Playing to Win, Part 1

I wrote this article many years ago. It was so widely quoted and valuable to so many that I spent two years writing the book Playing to Win. The book is far more polished than these articles, better organized, and covers many, many additional topics not found on my site. If you have any interest in the process of self-improvement through competitive games, the book will serve you better than the articles.



Playing to Win, Part 1

Playing to win is the most important and most widely misunderstood concept in all of competitive games. The sad irony is that those who do not already understand the implications I'm about to spell out will probably not believe them to be true at all. In fact, if I were to send this article back in time to my earlier self, even I would not believe it. Apparently, these concepts are something one must come to learn through experience, though I hope at least some of you will take my word for it.

Introducing...the Scrub
In the world of Street Fighter competition, there is a word for players who aren't good: "scrub." Everyone begins as a scrub---it takes time to learn the game to get to a point where you know what you're doing. There is the mistaken notion, though, that by merely continuing to play or "learn" the game, that one can become a top player. In reality, the "scrub" has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He's lost the game before he's chosen his character. He's lost the game even before the decision of which game is to be played has been made. His problem? He does not play to win.


This dog may be playing poorly, but at least he still has his nonsensical internal code of honor.

The scrub would take great issue with this statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevent him from ever truly competing. These made-up rules vary from game to game, of course, but their character remains constant. In Street Fighter, for example, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations "cheap." So-called "cheapness" is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn't attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design--it's meant to be there--yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield which will protect him indefinitely. Why? Exploring the reasoning is futile since the notion is ridiculous from the start.


You're not going to see a classic scrub throw his opponent 5 times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimize his chances of winning? Here we've encountered our first clash: the scrub is only willing to play to win within his own made-up mental set of rules. These rules can be staggeringly arbitrary. If you beat a scrub by throwing projectile attacks at him, keeping your distance and preventing him from getting near you...that's cheap. If you throw him repeatedly, that's cheap, too. We've covered that one. If you sit in block for 50 seconds doing no moves, that's cheap. Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime candidate for being called cheap.

Doing one move or sequence over and over and over is another great way to get called cheap. This goes right to the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Is he such a poor player that he can't counter that move? And if the move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then wouldn't I be a fool for not using that move? The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. The game knows no rules of "honor" or of "cheapness." The game only knows winning and losing.

A common call of the scrub is to cry that the kind of play in which ones tries to win at all costs is "boring" or "not fun." Let's consider two groups of players: a group of good players and a group of scrubs. The scrubs will play "for fun" and not explore the extremities of the game. They won't find the most effective tactics and abuse them mercilessly. The good players will. The good players will find incredibly overpowering tactics and patterns. As they play the game more, they'll be forced to find counters to those tactics. The vast majority of tactics that at first appear unbeatable end up having counters, though they are often quite esoteric and difficult to discover. The counter tactic prevents the first player from doing the tactic, but the first player can then use a counter to the counter. The second player is now afraid to use his counter and he's again vulnerable to the original overpowering tactic. (See my article on Yomi layer 3 for much more on that.)

Notice that the good players are reaching higher and higher levels of play. They found the "cheap stuff" and abused it. They know how to stop the cheap stuff. They know how to stop the other guy from stopping it so they can keep doing it. And as is quite common in competitive games, many new tactics will later be discovered that make the original cheap tactic look wholesome and fair. Often in fighting games, one character will have something so good it's unfair. Fine, let him have that. As time goes on, it will be discovered that other characters have even more powerful and unfair tactics. Each player will attempt to steer the game in the direction of his own advantages, much how grandmaster chess players attempt to steer opponents into situations in which their opponents are weak.


Sometimes I just don't know what to say.

Let's return to the group of scrubs. They don't know the first thing about all the depth I've been talking about. Their argument is basically that ignorantly mashing buttons with little regard to actual strategy is more "fun." Superficially, their argument does at least look true, since often their games will be more "wet and wild" than games between the experts, which are usually more controlled and refined. But any close examination will reveal that the experts are having a great deal of fun on a higher level than the scrub can even imagine. Throwing together some circus act of a win isn't nearly as satisfying as reading your opponent's mind to such a degree that you can counter his ever move, even his every counter.


