for not helping my Nana enough, but the problem is that most of the time, belay will leave the both of you wide open. Either she'll die, or you'll eat something really deadly. And it's super tough to aim her so she'll grab the edge, so half the time she won't even make it on her own.

This is where the up+b ledge-cancel comes in handy. It lets you save her when she's kind of close to the stage without putting yourself at a significant positional disadvantage. She becomes invincible above the level, and you get edge invincibility too. Even if she gets hit by the opponent, you're in a prime position to punish them for it, so at least you get a trade. Remember, you lose a stock when Popo dies, not Nana. It feels like the stock is over without her, but you can still attack, deal damage, land stupid d-smashes, and chaingrab a bunch of characters with SoPo.

5) Nana has a special platform AI. When she is on a platform or above it, she goes into a different AI pattern than normal. You cannot up+b and collect her if she is in this mode, even if you are close to her. Try falling through a platform then up+b'ing immediately; she won't join you. If she's stuck above a platform for whatever reason while you're trying to recover, do NOT try and belay because she won't do anything to help you. If you want an example of this, stand on a platform, drop down and immediately use your up+b. Popo will belay, Nana will do nothing. If you wait for a few frames, THEN you belay, she will go with you.

That's all for today. Thanks for reading!

Oh boy, 2010

2010-01-01T13:29:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the new year, Smashers. 2009 was an interesting year for Smash, and I'm looking forward to what happens in 2010.

To start, a moment of respect for NES N00b; it's bad enough the Smash community lost a rising Falcon, but a family lots a loving son and the world lost somebody with a bright future ahead of him. This kind of tragedy happens all the time, all over the world, to the point where we forget it's a tragedy; it's not until it strikes close to us in some way that we get reminded of it. I felt it and I never even met him. He was somebody behind a controller in a bunch of YouTube videos, and hiding behind a wall of text on SWF, and I felt it. I will never get the privilege of playing his Falcon, or get the privilege of meeting somebody with a reputation for being a very cool guy. So... farewell, NES n00b.

What does 2010 have in store for us? Pound 4 is almost here, for starters. I wish I could be there, instead of not there (which is where I'll be instead). But I will be cheering from the sidelines for nobody in particular, hoping only that every interesting match gets recorded and I get to watch them all. If there's a livestream, I'll try and tune in as well.

2010 may also yield the finishing of Bipolar, my video, which will shake the very foundations of all you believe to be true about this world and the universe. If I can get my recording equipment back, that is. On the bright side, I've actually pulled off enough cool stuff in tournament that I may just cobble it together from footage out of tourney videos.

Some insight into how I am determining what goes in the video. After a recording session, I go back and comb through the footage, taking notes of combo times. Then I rate each combo from 1-5. 1s and 2s aren't going in the video unless I absolutely NEED them. They're either little or boring, or an otherwise decent string of gameplay that takes too long to do. Not very entertaining, only to be included out of necessity. 3s aren't half-bad, but I'd prefer not to have them in. The majority of the combo video will be 4s, hopefully; these are solid combos that would provoke a decent reaction from a crowd if I pulled them off in tourney.

A 5 is pure gold. Zero to death, unbelievable, audacious, never before seen gold. As you can imagine, this rating is given sparingly. It's not THAT hard to zero to death somebody with ICs, but it's hard to do it in a way that looks interesting. So there may be one or two classics in there, but I'm trying to be creative and do stuff most people haven't seen, including other IC players.

Some combos have a .5 appended to them as an afterthought. "This is like a four, but just a bit better." (Why didn't I just rate the combos from 1-10 then? Because shut up, that's why.) If I ever land something that deserves a 5.5, I'll probably quit Smash right there and devote my life to God or something. After finishing the video, obviously. Additionally, certain clips are rated based on how funny or catastrophic they are. These will go in the credits or worm their way into the video proper.

This is one of the songs that has a 90% chance of being in the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRnZtn1a9bM

If it doesn't sound very... icey, that's because it's not supposed to. The video will be segmented based on combos that are mostly out of grabs and combos that are mostly out of ordinary hits. This song is intended to be in the faster-paced, non-grab section. The slower, more grab oriented stuff with consequently have a slower, more relaxed song.

So apart from Pound 4 and my video, there will be tons of tournaments and lots of Melee and probably some Brawl too. And, of course, I'll be writing stuff down. Check back tomorrow for something new.

Peace, and welcome to the new year.

Until the new year

2009-11-10T08:17:00.001-08:00

I'm out. Peace folks, and enjoy your time until 2010.

In-game resources and concentration

2009-11-02T23:09:00.000-08:00

Mleh, this one's kind of rambling, but I hope it proves interesting.

What are the things that your character "has" during a match? You have stock and percent. The match itself has time, which can affect how you play strategically. In the case of the ICs, you have a Nana. As a Peach, sometimes you have a projectile. As a recovering Link or Samus, you may or may not have your grapple available.

Playing well is determined by how these resources are used and expended. Obviously you don't want to lose stocks or gain percent, but sometimes strategically expending those resources is smart. Crouch-canceling comes to mind; SD'ing in a 2v2 match can get you back into the fight faster to help a teammate. Or having your teammate take a stock may cost you resources but give you an immediate advantage in its place.

In one of David Sirlin's articles (can't find it at the moment) he mentions that in Starcraft there are minerals, gas and units as your resources. However, there is another resource that players have, which is attention.

Where you put your attention is incredibly important. There are times where you have to be focusing on different aspects of the match, otherwise you screw up. You have to pay attention to executing this combo, then you have to pay attention to guessing this tech-chase, and so on.

You can also think of your attention placement as a strategic decision. It takes a lot of concentration to execute difficult technical maneuvers; if you believe your opponent to be weak against technical rushdown, it might be a good idea to stop thinking and start hammering him with relentless shield pressure. I try not to be extra technical so that I can instead pay attention to guessing what my opponent will do. However, one of my friends was also a mentally focused player, but had trouble dealing with really fast players. When I needed to beat him, I stopped worrying about what he would do and focused instead on having an extremely fast and tight aggressive game so he wouldn't have time to think at all.

Now for a different story! I recently started learning some Marvel vs. Capcom 2, and my friend was showing me basic combos and giving me some idea about the flow of a typical round. So, having learned only one or two useful combos, I tried playing against a different friend named Joe who was only a little better than me.

I had no idea where to put my attention. It didn't matter if I could guess when Joe was going to throw out his assist, because I didn't know what to do. I also couldn't focus on what I wanted to do, because then I was just attacking blindly and running into his stuff. It took a lot of rounds before I didn't have to consciously remember some of the game's most basic mechanics, but afterwards I immediately started landing punishes with significantly more efficiency. Of course, I'm still terrible :)

I bring that up to demonstrate a few things. First, unless you completely understand something, you will use extra attention on it. Second, because you only have so much attention to pay, if you aren't spending it in the appropriate area at the appropriate time, you will get distracted and screw up.

So let's recap. Performing unusually challenging technical stuff takes up your attention (though this differs from player to player). Trying to watch for a specific approach, or look for a particular opening takes up your attention. Figuring out what move you want to use at any moment takes up your attention. If you know exactly what the opponent will do next, and your technical game is 100% ingrained into your hands, and you always automatically know what move works best, then you don't have to pay attention at all to win. It would actually be accurate to say that you aren't paying attention to more things than other people; instead, you don't need to pay attention because you perceive those things automatically.

Assuming your brain doesn't instantly and perfectly process every detail of the match, you will have to swap your focus around a lot. It's not enough to say "I need to concentrate better," but you have to know what to concentrate on at a given point. You have to focus on watching the opening, then you swap your focus to tracking DI for your grab combo. Then you swap again to see if he'll land on a platform or bounce off, then you move over into calling his tech. However, if you know that he always techs left when he lands on the right platform of Battlefield, you can focus on spacing your tech-chase knee perfectly instead. Then you'll be paying attention to how many taunts you can get away with before they respawn.

In order to make use of this knowledge, it's incredibly important to understand your own capabilities. You need to know what you can do automatically and with great consistency, and make that the foundation of your game.

There's more though. Being able to shift your opponent's attention during a match is a valuable skill, and an important part of this game's mental battle. If your approaches are weird and unorthodox, your opponent must make a choice. They will either start putting attention on trying to understand your playstyle and mentality--which increases the likelihood that they make other mistakes--or they will ignore it, which increases the odds they will make bad decisions.

If you mix up your rhythm, the opponent can become distracted while trying to figure out your erratic movement patterns. If you alternate between rapid-fire technical rushdown and patient, turtle style defensiveness, the other guy will become preoccupied trying to figure out what on earth you're about to do next, which can make him impulsive and less attentive to things like smart positioning, good mix-ups, or even the right timing for a shffl'd n-air.

There are a million things that can shift your attention; good focus is based on knowing when, where, and why it happens and being in control of it. The first step is shutting out ALL external factors, because those have nothing to do with whether you should be shield pressuring with drill-shines or spacing cross-up back-airs. After that, it's up to you and understanding your own skillset. Know what you can do with minimal focus, and put that attention elsewhere.

I'm sorry that rambled so much, but I hope it proved interesting nonetheless. Peace.

Edit: I was really out of it when I posted this and left a few random sentences unfinished. I apologize to anybody confused by my spaced-out silliness.

Blech

2009-10-25T11:56:00.000-07:00

So my computer, a five year-old Dell laptop with enough cracks in it to be classified literally as "falling apart," and also containing all my articles-in-progress, has died.

I lost quite a bit of work in there, so that bites. Just wanted to update and say that because I haven't updated lately at all, and didn't want anyone to think I'd forgotten. I've just been working on several things that have all now vanished.

In the words of a great philosopher, "wah." But I'll have some stuff soon anyhow. Promise.

Peace.

Emotional Control, Part 2: Depression

2009-10-07T02:01:00.000-07:00

Emotional Control, Part 2: Sadness and Depression

Let's start by saying that if there's something I have a lot of experience with, it's being depressed. I've been to psychologists, psychiatrists, and at one point earned myself a stay in a mental hospital for multiple reasons, the primary one being depression. Most people don't know that after most of my temper tantrums, I'd spend the next few hours or days or weeks in a serious depressive spell. Being depressed sucks. A lot.

Fortunately, stuff has become a lot better in recent months, much like with my anger issues. It also means I've got a good insider's view to share on what being depressed means. And, of course, how it relates to your smash playing, because that's why you read this blog :)

The next thing that needs saying is that there is a difference between sadness and depression.

Sadness is an emotion. It's a temporary feeling that you get in response to different stimuli. It's pretty normal for people to become sad. Depression, however, is a combination of emotions and patterns of thought that can quickly become debilitating.

Here's an example: you're in a tournament, and you make it to winner's finals. You sweep your opponent 3-0, and then when you play in grand finals, you win two in a row. You're close to winning the third game, but self-destruct. After that, your play becomes sluggish and you lose the first set. You get discouraged, and then lose the second set 1-3.

Instead of being angry, you become sad. You start thinking "if only I'd done this," or "if I hadn't gone for a risky edgeguard." You feel bad for a bit, thinking about the things you should have done. Later, however, it passes on, and at the IHOP or Denny's after the tournament you cheer up and have fun. You console yourself that you're going to try harder to do better next time, you'll practice on X counterpick more, whatever.

That's sadness. Being sad when something bad or unfortunate happens is pretty normal. I'm not gonna tell you not to be sad, because that's actually kind of unhealthy. Constant, perpetual bubbly happiness often indicates that you're a bit out of touch with reality. Besides, a lot of the time if you become consciously aware of your sadness, you can think of ways to deal with it. Depression, however, is something else entirely.

Depression is feeling sad, then thinking, "I'm a screw-up," "I can never win when it counts," "I'm a failure," "I'll always suck," and stuff like that. Then, instead of picking yourself up and moving on, you make yourself feel worse, and the emotion lasts far longer than the experience that triggered it.

Depression, in short, is sadness that gets out of control. Much like anger, sadness is a useful emotion. It tells you that something is askew and needs fixing. Since you feel bad about it, it gives you motivation to fix it because you don't *want* to feel bad anymore. If you can't handle the sadness, and you start thinking thoughts that only make you sadder, it becomes self-perpetuating. That's the thought pattern of depression.

If anger is based on denial and believing that the world isn't the way it's supposed to be, then depression is hopeless acceptance. "This will never change." "I'm a terrible player, of course I screwed up." "Everybody's better/faster/smarter/more talented." Stuff like that. When it's really bad, you start spreading the sadness to other experiences, or you bring outside experiences in to bolster the depression. "Well, it's no surprise since I'm a failure in everything else."

Like anger, depression is tough to stop once it gets going. The real trick is catching the feelings as they begin. Remember, you usually have a lot of input into your emotional reactions. And the more you start actively and consciously thinking about an emotion, the less impact it begins to have.

Let's look at certain habits of depressive thinking.

Generalizations

"Everything," "always," "never," "every time," "nothing." These are the kinds of words that pop into your head when you start thinking depressive thoughts. "I always mess that up," "I never win," "everything goes wrong," "nothing works," and so on.

The thing to remember is that generalizations are always incorrect (ho ho ho). If you want to quickly kill a generalization, just think of a time when it wasn't true. And then remember that if you can do something once, you can probably do it again and again.

I always screw up my l-cancels -- no you don't. Remember the dozens of l-cancels you executed this match? And the chaingrabs and shine combos? Sometimes you succeed, sometimes you mess up. If you're messing up more than you're comfortable with, turn that discomfort into energy to practice.

I never win -- well, maybe if you have gone 0-2 at every tournament and you've lost every friendly since the dawn of time, this one is legitimate. Odds are, however, you win sometimes, and sometimes you lose. It will keep you from getting depressed, however, if you ask why, then come up with an answer.

"Why do I keep losing?"
"Well, he keeps destroying me on edgeguards and getting low percent KOs."
"How can I stop him from doing that?"

Then you answer. If you can't come up with an answer, ask somebody else. Put your energy towards finding solutions. Don't put your mental energy in focusing entirely on the problem, or else you begin to feel helpless and hopeless.

Compare these two reactions:

"He hits me with d-air a lot, what can I do to stop him?"
"He always hits me with d-air, I can't get away."

The first reaction is a pretty good way to think about situations. You start by acknowledging your situation, then you immediately turn

The second reaction is negative. It can easily cause you to start adding thoughts like, "because I suck," which probably put you in a worse mood. That leads to feeling like there is nothing you can do avoid the d-air. Which, incidentally, is the next part of depression I want to talk about.

Hopelessness

Another word that you start thinking a lot is "can't." "No matter what I do, I *can't*" do something or other. Blind and unhappy acceptance of a situation is a prime indicator of depression.

"That doesn't work for me." "That's not the way I do things." "That's not who I am." These are pretty common sentiments, and they're also rather unhelpful for the most part. If the way you do things isn't working after many attempts, you should try changing your methods. And remember, new methods require practice and adjustment, so don't forget to give them a fair shot.

Come up with an idea. Then try it out, and if it doesn't work, adjust the idea. Try new stuff. Ask for outside advice and then try it. Believe that your situation can be changed and start looking for ways to make it happen. Don't despair and discount possible solutions without giving them an honest try.

When things feel hopeless or scary or threatening, people come up with a lot of defense mechanisms. One of them is sandbagging. As long as you weren't playing at full power, you can convince yourself that you always had a shot. If you lose, you were sandbagging; if you win, you feel good because you weren't even trying! Same with not practicing; you screw up when you don't practice, it's only to be expected. If you succeed, you can brag: "yeah, I don't even own a copy of the game, I just kinda show up and win, lololol." This isn't the only reason somebody might sandbag or not practice, obviously, but I hope you see what I mean.

That's detrimental to you as a player. You've got to accept that you may lose or fail, that some people may play better than you, and accept that it's FINE. Of course you don't want to lose or make mistakes, and you shouldn't let people walk all over you and never try to get better; you want to push yourself and take your matches seriously, invest effort, and get returns. So yeah, it's kind of annoying when somebody has been playing for 1 year and you've played for 5 and they've got more tech-skill than you, or when somebody beats your serious tournament main with a character they never use. I speak from personal experience.

This is going to happen, and it doesn't really matter if it does. Take it from me, it's easy to invest a lot of personal and emotional energy in this game, and it sucks when you get a bad return. People will give you crap for your failures, and you'll often think "that was dumb of me." I recall losing an IC ditto in tournament to Axe, who doesn't play ICs with any real dedication. Nevertheless, he beat me in a serious game; I felt so stupid and embarrassed that I wanted to unplug my controller and walk out of the venue. There is something worse than having that stuff happen to you, however. That is having it happen to you, and letting it break you down.

Fortunately, my example was a day that I didn't let my emotions get the better of me, and I stayed calm and repeated the ditto on the same stage, and won. I actually learned a lot from losing that IC ditto with him, so I actually have that loss to thank for teaching me so much about the ditto.

Enough sidetracking! Moving on...

Outside Factors

Again, some things lie beyond your control. They may happen to you quickly and without warning, and they will affect your mental state in a variety of different ways.

I'll restate my advice for dealing with anger: be aware of these things as they happen and decide how you want to deal with them.

Your emotions are, for the most part, your own decision Obviously, chemical imbalances notwithstanding. If your emotions truly are beyond your control, seeing a doctor is a really really good idea.

Most people don't fall into that group though. For many people, our emotions are based on habits. People make themselves sad or angry more than they should, simply because they tend to think in ways that promote those emotions.

Analogy time: if you make a groove in the surface of something and pour water into it, the water will follow the groove to a specific destination. If you think certain thoughts long enough, you create a groove in the surface of your mind. As a result, your thoughts will lead you to the same emotional destination. In the end, no matter what the situation is, you will wind up making yourself sad, or angry, or whatever.

Sorry, that was kind of lame. The point is, you don't want thought habits that always make you depressed or angry. Otherwise, you drive yourself to the same negative place again and again; all the while, you reinforce the habits through repetition.

So... don't do that. Direct your mental energy towards solutions and what you can do. If you feel like you're in control over your situations, it's harder to feel either angry or sad. If you honestly recognize that something is beyond your control, you can stop worrying about it! If you can't do anything about it, then there's no point in wasting your energy and time thinking about it.

Final Note

Last, but not least; if your emotions begin getting the better of you and you feel like you're legitimately going to lose control, step away. Quit your match, tell your opponent, "good stuff man," and walk away. It's not worth it to dig yourself into an angry or depressive pit for the sake of a single game. Take it from me; when it comes to importance, put your mind before your matches. Take a break or a breath or whatever you need, and don't let yourself become bitter, stubborn, or unhappy. You will stop playing this game one day, and that's not the emotion you want to associate with it.

That was kind of rambly, but I hope it was worth reading. I guess that's all. I might try to write a third section about focus and concentration, but I'm not really qualified -_-

Peace, folks.

Emotional Control, Part 1: Anger

2009-09-28T14:22:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's weird for me of all people to be writing about this subject. I've had emotional control issues in every part of my life for years now. Rage, depression, you name it and I've probably had to deal with it. It might actually be more accurate to say that I have not been dealing with it. At least not very well.

Until recently, I more or less ran into the same mental and emotional walls while I played. It was not until around this March that I finally stopped to ask myself questions that needed answering and made some improvement.

Maybe this does make me qualified? Either way, I hope this helps give other players some perspective. Like everything else in this game, I also hope you can find ways to translate them into other areas of your life. If you don't have trouble with controlling your emotions, this whole thing will probably seem like a no-brainer. If you do have problems with emotional control like I do, then maybe this will help you out.

For better or worse, there are a lot of personal anecdotes and viewpoints in here. This writing is based on my experiences, and perhaps they differ utterly from yours. I can only really write what I know, and what I know best are my own emotions and reactions.

Like most of what I write, this is split up into two parts: anger and depression.

For starters, let's talk about the emotion I'm somewhat famous for: anger. I've ragequit, thrown controllers (and other stuff), punched/kicked/headbutted walls (and other stuff), stormed out of venues, and so on. I'd say the culmination of all this happened at Mango Juice earlier this year when, after getting obliterated by Silent Spectre, I did all of the above.

So... anger. One thing I've noticed about it is this: you aren't just "angry." You have a lot of emotions, thoughts, attitudes and experiences combining and boiling inside of you. With the right catalyst, they become a singular, explosive emotion.

Let's take a look at my most explosive outburst. I was just about to get 3-stocked. I was in front of a big crowd of people, almost none of whom were cheering for me. It happened at the tail-end of a long and arduous tournament day, so I was tired; I'd also just made a long trek through loser's bracket after getting stomped on by Zhu (something I also didn't take well).

And then there was my mental state. First off, I put a tremendous amount of pride and ego into the match. Even though I was thinking to myself before the match, "I'm probably going to lose," my mind wasn't prepared to accept that happening, let alone getting 3-stocked. I've built a lot of my identity around being a high-level smash player. I had just screwed up an infinite, my trademark move. A large crowd of people was watching me get reamed. I was the last Arizona player in the bracket and felt like I had to represent my state. I had to represent myself and show people I was a good player.

Every mistake I made was like an insult to myself as a player. When I screwed up an L-cancel or wavedash, it felt like I'd wasted the previous four and a half years of practice and dedication to the game. When I botched my infinite, I wasn't only thinking about the stock I failed to take, but the fact that I screwed up something I can do--and actually *have done*--blindfolded. It peaked when I did an empty short-hop by mistake (to this day I can remember spazzing out and missing the buttons I intended to hit) and SS landed a knee in my face. That was the point I quit the game and flung my controller at the wall, then stormed outside.

Not to mention, I was tired. Managing tournament fatigue is an important part of playing well and placing highly, and I had been doing a very poor job of it. I'd also had *two* emotional outbursts earlier, one after a loss in 2v2 winner's bracket and another after losing to Zhu in singles. Two large outbursts of emotion, a long day... my brain was exhausted. And after that match, assuming I won, I would have to play Zhu--and repeat the same ordeal--and if I somehow won that I'd play Mango, and if through some crazy miracle I beat him in one set, I'd have to do it again.

To top it all off, I'd been looking forward to the tournament for months and now I was--in my mind--completely ruining it (you know, ignore the fact that I'd already made it to fourth place among some of the west coast's toughest competition, and the two people who eliminated me are both really flipping good players).