Can you imagine what will happen when the two groups of players meet? The experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics they've either never seen, or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules.


The scrub has still more crutches. He talks a great deal about "skill" and how he has skill whereas other players--very much including the ones who beat him flat out--do not have skill. The confusion here is what "skill" actually is. In Street Fighter, scrubs often cling to combos as a measure of skill. A combo is sequence of moves that are unblockable if the first move hits. Combos can be very elaborate and very difficult to pull off. But single moves can also take "skill," according to the scrub. The "dragon punch" or "uppercut" in Street Fighter is performed by holding the joystick toward the opponent, then down, then diagonally down and toward as the player presses a punch button. This movement must be completed within a fraction of a second, and though there is leeway, it must be executed fairly accurately. Ask any scrub and they will tell you that a dragon punch is a "skill move." Just last week I played a scrub who was actually quite good. That is, he knew the rules of the game well, he knew the character matchups well, and he knew what to do in most situations. But his web of mental rules kept him from truly playing to win. He cried cheap as I beat him with "no skill moves" while he performed many difficult dragon punches. He cried cheap when I threw him 5 times in a row asking, "is that all you know how to do? throw?" I gave him the best advice he could ever hear. I told him, "Play to win, not to do ̃difficult moves.'" This was a big moment in that scrub's life. He could either write his losses off and continue living in his mental prison, or analyze why he lost, shed his rules, and reach the next level of play.


I've never been to a tournament where there was a prize for the winner and another prize for the player who did many difficult moves. I've also never seen a prize for a player who played "in an innovative way." Many scrubs have strong ties to "innovation." They say "that guy didn't do anything new, so he is no good." Or "person x invented that technique and person y just stole it." Well, person y might be 100 times better than person x, but that doesn't seem to matter. When person y wins the tournament and person x is a forgotten footnote, what will the scrub say? That person y has "no skill" of course.

Depth in Games

No one has ever been as bad at anythng as this man was at being president. At least learn from your mistakes.

I've talked about how the expert player is not bound by rules of "honor" or "cheapness" and simply plays to maximize his chances of winning. When he plays against other such players, "game theory" emerges. If the game is a good one, it will become deeper and deeper and more strategic. Poorly designed games will become shallower and shallower. This is the difference between a game that lasts years (StarCraft, Street Fighter) versus one that quickly becomes boring (I won't name any names). The point is that if a game becomes "no fun" at high levels of play, then it's the game's fault, not the player's. Unfortunately, a game becoming less fun because it's poorly designed and you just losing because you're a scrub kind of look alike. You'll have to play some top players and do some soul searching to decide which is which. But if it really is the game's fault, there are plenty of other games that are excellent at a high level of play. For games that truly aren't good at a high level, the only winning move is not to play.

Boundaries of Playing to Win

There is a gray area here I feel I should point out. If an expert does anything he can to win, then does he exploit bugs in the game? The answer is a resounding yes...but not all bugs. There is a large class of bugs in video games that players don't even view as bugs. In Marvel vs. Capcom 2, for example, Iceman can launch his opponent into the air, follow him, do a few hits, then combo into his super move. During the super move he falls down below his opponent, so only about half of his super will connect. The Iceman player can use a trick, though. Just before doing the super, he can do another move, an icebeam, and cancel that move into the super. There's a bug here which causes Iceman to fall during his super at the much slower rate of his icebeam. The player actually cancels the icebeam as soon as possible--optimally as soon as 1/60th of a second after it begins. The whole point is to make Iceman fall slower during his super so he gets more hits. Is it a bug? I'm sure it is. It looks like a programming oversight to me. Would an expert player use this? Of course.

The iceman example is relatively tame. In Street Fighter Alpha2, there's a bug in which you can land the most powerful move in the game (a Custom Combo or "CC") on the opponent, even when he should be able to block it. A bug? Yes. Does it help you win? Yes. This technique became the dominant tactic of the game. The gameplay evolved around this, play went on, new strategies were developed. Those who cried cheap were simply left behind to play their own homemade version of the game with made-up rules. The one we all played had unblockable CCs, and it went on to be a great game.

But there is a limit. There is a point when the bug becomes too much. In tournaments, bugs that turn the game off, or freeze it indefinitely, or remove one of the characters from the playfield permanently are banned. Bugs so extreme that they stop gameplay are considered unfair even by non-scrubs. As are techniques that can only be performed on, say, the player-1 side of the game. Tricks in fighting games that are side-dependent (that is, they can only be performed by the 2nd player or only by the first player) are sometimes not allowed in tournaments simply because both players don't have equal access to the trick--not because the tricks are too powerful.


There are some limits to playing to win. Not sure if this is one of them.

Here's an example that shows what kind of power level is past the limit even of Playing to Win. Many versions of Street Fighter have secret characters that are only accessible through a code. Sometimes these characters are good, sometimes they're not. Occasionally, the secret characters are the best in the game, as in Marvel vs. Capcom. Big deal. That's the way that game is. Live with it. But the first version of Street Fighter to ever have a secret character was Super Turbo Street Fighter with its untouchably good Akuma. Most characters in that game cannot beat Akuma. I don't mean it's a tough match--I mean they cannot ever, ever, ever, ever win. Akuma is "broken" in that his air fireball move is something the game simply wasn't designed to handle. He's miles above the other characters, and is therefore banned in all US tournaments. But every game has a "best character" and those characters are never banned. They're just part of the game...except in Super Turbo. It's extreme examples like this that even amongst the top players, and even something that isn't a bug, but was put in on purpose by the game designers, the community as a whole has unanimously decided to make the rule: "don't play Akuma in serious matches."


Sometimes players from other gaming communities don't understand the Akuma example. "Would not a truly committed player play Akuma anyway?" they ask. Akuma is a boss character, never meant to be played on even ground with the other characters. He's only accessible via an annoying, long code. Akuma is not like a tower in an RTS that is accidentally too powerful or a gun in an FPS that does too much damage. Akuma is a god-mode that can't coexist with the rest of the game. In this extreme case, the community's only choices were to ban or to abandon the game because of a secret character that takes really long to even select. They chose to ban the secret character and play the remaining good game. If you are playing to win, you should play the game everyone else is playing, not the home-made Akuma vs. Akuma game that no one plays.

My Attitude and Adenosine Triphosphate

I've been talking down to the scrub a lot in this article. I'd like to say for the record that I'm not calling the scrub stupid, nor did I even coin that term in the first place. I'm not saying he can never improve. I am saying that he's naive and that he'll be trapped in scrubdom, whether he realizes it or not, as long as he chooses to live in the mental construct of rules he himself constructed. Is it harsh to call scrubs naive? After all, the vast majority of the world is scrubs. I'd say by the definition I've classified 99.9% of the world's population as scrubs. Seriously. All that means is that 99.9% of the world doesn't know what it's like to play competitive games on a high level. It means that they are naive of these concepts. I really have no trouble saying that since we're talking about experience-driven knowledge here that most people on Earth happen not to have. I also know that 99.9% of the world (including me) doesn't know how the citric acid cycle and cellular respiration create approximately 30 ATP molecules per cycle. It's specialized knowledge of which I am unaware, just as many are unaware of competitive games.


Not everyone has to know every subject. This chart is for biologists and Playing to Win is for those who want to win tournaments.

In the end, playing to win ends up accomplishing much more than just winning. Playing to win is how one improves. Continuous self-improvement is what all of this is really about, anyway. I submit that ultimate goal of the "playing to win" mindset is ironically not just to win...but to improve. So practice, improve, play with discipline, and Play to Win.

--Sirlin

Playing to Win, Part 2: Mailbag

Rebuttals and Clarifications
My original Playing to Win article generated an incredible amount of e-mail, mostly of the form:

Dear Sirlin,

I thoroughly enjoyed your Play to Win article. It has changed the way I think about games. [Or, I always believed the same things about games but you put them into words for me.] What you described about Street Fighter is exactly the same for [game X] that I play.


You could be up there. I don't think there's any internet connections up there, though.

This brings us to point 3 from way back ("there are more things to life than winning"). A lot of people get rubbed the wrong way by this stuff because they think I want to apply "playing to win" to everyone. I don't. It's not that I think everyone should or would want to be on that peak. There are other peaks in life, probably better ones. But those who are stuck in the chasm really should know their positions and how to reach a happier place.