Mentally speaking, I did not prepare myself to play that match at all. I psyched myself out, so I wasn't prepared to win and keep playing. I invested my pride and ego in the match, so I wasn't able to deal with losing. There was no way for me to come out of this situation feeling good, and the hole I dug for myself got deeper and deeper.

Here are the two main points I want to make by describing that experience. First, anger is a combination of a lot of different things. If you don't want to get angry, you have to be aware of the things causing your anger and manage them. You can't magically decide "I won't be angry," because anger doesn't just magically happen. It's the natural result of a chain of thoughts, feelings, and events, so you have to catch it in advance. If you *do* start getting angry, remove yourself from the situation ASAP before your rage gets the better of you.

The second point I want to make is that every factor contributing to my anger, except for the fact that it was late at night when I played the match, I inflicted upon myself. I decided that I absolutely had to win that match or I'd look like a fool. I decided that making mistakes was an insult to myself as a player. I decided that losing would be unacceptable, that if I won I'd have to play matches I didn't want to play, that I wanted to be anywhere but in the chair I was sitting in, and so on and so forth endlessly. Having decided all that, it was inevitable that I would become angry with the way things turned out. However, I didn't need to make those decisions in the first place. So you can't suddenly put the brakes on your anger, but you *can* decide how you react to what causes it. That, in turn, keeps the anger from ever occurring.

So more or less, I did it to myself. What's funny is that if I hadn't been so bent on winning and playing perfectly, I wouldn't have become so angry. I probably would have played a lot better, maybe even to the point of winning.

It's surprisingly Zen. You have to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time. Giving everything you have to win and pushing towards perfection, yet being content with losing and making mistakes. To get what you want, you have to stop wanting it so badly in the first place. To avoid being angry so you can play well and win, you have to decide that playing well and winning isn't as important as remaining calm.

This, I think, is the key. However, you can't focus on keeping calm without knowing what will keep you from doing so. Let's look at what factors can lead to anger, and what we can do to control those factors and hopefully keep anger in check.

Pride

I believe that pride is one of the main roots of anger. I'm not talking about positive aspects of pride, like integrity and honor. What I'm talking about is self-importance, ego, and lack of humility.

When you have too much pride and someone or something challenges it, it's very easy to beome angry. When you're proud of something you've accomplished and somebody else says that achievement was worthless, it probably upsets you. If you have a positive view of yourself and something happens to turn it upside down, it probably hurts.

Personally, I've developed a lot of pride in myself as a Smash player. It makes me feel fantastic to say that I may be one of the best ICs in the world. I can say that I know way more about this game than most people, that I know more about the Ice Climbers than almost anybody. Weird as it sounds, because I've learned so much about Nana's AI and weird behaviors, it feels like I know her as a person. I've invested a lot into this game, and integrated it into my self-image When things start challenging and contradicting that self-image, it hurts me, because this is an important part of my identity.

So what's the solution? I think it's pretty simple: abandon pride. What good does it do you? It can help you push yourself further, but it can also hold you back. More often than not, pride blinds you to things that are actually happening around you. You can't accept the things that challenge your pride, and being unable to accept them (even when they're true) easily leads to anger.

Or if abandoning pride seems impossible, change the things you take pride in. I've started to put my emphasis on how I feel and think during tournaments rather than how I perform. For most of my career so far, I've entered matches wanting to play at my peak, wanting to win, wanting to be the best. In recent tournaments, however, my emphasis has been on the following things: keeping calm, being a good sport whether I win or lose, maintaining a positive attitude, never getting discouraged, never quitting a match out of despair, and having fun with a game I love. If I can achieve those, then I can take pride in my time at the tournament, even if I've taken last place.

Funnily enough, since I started doing that, I've been playing better and better. When I'm playing poorly and getting angry, I start asking myself questions: "why do I want to win so badly?" I want to be good at the game, but getting pissed doesn't make me any better--it usually makes me worse. "What's the worst that happens if I lose?" Maybe I'll get eliminated from a tournament, but at least I can have fun in the mean time. If I enjoy the time I spend doing what I'm doing, then the time was fulfilling regardless of the outcome. "Who cares if I make a bunch of dumb errors?" Maybe I look stupid, but it's better than looking like a sore loser and getting angry over a bad performance. If I laugh at my mistakes, I can even turn a bad performance into something enjoyable. And then I remember that even players like M2K in his prime would make technical errors; thinking that, I can't honestly feel that mad about my own.

What's most important here is that even when things around me are outside my control, *I* can choose how I view them and how I react to them. If I keep these things in mind, I don't think it's even possible for me to get angry at all. However, if I let them get out of control, anger isn't an emotion I'll just be able to shut off.

In all honesty though, I still haven't gotten rid of my pride, but I think I've channeled it somewhere more useful. I'm proud of the new player I'm becoming, and if something challenges or contradicts that pride, I can use it as a guide for my own improvement. I recommend others do the same.

Denial

Denial, it seems to me, is another part of anger. When things don't go our way, sometimes we deny their legitimacy. Because we can't accept that the problem exists, we can't fix it. It's nice, cliched, and stolen from the twelve-step method for fighting addiction, but that doesn't make it less true.

Let's say that you believe you are the best player in the world, and then you lose. There is now a contradiction between your view and reality. There are several possible responses:

--Claim that the other players aren't really better than you. They clearly just got lucky, or they were playing cheaply or unfairly. You're still the better player.
--Blame your loss on something like a controller malfunction, or an unfair counter-matchup, or that you just got over the swine flu, or that it was raining and made your amputated leg ache, or that your mommy didn't hug you that day. You're still the better player.
--Accept that you lost, and use your loss as motivation to practice.
--Accept that you lost, and decide that being the best isn't as important as having fun.
--Other stuff.

In the first two cases, it's easy to imagine somebody getting angry in those situations. The world is not how they thought it was; they've been humbled in front of other people and can't accept the disgrace of losing.

Of course, maybe your controller DID break or you caught SARS right before your match or something. The point here is not to say "you are always completely 100% to blame for a loss" but for you to honestly acknowledge the source of your defeat.

Often when I'm angry, I start muttering things to myself like "I'm better than this" or "I should be better than this," and, internally, I begin fighting reality.

It's not just Smash. Most people have a tough time accepting hard truths about themselves and the situations around them. People justify and rationalize their own shortcomings and failings because they really don't want to admit certain facts. It's part pride, and part denial.

In place of denial, you want honesty. You need to honestly assess the causes of your loss before you can change them. It's not helpful to say "he picked a gay stage" and pretend that you, not your opponent, is superior. Instead, you have to say, "I was not prepared to win on that stage," and practice it so it will never be a factor again. Don't deny that you weren't ready, and you will help eliminate your anger. You also give yourself a clear plan for improvement. With that in your mind, you won't even have room to be angry; you'll have a positive goal instead.

Outside Factors

There's a lot of stuff going on in your head at all times. Sometimes you're hungry, tired, sick, cold, hot, whatever, and it's throwing you off balance. Sometimes you're worrying about a job you lost, or a fight you had with a friend. I've gone into tournaments worrying about sick relatives on more than one occasion. Sometimes you hate the person you're playing against and want very badly to beat them. Maybe somebody is talking trash about your region, or your friend, or your mother, or your Hello Kitty backpack. Maybe everything just seems to be going wrong; your car breaks down on the way to the venue, and when you get out to see why, a truck splashes you with mud, and then when you get to the venue you find you forgot your controller and during one of your matches a power surge resets your Gamecube....

These things originate outside of you. Though you can try to have some influence on these environmental factors, you can't possibly control them all. The only thing you can do is decide how you will react to the things happening around you. Here are some questions I've come up with to keep myself from getting into out of control rage at external factors.

--Does it actually matter? If it doesn't, I do my best to ignore it. If it does, I move on to the next question.
--Am I somehow able to deal with it? If no, then I just accept it and move on. You'd be surprised how easy it is not to get angry at something if you just acknowledge its existence. If you *can* deal with it, however...
--What's the best way to deal with it? When I ask this, my mental energy gets transferred to solving the problem rather than raging at it.

Steadily eliminate the factors that can cause you stress and anger, and the anger will never become an issue.

I hope this helps. The next section will be about anger's close relative, depression. See you next time.

* *

Below is a write-up from last weekend's tournament, so check that out too!

Peace.

ActiveGamers tournament and notes for improvement.

2009-09-28T14:20:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I attended the ActiveGamers tournament in California.

Even though I only took 7th in Melee Singles, the event felt like a major victory to me for several reasons.

1) Even though at many times I felt myself beginning to get angry, I caught myself very early and kept my cool. Except for when I became incredibly tired, the tournament remained a fun experience for me the entire time.

2) Typically in the matches that I lose, I feel as though I could have been playing much better. I'm making lots of technical errors, getting flustered and impatient, not thinking clearly, etc. This was not the case this time; I managed to keep good control over my nerves and play at a level I was proud of. There was obviously room for improvement (for instance, I could have won ^_^) but I was pretty happy with my play, and I would say it accurately reflected my current skill level. That is, pretty good, but with a lot of places to improve.

3) I took 3rd in doubles with Romeo even though both of us showed up to the tournament without a partner, wondering if we'd even be entering the event. We worked together surprisingly well!

4) I learned some very important stuff about Melee that I can start focusing on and practicing that may be the next step in improving my game.

I also did pretty well in Brawl doubles too, taking 9th with my teammate Darklink. I also improved quite a bit at doubles from this, and if it wasn't for our Brawl 2v2 matches I don't think Romeo and I would have taken 3rd in Melee.

Some highlight moments from the tournament:

--In Brawl 2v2, my teammate played as MK and I played as Wario; during several of our matches we landed our new signature team combo, tornado into fart. Not only that, during one match I actually managed to use Wario's u-air and clap somebody out of MK's tornado from above by falling down into it.
--After winning one of my Melee matches, I got text messages from two different people congratulating me. They'd been watching it on live-stream and were supporting me from completely different states. It was a great feeling and gave me a major confidence boost.
--At Denny's with Mew2King, he opened up the menu and started shouting. The very first thing that he saw on it was strawberry mango tea and he shouted, "I can't get away from him! He's everywhere!"

* * *

Now for the *really* interesting part, which is the stuff I learned and get to improve on.

Studying the opponent's movement

During one of my money matches against a Fox player, I began falling behind and felt like I had no idea where he was going to move next. I was trying to catch him but it felt like I was playing the match with a blindfold on.

Suddenly it hit me, *really* hit me that he actually used relatively few approaches. He would dash dance until he reached the right distance, then come in with a SHFFL'd d-air or n-air. He would drop through platforms and double jump back onto them until I hit a certain distance, then he'd fall through with retreating b-air. If we were under one of the side platforms, he'd run off the edges to b-air me.

As I thought about my other matches, it was the case with almost every other player. They had about three or four approaches that they rely on, and maybe one or two tricks to bait me into approaching. A Falcon might throw out a full-jumped u-air to trick you into attacking, but he has more than enough time to fast-fall a b-air and then retreat. He might land on platforms with a d-air then run off with an u-air to punish you for approaching.

But even knowing this, I was still getting hit by a lot of this stuff. Is it just a lot of spacing errors? Not always; I typically have pretty good spacing. I realized that when I got hit by this stuff, I would only see it coming at the last moment, just in time to realize that I was about to get my face kicked in.

I got to thinking about this and understood that predicting your opponent isn't just knowing what the trick is, or what move is coming. It's about studying how they move and where they move.

In a sword fight, good fighters spend less time watching the sword and more time watching the opponent's feet and torso. In martial arts and boxing, you study the opponent's footwork to understand where they plan to move, how they've shifted their weight and what that means about the attack they're going to launch. So in Smash, it makes sense to me that if you want to be a good player, you don't study only the opponent's attacks, tricks, or techniques, but their movement. The rhythm of their dash dance, the way they fall and guide themselves through platforms, will tell you exactly where they plan to go, and as a result, exactly which move you can expect them to do.

This also tells you that to be better, you need to have as many solid approaches mastered as you can, and that you have to be as unpredictable with your movement rhythm as possible.

Concentration

How do you know you're actually focused on the match?

--Your movements are sharper, faster, and have less error.
--Anytime you have a thought like "how could I have messed that up?" or "what an annoying cheer," it passes quickly from your mind.
--You make your decisions faster and with more confidence. They are also typically better.
--Moments in the match seem to flow naturally together and make sense; each event seems perfectly, completely connected, like it's impossible for anything else to be happening.

How do you do it? I don't know. I'm one of those folks who has trouble concentrating on anything period, so... I have no idea how I can improve in this area. My one experience with absolutely perfect concentration feels very far away from me now.

It makes me wonder if good concentration is a thing that you make happen, or you allow to happen. Or maybe it's different for different people. I don't know. All I know is this is the area of my game that requires the most improvement, and I don't really know how to do that. At least, however, I know *what* I'm looking for, which is a step up from where I was before this tournament.

I'd love it if people posted some advice or personal experiences with good concentration so that I can get some ideas. I'll post my own as they come; for now I can only identify how it feels to be utterly focused and assert that this focus is what creates consistently strong performance. So Adderall, basically.

Kidding! But only kind of.

Doubles

This one is very short. If you want to win in 2v2, don't play 2v2. Turn it into 2v1 as often as possible; wall out the other player and then go in to help your teammate. Any time your teammate gets hit or punished, the opponent should suffer equally if not more. Any time your opponent hits the opponent, you should be there to add damage.

Teams usually have some kind of skill imbalance, so focus on the weaker player. Force the better of the two to make constant sacrifices to help his teammate out, and you can decrease both players' efficacy.

If you know for a fact that you and your partner are better at 1v1, turn the game into two 1v1s! Before Taj retired and we played a lot of doubles together, I was always confident that if he could get a Fox or Falco off the edge, that Fox or Falco would be toast. As a result, my goal was to keep the other player distracted and unable to assist. Likewise, if I land a grab with my ICs, his goal is not to help me combo them but to keep me as free as I can to punish with all my might.

When Romeo and I played M2K and Zhu, Zhu was doing an excellent job of bouncing me around and keeping me occupied while M2K focused on fighting Romeo. M2K was playing Sheik against Romeo's Falcon, so as long as Zhu's Fox kept shining me, M2K could abuse the character matchup advantage he had to its fullest potential. On the other hand, when I got a successful chaingrab against M2K going, Romeo put all his effort into keeping Zhu occupied while I hit M2K with a zero-to-death ledge CG and edgeguard.

So here's the basics: you want to make it 2v1 as much as you can so your opponent can never gain a good foothold with a combo or edgeguard. When your opponents have good teamwork but aren't as good when fighting straight-up 1v1s, you want to force 1v1 situations and abuse their weaknesses.

So pay attention to fighting with your teammate and keeping the opponent from doing the same. It's kind of general, but it's hard to get into the specifics of it when there are so many team combinations and individual playstyles... I'll be posting much more about doubles at a later date though, so look forward to that :)

That's all for now. Peace, folks.

Big announcement...

2009-09-25T03:09:00.000-07:00

I have some exciting news. Though I don't know how successful this project could be, and I alternate between being pumped for the possibilities and doubtful as to its feasibility, what I'm talking about is...

My Smash memoirs! I intend to write a full-length book about my experiences as a competitive gamer; this would be about my induction into the scene, the crazy experiences I've had while playing Smash competitively, and how it's affected me.

I also plan to write a little about *other* games and the competitive experience in general, as sort of an introductory guide to what competitive gaming is all about. I fully intend it to be a marketable item of interest to as many people as possible, gamers and non-gamers alike.

My main doubt is whether or not I'm the person who should be writing this, and if a more successful player should embark on this kind of journey, but I feel the urge to do it.

So the project begins today! I still plan to update the blog with various things, but my primary focus will be on this project. I'm still trying to think of a working title, so any suggestions are welcome :) I'll also be posting random sections from the book on here for you guys to read.

Here is what I'm thinking: for starters, many members of the Smash community might be willing to purchase this book. If I could communicate to a publisher a willing and receptive audience, that would increase the likelihood this could find its way into bookstores. More people buying it = more attention for the book, which = more potential buyers. The bigger it gets, the bigger it can get. I have emphasis on this because my goal is to be a writer of sorts, and it's hard to make a profession out of something that makes you no money.

Most importantly, I'm passionate about this game and I love to write about it. This project is ideal for me.

Why would it be interesting to anybody? I intend to make it as non-technical and emotionally accessible as I can. People would hopefully read it for the same reason they read sports memoirs: for the the ups and downs of the competitive experience. And as far as I know, there are no books quite like this on the market.

This project has a lot of potential factors in its favor and with some savvy I should be able to overcome the cons. So I hope with the community's support, I can turn this into something successful.

And of course, if this book somehow gets any attention at all, it can only mean good things for competitive gaming in the future. So... yeah. This is a big thing for me, and I hope that people will continue to pester me about it to make sure I stay on track.

Next up on the blog will be stuff about emotional control and a tournament write-up.

Peace, folks.

What's in the works...

2009-09-15T05:29:00.000-07:00

Right now I have a bunch of ideas for different articles and posts that I'll be creating in this coming month.

I'll be transcribing some of my thoughts on:

--Playing doubles well, with a bonus feature on using the Ice Climbers in 2v2,
--Managing your emotions during play,
--Being efficient and choosing good options,
--Concentration and attention as in-game resource,

and others as well, probably. There's also an exciting new project that I'm embarking on (non-smash related) that I plan to write about as well, if only to help myself achieve the goal. So that's what you have to look forward to regarding this blog. I hope it proves interesting!

The Best Melee of My Life, Part 2

2009-09-03T17:00:00.000-07:00

Before I start talking about this mentality, I want to link to a Wikipedia article that correlates strongly with how I felt during my matches:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushin

And then this related article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
Lastly, there’s this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes-Dodson_law

For awhile I was wearing the tag “flow” from reading a book of the same name by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, because I thought it was rather inspirational and wanted to remind myself some of the book’s concepts during matches.

In any event, the first two links should give you a good idea of how I felt during my matches, and the third may be part of explaining why it happened.

I’ll repeat from the previous entry: my mind felt like it had no room for any emotional response to anything happening on screen. When I was winning, losing, making mistakes or doing things perfectly, I had almost exactly the same reaction: “okay.” I did some stuff I normally never have the presence of mind to do, and I occasionally did things that were just completely outside my normal playstyle. What was going through my mind? In a lot of ways, nothing, which is weird.

Most people who know me (or read anything I write) know that I’m very analytical; I’ve usually got an analytical voice running non-stop in my brain even when I’m playing important tournament matches. This voice didn’t completely go away, but it felt extremely muted.

Because I’m so analytical, I want to break down that tournament day and see what sort of stuff I come up with.

To begin, I had a decent amount of sleep and woke up refreshed. I’m a total insomniac, especially before tournaments and especially considering I’d just *had* a day full of tournament play. I wasn’t expecting to get even four hours of sleep, let alone a solid seven-and-a-half.

I was pretty anxious about the tournament because I’d played a little Melee the day before and felt really sluggish. That seems to be the case when I move from Brawl to Melee, but it felt really exaggerated and I was thinking I might not place top 3 (or possibly top 5, even). It was looking like the tourney would have me, Taj, Forward, Axe and Light, AZ’s top 5 Melee players; all of those four folks are more than capable of beating me in any tournament on any given day, whether I’m playing well or not. This doesn’t even account for Tai, who plays decently technical space animals and—randomly—goes on rampages where he plays really well. Later that day, he would handily 2 stock my ICs with Falco in a friendly before the tournament, which didn’t help my nerves.

I’m getting ahead of myself. My ride showed up and we stopped by Taco Bell before the tournament; normally I don’t do so hot if I eat a lot, so I got a taco, a chicken burrito and a small Dr. Pepper (cost me about $3.50, go Taco Bell). When we got to the venue I sat down and finished the taco and ate about half the burrito before giving it to Forward. For whatever reason (might have been the nerves) I wasn’t hungry anymore and couldn’t finish.

I played friendlies with some people, and probably won about 30% of them, losing a lot of games with ICs. I was getting the feeling that I wouldn’t be doing well today; even worse is that day was also Brawl low-tier and my lowest tier character, Sheik, is in C tier, one tier too high to enter. I’d been messing around with Mario for the week to try and prepare, but I didn’t have any real hopes about winning.
Here is where I think the making of my mental state began. At this point, I was thinking rather negatively: “I’m going to lose,” “I’m playing badly,” and so on. Thinking like that though I also came to the conclusion, “so what if I lose?”

Most people, particularly after my spectacular rage explosion at Mango Juice, believe me to be a sore loser. This is probably 40% true. I don’t like losing, and I like winning. I want to clarify something though; apart from taking medication and going to therapy for two mental disorders, I invest a lot of my emotion into this game. I practice a lot. I think about it a lot. When I don’t play well, I get very mad, thinking “I shouldn’t be this bad.” I also get mad at my inability to control my temper. I start thinking things like “I can’t. This takes attention away from the game, causing me to make more mistakes, making me angrier, etc.

I don’t want that to be a justification, just an explanation. People shouldn’t flip out and throw their controllers and storm out of venues and if they want to be part of the community, they should learn to control themselves. My recent retirement announcement was based on two things: I felt like I wasn’t improving, and I felt like my mindset and presence were too destructive for me to belong in the community anymore. Good advice from a friend has helped me with the first one; flipping out at Mango Juice made me strongly re-evaluate the second. I’m happy to say that I haven’t flipped out since Mango Juice, haven’t thrown a controller, and haven’t acted like a total disgrace.

But yeah, losing is something I highly dislike. That day, however, it really hit me: “so what if I lose?” People lose all the time. The game doesn’t care about who you are, doesn’t care what your screenname is. There will be more games. There will be more tournaments. Pride and ego have done almost nothing but backfire on me throughout my entire career; maybe it’s time I got rid of them.

My first set against Axe was difficult, and I played about as well as I expected. I won a game from my counterpick, Fountain of Dreams, but otherwise he solidly outplayed me.