Thanks for all the responses.

--Sirlin

This man just read Playing to Win.

"Game X" took the form of Counter-strike, Virtua Fighter, Magic: the Gathering, Legend of the 5 Rings, Starcraft, Smash Brothers, Scrabble, Tiddlywinks, and many others. It's sort of like when a supreme being speaks and each listener believes the words were spoken directly to him in his native language. Ok, it's not exactly like that, but I had you going there. Seriously though, communities surrounding all sorts of competitive games do face the exact same issues.

Now that the overtly self-congratulatory portion of the article is over, let's move on to those who had disagreements and questions about "Playing to Win."

The Objections

There were some who objected to the entire notion of playing to win. Here are representative samples of their views:

"But I really have a tactic that wins every time! Tower rushing in Warcraft 3 [or camping in Unreal Tournament, or whatever else]. It's not that I'm a scrub, but the game is more fun when I don't use that tactic and when I play against others who also don't use it."
Bad news for you. You are a scrub. You can't e-mail me and claim not to be a scrub, yet exemplify the only pre-requisite! (Well you can, but please don't.) What's worse is that the tactics stated are always tactics I know for a fact not to be "too good." Does tower rushing win every Warcraft 3 tournament? No. Are all the best Unreal Tournament players hardcore campers (players who sit in one spot on the map)? No. Then what are you complaining about? Learn the counter to the strategy. If there is no counter (there is a 99.9% that there is, but you don't know about it), then enter some tournaments, win them all and prove it. If you manage to do that, then fine, you've exposed the game as a degenerate one that you should probably no longer play. Otherwise, expand your horizons and learn more about the game. I suppose you could continue to play your homemade version of the game against other scrubs, but I think you'd be missing out.

"What about using the map hack in Starcraft, or a packet interceptor, or a macro to cast your spells faster, or a server that enforces no camping in a first person shooter, or just a swift kick to the shins of your opponent?"

First let's address the smarty-pants questions, then get to the heart of the issue. One of the great things about playing to win is that it's a path of self-improvement that can be measured. Becoming a better cook is also path of self-improvement, but it's more subjective and much more difficult to measure. In playing to win, we have the cold, hard results of winning and losing to guide us. I think it's only useful to consider winning and losing in the context of formal competition, such as tournaments. Kicking your opponents in the shins is outside the scope of the game, and is not legal in any reasonable tournament.

Likewise, any 3rd party program obtained from an illegal warez site and installed as a hack into your game is also not going to be legal in any reasonable tournament. These things, though technically useful to those trying to win, are outside the path of continuous self-improvement that I'm talking about. You should use any *tournament legal* means to win. If you participate in some strange tournament where all players are allowed to use a map hack, then go for it. You're playing a rather weird, non-standard version of the game, though, which defeats the whole purpose of shedding extra rules so as to play the same game as everyone else. Any reasonable person would consider "no cheating from outside the game" to be part of the default rule-set of any game.


Things outside the scope of the game are usually banned.
Leave your narcotic analgesics at home, kids.

The case of a server that monitors camping (sitting in one place too long) in a first person shooter, is a little more interesting. It meets the very important criteria for a ban of strict enforceability (players need no friendly agreement; the server knows exactly who breaks the rule and hands out a penalty). I think it fails on two other counts, though.

1) The tactic of camping is almost certainly not a game-breaking tactic, so it has no place being banned in the first place.

2) If it were a game-breaking tactic, it's just too hard to fairly monitor. If camping is defined as staying within one zone for 3 minutes, and if it really is the best tactic, then sitting that zone for 2 minutes 59 seconds becomes the best tactic.
A ban must be enforceable, warranted, and concrete (or discrete). The last requirement is really just part of the first, I suppose. Imagine that repeating a certain sequence of 5 moves over and over is the best tactic in a game. Further suppose that doing so is "taboo" and that players want to ban it. There is no concrete definition of exactly what must be banned. Can players do 3 repetitions of the 5 moves? What about 2 reps? What about 1? What about repeating the first 4 moves and omitting the 5th? Is that ok? The game becomes a test of who is willing to play as close as possible to the "taboo tactic" without breaking the (arbitrary) letter of the law defining the tactic.

Some games have it easier than others when it comes to banning. In the card game Magic: the Gathering, it's easy to create an enforceable, discrete ban. "Card X is now illegal. If you have card X in your deck, you are disqualified." The tough part there is whether the ban is actually warranted.

Street Fighter Again!

Speaking of banning, forgive my tangent into the world of Street Fighter. In the 10 year history of the 30 different versions of the game, there has only been one banning issue which had any serious debate: the issue of "roll canceling" in Capcom vs. SNK 2 (CvS2). So-called "roll canceling"is a bug-exploit that allows a player to cancel a ground roll within the first 5/60ths of a second into any special or super move, retaining the invulnerability of roll during the special or super. Let's try that again. Roll canceling is a bug requiring difficult timing that allows a player to have many invulnerable moves that the game designers never intended.

Some people claimed that players would never master roll canceling. That was just foolish, so I'll pretend I never heard that. Players will master anything that will help them win. Some players claimed that if you can beat person A, but not person B, and both A and B learn to roll cancel, that you will still beat A but not B. Others believed that even if the game ended up being all about roll canceling vs. roll canceling, that there would still be a game. Others, including myself, believed that roll canceling would ruin the game, making it degenerately unplayable. The actual results are amusing.

On August 9-11, 2002, we held the largest fighting game tournament ever in the United States. 20 players from Japan attended and CvS2 was one of the 3 primary tournament games. Most American players did not learn to roll cancel (including myself, I did not take the game seriously). Most Japanese players did. The 7th and 8th place finishers were from the US; the top 6 finishers were all Japanese. The player who won the tournament, Tokido of Japan, played Blanka and Honda(!?), using nothing but roll cancelled invulnerable versions of their self-projectile moves. This tactic absolutely destroyed the #1 US player (who even used roll canceling himself!), and the other Japanese finalist, who was clearly the better player. The "better player" just never got a chance to actually do anything during entire the set of games since the roll cancelled Blanka ball seemed unbeatable.

Should roll canceling be banned? I'm pretty sure it meets the standard of "warranted" since I'm satisfied that under serious tournament conditions, the game completely fell apart into a joke. Unfortunately, the ban would be practically unenforceable, since roll cancelled moves are exceedingly hard to actually detect or prove. I should note that many top players of the game believe that the tactic creates a different, but non-degenerate game, so it should not be banned. Ha!

Whew, we made it through more Street Fighter mumbo-jumbo. Back to the complaints!

"But playing hard against beginners (or my girlfriend) is mean. I play down to their level so it will be close."
This one is tough. Many people presented elaborate situations which were basically equivalent to them being stuck on a desert island with only one video game and one opponent who is doomed never to improve and claimed that it is more fun not to play to win since it would always be a blowout. In such a case, I suppose I concede the point.


Apparently, several of my readers are in this situation.

But what about a case where you have ready access to a variety of opponents? I'll present the case of legendary Street Fighter player Thomas Osaki (darn, back to that game again). I did not actually play with Thomas during his heyday, but I have since met him and I hope he forgives any misrepresentation of his conduct during his glory years.

Thomas Osaki dominated the game of Street Fighter in Northern California. His reputation for "playing to win" was quite extreme. They say he never really engaged in "casual play," but rather always played his hardest, as if every game had something on the line or was a serious tournament. They say he played this way regardless of his opponent, even if his opponent was a 9 year-old girl with no skill at the game. He would "stutter step, throw" her like all the rest (a particularly "cheap" tactic). Did he have no compassion at all? Was he just a jerk? I like to think of Thomas (or his legend, in case it happens not to be true) not as mean player, but as an inspiring player. He set a bar of excellence. In his path of self-improvement, he was not willing to compromise, to embrace mediocrity, or to give less than his all at any time. His peers had the extraordinary opportunity to experience brilliant play whenever he was near, not just at rare moments in a tournament.

And what of the 9 year-old girl? Perhaps she had no business playing in the first place. From Thomas's view, getting her off the machine allowed him to face the opponents he "should" be facing anyway.