It was until I got into my match against South Paw that I started thinking more about my own mentality. He was playing viciously in our first game, landing lots of shines and controlling most of the match. I thought , “at this rate, he could definitely win.” For some reason, I was fine with that. Losing to an opponent who is on top of his game is more of an honor than anything.

At this moment, I had two things in my head at once: I didn’t want to lose, but I wasn’t afraid of losing. Suddenly, they were both gone. I was thinking almost entirely about the game.

I didn’t really see its effects until I got to game 3 against Forward. During games one and two and right before we started game three, I was talking to other people, talking to Forward, and not acting at all like I was 1-1 in Loser’s Finals. Then the moment we hit start and began game three, something changed.

I don’t know if it was Mushin or Flow or what. I just wasn’t thinking about anything but “what next?” Normally I feel like I’m fighting with my hands to get them to cooperate; this time they were just ready and willing to do whatever I wanted. By the time I realized I needed to do something, I did it with no hesitation. Everything was sharp. My conscious mind was only thinking one thing: “keep it up, he can still come back.” And I kept it up, and won. We went to game four, Peach vs. ICs on Dreamland, and I felt the exact same way. I wasn’t playing perfect by any means, but I was playing better than I ever had in my entire life.

Axe came over and sat down to play me, and it was the same. Regardless of the circumstance, winning, comboing or being combo’ed, my mind stayed calm; I remember one thing that stood out—his Falco was approaching me while I was facing backwards. A laser hit my shield and I did the fastest b-air out of shield that I’ve ever done in my life, caught him DI’ing down out of his SH approach and won the round. For a brief second, I thought “did I really do that?” It’s more like I watched it happen.

It sounds absurd to say this in the context of a videogame, but it felt like enlightenment. I felt tranquil, serene, peaceful, quiet, and every other synonym I can throw out there. It’s like nothing mattered but being there and playing. It’s like I wasn’t even holding a controller, like I wasn’t sitting on a couch in a friend’s apartment; it’s like I was somewhere else entirely.

Afterwards I went into Brawl low-tier grand finals (which earlier I had unexpectedly made it to) still feeling this way. I was just watching things unfold, really seeing things, understanding them in ways I never had before, and won 6-0 with a character I barely played. I just could see what worked, and my body just let me make it possible.

What happened and how did it happen? This is what I know: I wasn’t hungry or tired, but I wasn’t full or energetic either. I wanted to win, but I was perfectly willing to accept my losses.

On the one hand, it was the greatest feeling in the world, completely unique and unlike anything I’d experienced before. On the other hand, I’m worried I might never feel it again.

I don’t really know what else to say. See you folks next time.

Another Weekend, Another Tournament, and the best Melee of my life.

2009-09-02T09:59:00.000-07:00

Warning: Long post ahead!

This past weekend an AZ smasher held a semi-small tourney in his apartment. The events included:

Brawl Singles

Brawl Doubles

Melee Singles

Brawl Low-tier

I took first in Brawl Singles with Wario and 1 round of Metaknight, first in doubles with my teammate JustinKamikaze, who played MK and Snake. I went MK for a few of the matches in Winner's and Grand Finals of teams because my Wario wasn't really shaping up, but fortunately my fat man helped bring in the win in the end :) I dislike switching off Wario because too many people have MK experience, I don't seem to have the right mindset to play him well, and relying on him seems like it will be detrimental to my game in the long run. However, he's such a strong character in doubles and I play different in teams than I do in singles, so I guess it kind of works out sometimes? :)

Melee Singles came the next day, and something interesting happened to me (mentally) during one of my matches in loser's finals. Whatever it was, this one day [i]officially[/i] made five years of playing Melee worth it. Every crappy day, every botched victory, every heartbreak tournament elimination, every ragequit, every john, everything.

I'll just give a rundown of my play. First round I got a bye (thanks to the # of entrants and some seeding). Second round, I wound up playing one of the few AZ Brawl players who's also invested some training time into Melee, Jar'd. He's got a remarkably good competitive attitude and he's actually kind of okay at Melee for not being part of its scene.

My next match is against another (relatively) young guy, Axe. For people who don't know him, Axe is AZ's newest up and coming Melee star, beating JMan at Genesis with his Pikachu; he also holds a beastly Fox and Falco. It's bad enough that he's technically flashy, he also knows when to go for efficiency instead, and he makes a LOT of irritatingly smart calls. I think he needs more tourney experience and confidence, but he's also got one of the best attitudes of any gamer I've met and he's unbelievably nice too.

Not in game though. In game he's a jerk, which he demonstrated by repeatedly killing my Nana off the top of Yoshi's and Battlefield with shines and up+b as Falco. He called me out on some of my gambles to try and take the edge rather than return to the stage, so he also got some clutch KOs that way which were a bit disheartening, since I normally get away with that stuff. It sucks when your opponent can kill you AND Nana before you're at fifty just by being intelligent. He wound up defeating me 2-1, and game 3 wasn't exactly what you'd call close :(

Do I want to say that I wasn't really warmed up yet because I'd spent the entire day before playing Brawl? Yes. But I'd also had all morning to get back into my groove, which consisted of Axe destroying me in friendlies as well. No johns!

Loser's bracket I played AltF4Warrior, Southwest forum mod (whom I finally got to congratulate in-person on his engagement.) It wasn't difficult to beat his Marth, but Dan's been out of the serious scene for quite some time and his attendance/entrance was mostly a social thing.

Next match was against South_Paw, another player who's mostly stopped playing. In our first game he seemed to be on top of things with Fox, gimping me *and* Nana pretty fast and going for a lot of surprising grabs, and I managed to win with a solid one-stock. Strangely enough, the next game I four-stocked him in under 1:30

My next match was against Forward, who lost to Axe in Winner's Finals (I'm telling you, the kid is scary). Round 1 he beat me with Falcon on our random, round 2 I took him to FoD where he went Peach and I went Sheik. Neither of us are exceptional with these characters in singles (my Sheik is kind of slow and clumsy, which is much easier for me to get away with in doubles), but the last time I played his Peach in tournament with my ICs, he walked all over me. Bad times.

I barely won, and then something happened. My mind decided to kick into overdrive. 3rd round he took me to Pokemon Stadium and went Falcon, and... I can barely remember anything of the match, except for three things. 1) I made almost ZERO technical errors, something which never happens to me in tournament, 2) I 3-stocked him, something I've never done to Sean in tournament, and 3) my mind went into an unbelievable state of focus that, once again, never really happens to me. For the fourth game, he took me to Dreamland and went Peach. I stayed ICs and 2-stocked him.

I'm trying to find the right words to describe what happened to my mind during this set. To give you some backstory, I have a clinical ADD diagnosis and a prescription for Adderall. I don't take Adderall during tournaments anymore though, because it makes my hands shaky, I get moody afterwards and then I can't sleep later; I pretty much use my medication exclusively for schoolwork and writing. I bring this up because typically it's impossible for me to concentrate on anything for more than thirty seconds unless I take medication.

However, the state of mind I went into was... beyond Adderall. I felt remarkably serene and detached, yet at the same time more intensely into Melee than I've ever been before. This was more than just "in the zone" play, more than just having "a good Smash day" because until that point, I really wasn't. I'd been playing kind of clumsy, my mind wasn't as sharp or fast as I needed/wanted it to be, and my tournament experience was turning out to be very... "bleh."

Something clicked though. I wasn't talking, I wasn't looking at anything but the screen. I could hear the eight or so spectators cheering, clapping and making "ooooh" noises in the background, but they were like white noise. I was aware of them, but didn't have room in my mind to think of responses besides "oh, okay." My hands were completely listening to me in a way that they never do. It's going to sound rather strange, but I felt like my mind, my body and the game were all communicating. Meanwhile, my conscious inner voice was just spectating, struck speechless by the spectacle. And the alliteration.

This state of mind carried over into my matches against Axe. Against his Falco in game 1, the game came down to the wire but at no point did I feel any hint of nervousness. When the last stock was my SoPo (Solo Popo) against his Falco, I pulled out a clutch victory and barely realized I was doing it. Next game he played Falco again and I can't even remember the counterpick (and normally I have no trouble remembering my tourney matches) and I won solidly. Then he went to Yoshi's, with Pikachu and I won again (though he ended with an SD), taking the first set 3-0.

I did not by any means dominate Axe in these matches, but at the same time I felt like I'd never played better in my life. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say I'd never felt better while playing.

In any event, for the first game of set 2 he tried to throw me off by going Jigglypuff, and we played on FD. I spent my first stock throwing out smashes and doing things seemingly with no battle plan, and to be honest I didn't have one. The part of my brain involved with making plans seemed to be on vacation. We went relatively even and both went to 3 stock (IIRC), and then suddenly my playstyle switched up. I ate about 20 percent before landing a grab and infiniting him. The next stock he went for a rest combo, missed, and I infinited him. His fourth stock I won almost purely by outspacing him with smashes, and finished with a basic SoPo d-throw u-air combo to get the V.

It seemed like my brain in the first stock was just taking its time to learn what Axe's Puff liked to do, then it used the next one to exploit that. His Puff isn't nearly as developed as his other characters so it honestly wasn't tough at all. What's amazing is that at this point, my mind was still focused. Normally, when I go into what several AZ players refer to as "beast mode," it only lasts for about a stock. This weird mindset I was in had lasted me for SIX FULL LENGTH GAMES. Between the matches themselves, time spent on selection screens, that was almost thirty minutes of pure focus for me. It was unreal, yet it kept going.

Between sets I did something that should have been a terrible idea and gave Axe advice on how to counterpick ICs. I told him to play on weird stages because "even if the space animals have good advantages on a neutral, the ICs are at their best on those five levels; they hate the weird ones." So sure enough, for game two he took me to Pokefloats (I had banned Battlefield as it was his favorite Falco stage and I had an almost perfect loss record against him there). I figured that this was going to be a lost round and went Sheik, and his Fox three stocked me by lasering me and hitting me when I tried to come close. I can't imagine it would have gone any better with my ICs.

Normally getting three stocked would throw me out of whatever mental momentum I gained, but then again, nothing seemed to be happening normally this tournament. I just shrugged it off, said "nice" to Axe, then told him we were going to Yoshi's Story. He stayed Fox and we played a close game, but I stayed cool, made some good calls, and linked them into grabs. Thankfully I've been working on my d-throw d-air game a lot, and it paid off. I never relied on it since previously I would just go with an infinite. However, since he was at low percent I used d-throw d-air to link into an infinite and seal two of his stocks off textbook openings.

For the fourth game he took me to Corneria. This stage is one of Chu's favorite counterpicks and most ICs assert that it's good for them, but I've personally never liked it. Axe wanted to camp me under the fin, but fortunately I secured a lead and stayed out on the main body of the ship where he had to fight me in a completely open environment. I got the grabs I needed and took game 4, winning the tournament. There's very little for me to say because... I barely remember any of it.

I hope that wasn't too boring to read. The reason I bother posting all of that is because my mentality was radically different from my typical mindset when I play. Everything from my tech-skill to my thought process to my emotional responses to my reflexes were sharpened in ways that I didn't know were really possible for me. I barely spoke except to ask what stage we were going for counterpick, and I'm usually impossible to shut up.