*pause for hate-mail*

Because I'm psychic, I can tell that you violently object to the above, and that you have three specific grievances:

1) "I can't play that way, because if I did, and even if I believed it was the best path to self-improvement, I DON'T have a steady stream of opponents in the game I play. I have a limited audience and playing that way, or playing to win at all, alienates them so I am forced to tone it down."
2) "If everyone played that way, no one would ever be able to learn the game."
3) "There are better things in life than winning. You are just a rude bully."

On the fist point--yeah. You got me. If playing your hardest prevents your opponents from playing you, and you have access to only a very few opponents, I guess you're stuck. Sorry. Too bad you don't play Warcraft 3 or some internet game with endless opponents. You will be unable to improve past a certain point, so make the best of it, find more opponents, or play a different game.

On the second point, I guess you got me again. You, the expert player, are powerful in the narrow domain of whichever game you play. How will you use that power? Perhaps you will judge who is worthy to be taught the secret knowledge and who is to be dispatched quickly. Perhaps you will take one of the two extremes, and either defeat all or nurture all. No matter what you do, I am strongly in favor of you passing on your wisdom and passion to other players. It's no "fun" being good at an esoteric game with no players, so it is even to your advantage to train and mentor new players. But beware--all training and no "real playing" can weaken you. Thomas "trained" his peers by exemplifying excellence, setting an inspiring standard. But what is the "moral" thing to do? Does morality matter in this context?

This whole area is far beyond the scope of my ability to advise. It all comes down to what your goal really is. To improve yourself? To improve others? To win? To have "fun"?

We need to take about 100 steps back and remember what the whole point of "playing to win" was in the first place. It's certainly not about beating 9 year-old girls at Street Fighter.

The Whole Point

Imagine a majestic mountain nirvana of gaming. At its peak are fulfillment, "fun", and even transcendence. Most people could care less about this mountain peak, because they have other life issues that are more important to them, and other peaks to pursue. There are few, though, who are not at this peak, but who would be very happy there. These are the people I'm talking to. Some of them don't need any help; they're on the journey. Most, though, only believe they are on that journey but actually are not. They got stuck in a chasm at the mountain's base, a land of scrubdom. Here they are imprisoned in their own mental constructs of made up game rules. If they could only cross this chasm, they would discover either a very boring plateau (for a degenerate game) or the heavenly enchanted mountain peak (for a "deep" game). In the former case, crossing the chasm would teach them to find a different mountain with more fulfilling rewards. In the latter case, well, they'd just be happier. All "playing to win" was supposed to be is the process of shedding the mental constructs that trap players in the chasm who would be happier at the mountain peak.


You could be up there. I don't think there's any internet connections up there, though.

This brings us to point 3 from way back ("there are more things to life than winning"). A lot of people get rubbed the wrong way by this stuff because they think I want to apply "playing to win" to everyone. I don't. It's not that I think everyone should or would want to be on that peak. There are other peaks in life, probably better ones. But those who are stuck in the chasm really should know their positions and how to reach a happier place.

Thanks for all the responses.

--Sirlin

Playing to Win, Part 3: Not Playing to Win

Ok, ok. I’ll let you in on the secret: “playing to win” at all times is counter-productive. If you want to win over the long-term, then you can’t play every single game as if it were a tournament finals. If you did you wouldn’t have time for basic R&D, you’d never learn the quirky nuances that show up unexpectedly at tournaments, and you are likely to get stuck honing sub-optimal tactics.

Basic R&D

Playing to win and playing to learn are often at odds. If you play the game at hand to maximize you chances of winning, then you won’t take the unnecessary risks of trying out new tactics, counters, moves, patterns, or whatever. Playing it straight is the best way to win the game at hand, but at the cost of valuable information about the game that you may need later, and valuable practice to expand your narrow repertoire of moves or tactics.

Here’s a simple example from Street Fighter. Let’s say I know for a fact that one split second from now my opponent will do a particular “super move.” To win the game at hand, the smartest thing to do is just block the move, but that doesn’t teach me a whole lot. How invulnerable is his super move, anyway? Could I have stuck out an early kick that would knock him out of his super? Or could I have waited for the “super flash” to happen (signifying the beginning of his super move) and then done an invulnerable dragon punch 1 frame later? Maybe my invulnerability will last longer than his and I’ll knock him out of it. Maybe his will always win. That’s valuable information to have for the time when you have zero energy and the opponent forces you to block the super move and die. This situation will happen in the tournament, so you better know what your options are.