What's really weird is that even after I won the last game (making for nine games of hyperfocused play) I went into the grand finals of the low-tier Brawl tournament with the same mentality still running strong. I came from loser's bracket in *that* as well and kept my mentality to win 6-0 against my opponent who had, earlier that day, 3-1'ed me with total ease.

So for fifteen games straight (six of which were Brawl matches which lasted almost 40 minutes in total when adding in my opponent's counter-stages and character select screens), I played different opponents, different characters and different GAMES in a mental state that I normally can't maintain for more than thirty seconds at a time. By my count, it lasted almost eighty minutes. When the tournaments ended and I snapped out of it, I was both exhausted and exhilarated. The second day of this local tournament was, without question, one of the best days of my career as a Smash player and possibly one of the best days of my life.

I'm going to post again later today with more thoughts on that mentality; this post has gone on long enough. Peace.

Subtractive Playstyles, Part 3: Case Studies

2009-08-28T13:02:00.000-07:00

Subtractive Gameplay, Part 3: Case Studies

I've discussed in part 1 and part 2 the pros and cons of the subtractive playstyle. For the third part, I'm going to look at players who demonstrate this playstyle, for better or worse.

B-stick

For starters, somebody you probably don't know. B-stick is an Arizona Marth player who has managed to remain near the top of AZ's Melee scene for a long, long time. His playstyle has always, for at least 4 years now, consisted almost entirely of of grabbing and forward-smashing.

Unless you are perfect at sweetspotting and edge-teching, he will almost always perfectly time f-smashes and tippers to keep you off the level. He happily stays near the edge for most of the match, using dash-dances into grab and shield-grabs to throw you off the level so he can f-smash away. Occasionally he uses full-jumping forward-airs from his shield, and I swear I once saw him up-tilt. He can wavedash and short hop, but he'd rather walk and smash.

Why is his playstyle so successful? For starters, Marth's f-smash is a really really good move. Damaging and far-reaching, decent speed when it comes out, and with appropriate spacing almost impossible to beat. Its weakness, of course, is its long ending lag; additionally, many bad Marths overuse it and it becomes very exploitable. You can shield it and then wavedash out to punish it, you can roll behind him or simply dodge. Such a good move is bound to be overused, and therefore become predictable and easily beatable.

B-stick seems to break this convention. His f-smashes seem perfectly timed to reach through and hit you just when you decided you wanted to aerial, and at least half of them are tippers. He's very good at judging its spacing, and reading opponents' movements to call when they will leave themselves open. When it comes to using this move, B-stick is a pro. (His advice to a Marth player who was having trouble winning against Peaches was "less technical, more forward-smash," and the player immediately improved).

On top of that, his shield grab timing is very precise, which lets him deal nicely with most characters' shield pressure. He can also actually combo and chase people around the level with aerials when the opportunity falls in his lap, but he prefers to f-smash and grab, which works out nicely for him.

B-stick is hardly perfect though. For one thing, though he's very precise at what he does, he has a definitive technical limit. He almost never short-hops out of shield, he doesn't wavedash out of shield, and he has trouble dealing with people who are just too fast for him. He rarely travels out of state, so he lacks experience and can have trouble reading players from different regions, and sometimes he's bewildered by uncommon matchups.

However, he's been of tremendous benefit to the Arizona scene. He forces people to learn how to deal with his playstyle and the wall of priority that Marth can throw out, he forces them to learn to sweetspot, and he forces them to adapt to his patient yet brutal method.

HugS

HugS is a Samus player whose successful career began based around almost a single move: up+b out of shield. While the meta-game began revolving around Foxes and Falcos with powerful shield pressure, HugS mastered one of the best anti-pressure moves in the game. Using his shield almost as a weapon, he made it very difficult for most players to even attack him as he wormed his way in.

His second major claim to fame was his f-tilt. HugS spaced f-tilt about as perfectly as it could be spaced. He coupled it with wavedashes, erratic dash-dances, and confused people's spacing. They ended up pressuring his shield and eating an up+b, or they would try to space and get poked.

Mastery of these two moves gave HugS a foundational, positional playstyle that let him sneak in a few of Samus' other moves. He loved poking shields, so it came as a surprise when he'd throw out a seemingly random grapple, and when the opponent became too impatient, he'd have an f-smash or charge shot. Combined with solid up-tilting for edgeguards, HugS ate most space animals alive.

He didn't stop there, though. He gradually began adding components to his game that gave him more options and made him more difficult to read. He added up-air and f-air to his Samus game, giving him an extra degree of aerial pressure and combo ability. He also pioneered the use of Samus' n-air to edge guard: when his opponents were focused on sweetspotting and escaping the wrath of his u-tilt, he'd simply run off the stage and n-air them while they were vulnerable (and very surprised). He remained a top player on the West Coast for a long time with his own distinct style until he retired. He claims he'll be making a comeback though, so I'm looking forward to that (but not to playing him in tournament :/).

Chu Dat

Chu more or less invented most of the tricks Ice Climbers players use, and he was singlehandedly responsible for raising them up to high-tier Melee's metagame. He's been, for most of his career, a top contender in every tournament he attends. There was a long period, in fact, where it would be a shock to everybody if Chu did not take top 3 at a tournament, regardless of size and location.

Chu's game, however, was based around surprisingly few things. When he grabbed people, he would have Nana blizzard, and then d-throw d-air them. If they were at KO percents, he would grab smash. When not grabbing, he would focus on spacing d-smashes around his opponent's approaches, intercepting people in the air with u-air, and then throwing out surprise b-airs as his wildcard approach.

What really defines Chu's ICs, however, is the way he moves. The ICs are naturally an erratic character; their wavedash allows them to move in bursts, but their running speed is relatively low. Chu maximizes that by dashing, then shielding to immediately stop his momentum, then wavedashing out of the shield. Sometimes he shields for seconds at a time, sometimes he shields for only a few frames. Sometimes he keeps dash-dancing, sometimes he fox-trots away. The opponent almost never seems his actual decision to attack or retreat coming.

He couples that by slowly figuring out his opponent's timing and favored approaches. This often costs him stocks and even the first game of his set--it's not uncommon for players far beneath his level to take the first game against him, myself included--but by the second game he's unconsciously assimilated his opponent's style. These two skills--they aren't even actual moves--are the main reasons why Chu has always been so good regardless of the state of the metagame: he's difficult to read and a very fast learner.

He's hindered somewhat by the fact that his favored chaingrab, d-throw d-air, is escapable, and more players are familiar with the timing of the smash DI needed to escape; as a result, his grab punishes aren't as deadly as they once were and he's lost some of his efficiency. Nevertheless, he's still an amazing player.

Others

Those are the players who really stand out to me with this playstyle (and they're the ones I've really stopped to analyze). Here are some other examples:

--Hungrybox, a Florida Jigglypuff and recent national breakout, was known for initially relying almost exclusively on Jigglypuff's b-air.

--Drephen, Sheik player from Ohio, was known for happily abusing Sheik's d-smash, and mixing it up with the occasional tilt, grab and f-air. You can see this highlighted in his combo video "All this nigga do is grab."

--JMan, Fox from NY and mentioned in part 2, is incredibly fond of using n-air as his cure-all move, and he's very good with it.

--Just about every community's got one, really.

And that's about it. It's important to know that mastering a technique doesn't just mean being good with one or two moves. Often, it also means skill with your character's movement and understanding their attributes. It means knowing the crucial peculiarities that set your character apart and knowing how to exploit them to maximum advantage. It means knowing how to keep the fight in a place where you have control and forcing the opponent to fight at a pace you dictate.

I hope this has been an interesting and educational read for everybody. Peace out.

A couple things: recent tourney and approaching backwards

2009-08-18T13:51:00.000-07:00

Recently went to a tournament in Tucson, have some sets up against Axe and Forward. Here's the thread.

Those vids should highlight how important it is never to mess up your guaranteed combos. I lose quite a bit of percent and even stocks off mistimed infinites, which is not at all bueno.

It's been awhile since I've fought really fast Falcos; they're scary. You can also see Axe using a lot of f-throw, which (for some reason) makes Nana drop her shield when he grabs you. That keeps her from being able to shield grab, which sucks. The throw hitbox also has strangely powerful knockback, meaning the two of you will get separated in a heartbeat. Falco can also CG with it at low percents :(

And his pressure game... ouch. The real trick to getting away from his lasers and shield pressure is simply calling whether you should roll.

You also see me having to fight off a lot of f-smashes; it isn't until the end of my set vs. Forward that I start spacing around it. Forward likes to predict the rhythm of people's movement, so by the end I was consciously trying to kill off my rhythm and make him whiff. It worked once or twice, I think :D

There's also a spacing against the f-smash where you can shieldgrab it, but I don't know what it is. You might need to wavedash into your shield so that your momentum keeps you from sliding back so far. It might also just be if he simply smashes too deep. Anybody who knows should tell me ^_^

--

Part 2! This strategy seems to work decently well against many people and has helped me out a lot against Captain Falcon players. I've known about it for awhile but I'm only recently really exploring the concept of constantly facing away from Falcon.

The following are reasons why I think it's a good idea:

1) D-smash comes out behind you, so you have those few extra frames to take him by surprise. Catching people when they DI badly is how I land a lot of my KOs.

2) His forward+b is punishable from your shield with short hopped b-air; for that matter, you can wavedash into your shield, then suddenly b-air from it, and you can catch him by surprise.

3) This lets you f-tilt-guard into blizzard really really quickly as you advance. Since hitting him with de-sync'ed blizzards can give you crucial openings, finding ways to sneak them into the normal flow of battle gives you a big edge.

4) It makes your grabs very surprising, because most characters don't grab while sliding at you backwards. Facing the wrong way is a good way to bait the opponent into shielding.

Points 1 and 3 are applicable against a lot of characters, really.

That's all for now ^_^

A brief note about johning and complaining

2009-08-14T16:05:00.001-07:00

It occurred to me last night that making johns and complaints turns you into a worse player. Any time something happens to you and you seriously complain that it's "broken," "unfair," or "gay," you are making yourself a worse player.

If you shift the blame for a loss onto something besides your own mistakes or your opponent's successes, you are telling yourself that you aren't really responsible for losing. It's not that you weren't good enough, something "gay" just happened to you. It's inevitable that this stupid thing happened to you, it was inescapable, it's broken, etc.

Was it really? Don't cement that into your mind. Once you declare to yourself that a matchup is unwinnable or a situation is always going to happen to you, you lose the ability to keep it from coming true.

A personal example: the ICs infinite in Melee is declared broken by some on the basis that it's impossible to avoid getting grabbed, and that every time you get grabbed you will die. It also means that IC players who are "worse" than other people will beat them anyhow.

I noticed something though, which is that the people who didn't seriously complain about the infinite are the ones who did the best job of avoiding grabs. Of course, I still managed to land grabs on them, but they were focused on the solution to the problem. They tried to keep me split apart from Nana, to efficiently KO her; if I was protecting her too well, they would focus on zoning me and shutting me out as much as possible. Even if watching for the grab meant they got hit by other attacks more often, that was fine with them because an isolated u-air is far better than losing a whole stock.

Some people complained that it was cheap, broken, gay, etc., and almost everybody who said that would get their asses handed to them. It's okay though, because I wasn't better and I wasn't outplaying them, they were just victims of my bullshit. They didn't have to improve, I was playing brokenly. I was the "worse" player, they were really "better," and their game didn't have to change. They just had to ban my broken tactic and I'd lose like always.

Maybe the IC infinite *is* broken? Doesn't matter. As long as you have to deal with it, complaining isn't the answer. Same with any other tactic in the game. Marth's f-smash is really good, but it's punishable and avoidable. Peach's d-smash can be DI'd and teched, or baited and punished as well. People complain about how unfair these moves are, and as a result they conclude it's not their fault they lost. This doesn't help them improve; it does the opposite.

I've DEFINITELY been a culprit of this mindset of thinking. ICs vs. Peach is genuinely a difficult matchup, but I've slowly been finding answers and ways to mitigate some of the advantages she has. I spent years whining to myself about how broken and unfair and stupid her character design was, and how she seemed custom-made to rape my ICs; the moment I stopped and said, "okay, let's assume there's a way to deal with Peach. How can I find it and stop losing?" I immediately started doing better. Some of it was simply "space better and outthink her," some of it was tactical, but I wasn't able to find it until I stopped complaining and looked. I still lose to Peaches (it's a genuinely difficult matchup after all) but my attention nowadays is focused more on solving matchup problems, and I do way, way better.

In Brawl--which I play less intensely--I use Wario and he has trouble dealing with campers. His amazing air control makes up for priority deficits against other top tiers, but he still has no projectile and can be grab released into extreme pain. At first I just complained and johned endlessly believing that Wario "shouldn't be able to win," but then... why were other Wario players winning? The fault was clearly mine. I started using his air control to deceive my opponent, DACUS to quickly and surprisingly approach projectile campy characters like Olimar, and as a result my game immediately expanded. I just lost against a Diddy in tournament, so I decided to practice glide tosses and mixing them with DACUSes; I can't wait to see how it works out, if only because it's better and more productive than complaining that Diddy's banana game is unfair.

No johns, Wobbles.

Edit:

It bears mentioning that sometimes things *really are* broken, unfair, or imbalanced. The important thing is that you look at things honestly and not shift blame from yourself as an automatic ego defense.

Subtractive Playstyles, Part 2: Problems and Solutions

2009-08-13T13:07:00.000-07:00

Let's quickly list the pros and cons of a subtractive playstyle.

Pros:

--Allows for low-energy play; by focusing on abilities that you are good at, you don't need to expend unnecessary mental energy executing them.
--Gives you concrete, measurable improvement.
--You quickly become good at some aspect of the game.

Cons:
--It can be difficult to learn which skills are worth improving and focusing on. How do I know which skill I should be putting my focus on, and which ones aren't worth my time right now?
--You may wind up with a gimmicky style and stagnate as a player.
--You may become easy to read.
--If you practice against people who aren't very good, you may think you've mastered a skill but really haven't, and this comes back to haunt you later.
--If you play against somebody who is better with your specialties than you are, or they have mastered a counter to your specialties, then you have nothing to fall back on.

The pros are great, and don't really need elaborating on. Instead, let's look at the cons and find ways to counteract them. After all, I managed to list more of them than the pros, which kind of makes you rethink whether this is a worthwhile endeavor.

Problem: It can be difficult to learn which skills are worth improving and focusing on.

Solution: Study higher level players and pick important, successful parts of their game to emulate. It's tempting to spend time mastering neat tricks that look really cool but have no use or application. I used to devote a lot of time to practicing things like triple shine into short hop reverse double laser; it goes without saying that I've never used it to any effect in an actual game. I should have been watching videos of the top players and seeing which aspects of their game were successful. If they use some move as their bread and butter approach, pay close attention to how they use that move and try to use it in the same way. Learn everything you can about that one move and why it works so well for them, then master it.

Think critically, and focus on subtle details. For instance, look at JMan and his use of Fox's n-air, like in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMAu3XYdVk0 Look at about 0:14, when JMan starts n-airing Scar from the right side of Dreamland across the stage. The first n-air comes out almost the very frame JMan leaves the ground, and he fast falls as soon as possible. He does it again with the second one; JMan is n-airing as fast as he possibly can. However, after jabbing Scar off the ground, he uses a third n-air that is NOT as fast as the first two. This is because if he had n-aired sooner, he'd have hit Scar's shield too early and risked getting shield grabbed; delaying it put him as close to the ground as possible . I'm willing to bet JMan quickly recognized that; he understands how to use n-air properly even when the situation changes in a subtle way. Sure enough though, after he shines against Scar's shield he throws out a fourth very fast n-air to prevent Scar from escaping his shield pressure.

So on the one hand, you may watch JMan and think "if I can n-air as fast as he does, I'll be a top player," which is incorrect. You should be able to control the n-air as well as JMan, and understand its situational uses as well as JMan, and then... you will be able to n-air as well as JMan, and that's it. But it's a great start, and n-air is a great move.

There is a downside to doing this method: with pure imitation you can only become as good as the player you emulate. However, by watching their videos you can also see what sorts of things they get punished for, or where they fail to follow up effectively. That gives you a good roadmap for how you can eventually surpass them. If they're very effective with a character's b-air but they space f-air poorly, you have a clue as to how you can later develop a skill that they don't have.

That brings me to another point: make your own videos and look for some part of your game that gets you into trouble a lot. Focus your energy on improving those parts of your game; if Peach's d-smash destroys you, deliberately let yourself get hit by it and practice teching out of it, practice DI'ing it so you only get hit by it once, learn how to space away from it when Peach CC's you; focus on all the ways that you can get around the destructive power of this one move. When it's no longer an issue for you, train the next trouble spot of the matchup. You may not even need videos if you have a decent memory. Just think of the things that beat you, and turn all your attention to countering one of those things. Once countering it is second nature, move on.

To start with, however, here are some examples of skills that are good to work on and improve: tech chasing with grabs, spacing moves to avoid shield grabs/CCs, dash-dancing away from a move to punish it, sweet-spotting your character's recovery, perfectly timing shield grabs, absolutely mastering your character's chain grabs (if you have one). Lastly, being able to viciously gimp Fox and Falco will always come in handy in tournament, so master that too; pretty much every character can do it :)

Problem: You may wind up with a gimmicky style and begin to stagnate as a player.

Solution: Don't. Resist laziness and keep finding new skills to improve. If you start seeing results and you wind up winning a lot of your games, you may start thinking that your game doesn't need expanding. However, you must remember this: the more mastered skills you have at your fingertips, the more unpredictable, versatile, and creative you can be. Not only that, it often happens that when you learn a new skill it improves the efficacy of your old ones; you get more mix-ups and more follow-ups, which in turn makes you deadlier.

Against some players you can get away with a lame and gimmicky style. Don't let that spoil you into stagnating; the end goal is expanding your game, not limiting it. Remember this, particularly because of the next problem...

Problem: You may become easy to read.

Solution: At first, there really isn't one. Hopefully you'll be *so* good at whatever your technique is--maybe dash-dance camping into a grab, or tech-chasing with u-air on a platform, or something--that the opponent can't avoid it even if he knows it's coming. However, at high levels of play that's very unlikely, because top players are experienced at dealing with many different situations and will probably know the counter to your technique.

Right now though, we're assuming you're NOT at that high level of play, and you're just trying to improve. Don't worry about those top players at this moment. A lot of people have trouble dealing with various tactics; make your technique as unstoppable as it can be, and you'll quickly surpass all those other people. Then you can add new techniques and become *more* unstoppable. As you learn the intricacies of each skill, you end up making better and better decisions, and you can handle more situations.

I reiterate: the only way to avoid the problem of being gimmicky, stagnant, and easily read is to keep mastering new and useful stuff. For now, accept that your game will be limited and move on.

Problem: If you have poor competition, you may think you've mastered a skill when you really haven't.

Solution: Hopefully, you *do* have at least one person in your area as motivated as you. Even if they aren't good, they can still be a sparring partner for training specific situations.

Try this: set a match to time mode and turn the timer off. Pick something to practice, like drill-shining a shield versus shield grabbing. The two of you will be competing to see who is better at the situation, and you just play at it. Even if your opponent isn't good in the context of a real match, the two of you can still improve in this one area, in that one context. Because the timer is off and there is no stock, there's no pressure; you can experiment with the timing, and if you get shield grabbed or shined... so what? You try again, and again, and cement the proper timing into your hands and mind.

You can also try gimmick matches; your opponent will ONLY edge-camp with Sheik and you'll be Fox, and you'll both try to win that scenario again and again. You will only play on Pokemon Stadium during its transformations; when you're not in it, you both just dash dance around and practice movement tricks.

The goal of this is not only improving your skill at these situations, but to make your competition better.

If you *don't* have a training partner or your local scene is far beneath your level, then you'll have to be imaginative. Even when practicing Brawl by himself, Mew2King tried to imagine and construct in-game situations that he could practice. He'd send a computer Snake into the air with Metaknight, then intentionally up-air beneath him and miss, pretending that the computer was a human who would try to fall and air dodge through him. M2K would fall as he u-aired, then jump and n-air, tracking the computer's movement.

If you're alone, try and practice situations that are very likely to occur. For example, you might play as Marth against a computer and throw it onto a platform. Then you practice hitting it with a tipper after it misses its tech. Try to learn where you need to stand to have the most control over the platform, so that when an enemy is stuck above you, you never miss the tipper. Do the same thing with up-tilt and f-tilt, learn the different spacings on Battlefield, Yoshi's Story, and Pokemon Stadium.

Watch videos and practice scenarios as though you were in those matches. Even though no two matches are identical, most situations are remarkably common and you can find ways to rehearse them, even without an opponent.

Problem: If you play against somebody who can counter your specialty, you'll have no contingency plan.

Solution: There isn't one. In a lot of ways, it's not even a problem. You can say "I should have practiced something else," but that's not very helpful; the same problem will still occur, maybe even against the same opponent. You may wish you were better all-around, but if your opponent is experienced that won't help much either. You may wish to plan and be ready for every scenario and every kind of opponent, but that's not realistic. It's highly likely that you will come against some player or some tactic that simply outclasses what you've got at the moment. Understand that these kinds of losses are possible and then use them as maps. Use them to tell you what skill you should train next, or how you can further expand the one you're using.

Here's something to keep in mind though; in the tough matches that matter, you may have to take risks to win. Perhaps you *will* have to do something with a low chance of success because it's the only path to victory, or it's just more likely to succeed than your other options. It may be something that you're bad at, something that's crazy and situational, or even something that's just really really stupid. There's nothing wrong with going for these, provided you believe it's pivotal to winning that particular game. You never want to give up on a match, or completely assume at any moment that it's hopeless for you. I've seen people drastically improve in the middle of a match to come back and beat people they "should have" lost to; in a few rare instances, I've done it myself.

Furthermore, don't let any kind of pride dictate the way you play. You are not forced to win with your chosen style, or finish with a signature combo. You also aren't forced to play in an entertaining way, or mix up your game when it's disadvantageous. Pick the path that you believe will lead you to victory. If it's your specialty, fine. If it's something you've never done before, fine. If it's boring, fine. If it's risky and exciting, fine. Just remember that in a serious match, you are playing to win by whatever means available to you.

Please comment if you have any questions or comments; this section can be organic and I'll add to it if people raise important or interesting points.

Subtractive Playstyles, Part 1: Theory and Method

2009-08-11T14:21:00.000-07:00

First, a Shaolin proverb, slightly paraphrased:

"I do not fear the ten thousand kicks you have practiced once. I fear the one kick you have practiced ten thousand times." The meaning behind the proverb is simple: a bunch of awkwardly performed kicks are no match for a single one done with utter mastery.

Second, an interesting article on game design courtesy of David Sirlin: http://www.sirlin.net/articles/subtractive-design.html

I recommend you read it, but if you don't want to, this is the main point some of the most powerful and interesting games have, at their core, very few elements to them. This is because the developers took time to deeply explore those few elements, polish them, and ensure that they were perfect (or near to it). Anything that detracted from those elements was then removed or changed to complement them. He mentions two of my favorite games, Portal and Braid, and I felt gratified because I previously thought--in significantly less concise and enlightening terms--the same thing about them. At their heart they are simple games, but the gameplay they deliver is top-notch; their simple components can be twisted and shaped in countless ways because they are well-developed. That is why those games are deep, entertaining, and acclaimed.

I've learned a lot of lessons about competition and life from playing Smash: consistent performance is key, find ways to turn disadvantages into advantages (and when you can't do that, play in a way that keeps those disadvantages from becoming an issue), honing the basics is an absolute must if you want to be a top pro, and so on. In light of Sirlin's article, I thought about a theory behind how any player can practice, improve, and become high level players. I feel that many people get discouraged when they hit a wall, and the reason most give up is because they do not know how to push past it. They don't have a method for improving, so they practice and train haphazardly, go nowhere, and eventually quit from frustration.

In other sports, there are countless coaches and teaching methods designed to make players improve. For instance, if you don't know why your golf swing is bad, hire a coach and he'll (hopefully) be able to tell you what you need to do to change it. This kind of resource is significantly harder to find for competitive gamers. I really like Melee and I don't want people to quit; playing it seriously against a skilled opponent can be a lot of fun and it sucks when players stop for the wrong reasons. You decide the game isn't for you, fine; you have other life issues that take higher priority, no problem; you really want to get better but don't know how and the game stops being fun, that's bad.

It's really hard to find a concrete method that says "here is how you get better," because every player is at a different point in their development. So all I can really do is offer basic recommendations; hopefully it helps.

Let's go back to the proverb and the article by Sirlin. The most terrifying kick to a Shaolin monk is one that its user has practiced ten-thousand times. The deepest and most entertaining games are ones that have a few elements that are explored and polished as much as possible. I believe that the reason the best players are as good as they are is because they have mastered a few key areas of their respective characters. Then, they try to make the match take focus on those areas as frequently as possible, and stay away from situations outside their mastery.

That said, the method for improvement is simply put: pick a single, important aspect of your chosen character, and train it exclusively until it becomes as flawless as possible. Once you have done that, choose another aspect of that character, and train *that* until it is flawless. Keep doing this, and your game will expand. When you play important games (tournaments and money matches), do your best to keep the game within your areas of mastery.

Think of it another way. When you play a match, a bunch of different situations crop up. You and your opponent will both be on the ground, making it a ground game. Then, one of you will be in the air, turning it into air versus ground, then vice versa. There will be aerial combat where you are directly above the opponent at 12 o'clock. There will be combat when you'll be beneath him, above him and in front, above and behind. There are times when you edgeguard and the opponent is high, times when he is low, times when he is even with the stage; likewise, you will be edgeguarded in those circumstances as well. There are a lot of different situations in any given match, and if you want to be good, it makes sense you need to be good at controlling those situations.

Now let's make up a number and say there are 10 skills you need to master to have a good Fox (it's probably higher but that's not important at the moment). Let's also say that you get... 400 points to split among those skills, and they max out at one hundred. Most players would then have about 40 in every skill. That's below average at each of the skilsl you need to be good at Fox. That makes you a below average Fox. With training you get more points, but right now, you're crummy everywhere.

Now imagine a player who has 100 in two of his skills, then 25 in the other eight. Same 400 points, but he's an absolute master of two of the necessary Fox skills. Any time he is using one of his two good skills, he's a champ. When he isn't, he's garbage.

If you were that player, you would try to make sure that when it counted, you were applying those skills and not using your others. Your game would only have two components, but they would be perfect. As long as you could keep the game going at your pace, you'd be untouchable.

Let's say that player gets more skill points; say he gets... eighty. He could evenly distribute them (100, 100, and eight 35's), or he could invest them in a single skill (100, 100, 100, a 30, and six 25's.) Which is the better choice? He could have another skill that he can always perfectly rely on, and then try to make the game revolve around his three skills. Or, he could continue to have eight below average skills, and keep trying to stick with his two mastered abilities when he plays seriously.

I would argue that the first option is far superior. When you have a useful skill perfected, it becomes a reliable tool that wins you games. The more reliable tools you have, the higher your odds of victory. If you take your unreliable tools and only make them slightly more useful, you guarantee nothing. Even more than that, when you have a skill heavily ingrained into you, it takes very little energy to use it. That leaves you with the energy to concentrate on other parts of the match. If you are constantly expending energy to use skills that may not even work, you weaken your own mind.

The conclusion: focus your training. Pick an important part of your game that needs work and focus on THAT AND ONLY THAT. Once it is mastered to the point where you can rely on it safely and comfortably, select a new part of your game to train.

In part 2, I'm going to talk about some of the problems and issues that arise from this style, as well as ways to deal with them. Part three will be case studies, examples of these playstyles in the Smash community :)

First non-introductory post: Focused Revelation

2009-08-06T07:40:00.000-07:00

One of the nice things with messing around in Smash is that, to this day, I still find random things about it--specifically the ICs--that I never knew/noticed before.

A recent discovery is that you can up+b right as you dash off the edge of the level, turn around, and grab the edge while belaying Nana into the air. She gets her normal hitbox/invincibility frames, you grab the edge from the stage. Quick and kind of cool looking. Useful? Your mileage may vary :)

The best part about it is that I found with a crazy burst of logical insight. I thought, "you can turn around with their up+b, right? And if you jump just before you run off the stage, sliding off the edge will cancel the jump animation; that means I can up+b without using their double jump. What if I can just cancel this onto the edge and grab it?"

I guess the best term to describe this is "focused revelation." You put yourself in a position where innovation and discovery are possible, then put all your energy and exploring mutations of... something. In this case, I was noodling around with the ICs up+b and thinking of all the ways that up+b's can be manipulated. "Sheik has a trick like this, Jigglypuff has a trick like this, why not the ICs? After all, you can wavedash backwards off the level and buffer the up+b so you slide off as you begin, letting you grab the edge. Why not run off, turn around, and get the same effect?" And it worked! More often than not, your crazy ideas will turn out to be legitimately crazy and then flop, but sometimes they work out. This time, mine did. I found a new way to up+b cancel onto the edge with the ICs and look cool in the process.

So yeah, focused revelation. Pick one thing in any environment, any field, any circumstance, and explore it as much as possible. Combine that thing with any other thing you can think of, mutate it, twist it, bend it, and see what happens. It works just about everywhere, I think, and is a key to developing personal creativity. Since this is a blog about Smash however, I've been thinking about how many follow-ups you have to any opener, and I'm getting some unusual results.

Example. I've been messing around with IC's jabs as an edgeguarding tool--I've seen how many times people die to random weak hits at the edge, and realized that being immediately below the edge with no control over your approach angle is a bad place to be for many recovering characters. So why not jab them, and see what happens?

Well, for starters, a lot of people randomly air-dodge and give me free KOs. That's great, since until the late 100's and onward, jabs are untechable, and if people start mashing R and L they may wind up air-dodging by accident. Second, the IC's jab has deceptive range *beneath* them. Against a Falcon, you can repeatedly jab (only really doable with two ICs, I think) as he up+b's and just poke him. He drops below the edge, up+b's again, and you jab again. Duck cancel the jab, and repeat.

In the case of Falco, I would normally try to tilt or smash their recovery, but now I've found that if I just jab, Falco becomes incredibly easy to finish. I can jab and wait for him to recover so I can smash. If he goes too low, I can just edgehog. But this is boring, and in the spirit of focused revelation, I want to keep exploring. What else do I have? Well, I can also try to tilt or grab his recovery if he comes above the level.

What else? I've covered jabs, tilts, smashes and grabs. How about B-moves? Blizzard is a nice soft poke that might stun him and cause him to drop again, but it has more lag than the jab and sometimes freezes the recovering opponent, popping him up and giving him his 2nd jump back. Iceblock would be great for gimping, but when they're right below the stage the angle is usually all wrong. Up+b could work; after all, I have a new trick for grabbing the edge quickly; I could fake him out by pretending to stay on the edge and edgeguard, then quickly get the edge and let him fall. I have an idea for forward+b, but this is the wrong circumstance for it.

This leaves me with my aerials. I could drop off the stage and suicidal d-air, but that has a low chance of killing him unless he's already low. B-air could work if I get the reverse hitbox and hit him away from the stage, otherwise I give him a chance to tech. F-air might pop him up or spike him, but he could meteor cancel. Alternatively, I could stay on the stage and try to edgeguard with both f-air and b-air, or I could grab the edge and try getting him with the ledgehopped d-air loop. I could go down and use u-air, but that defeats the purpose of hitting him that low; then again if he's at a low percent, the soft u-air might send him nowhere and set up for another hit.

Of course, that effect could easily be outperformed by using n-air, which is exactly what I've started doing. Jab the Falco while he tries to recover; when he falls beneath the level, walk off and n-air him as he tries to up+b. N-air's low knockback makes it very suitable for gimp KO's in this circumstance; it also has a quick recovery, meaning I can quickly forward+b with Nana to recover. If Falco tries to be persistent, I can also double jump and n-air again, then forward+b or up+b afterwards. Catching him that low with such a weak hit guarantees he will be sent at a bad trajectory, and it makes for a very easy, untechable, deadly edgeguard off the relatively easy to use jab. I like it!

In fact, now that I know n-air is so effective at dealing with Falco here, where else can I use it? No spoilers! Go explore!

Today we start climbing

2009-08-03T16:11:00.000-07:00

This blog is about my growth as a competitive gamer. Specifically, I play Nintendo's Super Smash Brothers Melee in tournaments. I go by the name of Wobbles in the Smash community and play as the Ice Climbers.

Recently I announced to the community that I was going to retire, and that my gameplay/combo video Bipolar would be the last Smash related thing I did. That is not the case anymore :) Thanks to Genesis and the effort involved in making the video--still in production--my interest and passion has been rekindled. So the community hasn't managed to get rid of me yet.

Why start a blog? Well, for one thing, I was inspired by Sean "Forward" B, who started his own blog at http://forwardfox.blogspot.com/. Second, I intend to be a writer by profession, and the best thing any writer can do is keep in the habit of writing, no matter what he/she is writing about. Third, I like my fellow IC players, and if I keep updating here with things *I* learn, it might help them get better. Fourth, it's an ego boost. Yayhuzz.

Also, I picked the name, then found this: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=eskimo+sisters

Dammit.