Very often in “casual play” I will forgo the safe option in order to try possible counters to certain moves. Even if I lose a game when a possible counter turns out not to work, the knowledge gained is well worth it, since I’ll never make that particular mistake again (I hope!). If you really want to play to win, you have to know all the options open to you at every moment, and that doesn’t happen without a lot of disastrous experiments.

This concept applies to pretty much any game, of course. “Will my 6 corsairs really beat his 12 mutalisks in StarCraft?” Or, “I know I have the flak cannon, but will the shock rifle combo work just as well around corners in Unreal Tournament?” You will never know unless you try it.

Honing Sub-optimal Tactics

Early in a game’s life, players have not yet figured out which strategies and tactics are actually the best...though many players will claim to know all. Those players may very well know better tactics than other players of their time, but games evolve. New things are discovered that obsolete old tactics. Usually, radically different and better tactics are discovered that put the old ones to shame. Sometimes, new counters are discovered that can entirely defeat the old “best” tactics. In a fighting game, you also have the concept of figuring out which characters are the best. It can take months (or years!) for players to figure out that character X, though widely thought to suck, is actually able to abuse bug/feature Y in such a way as to be nearly unbeatable.

So how does all this relate to playing to win? The hardcore “Play to Win” player will choose his one character, his set of powerful tactics, and hone them to perfection over time. He’ll know all the tricks for that character to perform those tactics. For example, in the fighting game Marvel vs. Capcom 1, he might pick Mega-man and learn the “rock ball trap.” This a pattern of attack where mega man creates a soccer ball (“rock ball” in Japan), kicks it diagonally across the screen, then fires one blue projectile in the air, then one on the ground. That’s 3 projectiles total controlling the play field. While the opponent deals with that, Mega-man has time to summon another soccer ball and repeat the pattern.

A serious Mega-man player will learn the rock ball trap variations needed against Chun Li, the different variations needed against Venom, and so on. Other players will find tricks to negate the usefulness of the rock ball trap in general, then the Mega-man player will find the counter-tricks that allows him to keep the pattern going. This will feel a lot like “Playing to Win,” but in the end, this player will do precious little winning. He will have mastered a sub-optimal tactic that in the end is not bad, but isn’t 1/10th as good as other things that other characters can do.

I think of a game as a topological landscape with lots of hills and peaks that represent different tactics/strategies/characters. The higher the peak, the more effective that strategy is. Over time, players explore this landscape, discover more and more the hills and peaks, and climb to higher locations on the known hills and peaks. Players can’t really add height to these peaks; they are only exploring what’s there. The problem is, when you reach the base of a new peak (say, the rock ball trap peak), it can be very hard to know that the pinnacle isn’t very high. It might be really difficult to climb (lots of nuances to learn to do the trap), but in the end, the effectiveness of the tactic is low compared to the monstrous mountains that are out there. You have reached a local maximum, and would do better to exploring for new mountains.

In other words, playing to win involves exploring. It involves trying several different approaches in a game to see which you are best at, which other players are best at, and which you think will end up being the most effective in the end. When you are perfecting your rock ball trap (your best chance of winning at the time), you have to realize that “playing to win” might actually involve taking up a new character you know nothing about...a character that you will eventually play 10 times better than you could ever dream of playing Mega-man.

Learning Secret Lore

Tournament play often creates critical moments of decision when you are exposed to a very strange situation in the game. In a tournament, the best players get to play each other, often with a clash of play-styles. They each have their own tricks and must find immediate answers to the tricks of their opponents. And it’s not just for fun anymore, it’s “real.” It matters. Under this pressure players find creative and unusual solutions to they tricky spots they get put into.

When these strange situations come up, will you be familiar with them? Do you know the options and the risks involved? Knowledge of “secret lore” or unusual interactions in a game often means the difference between winning and losing.

And how will you learn this secret lore? Perhaps you are preparing for a tournament, practicing, playing to win. What will you practice? You’ll practice the things you know you need to do the most in a match. You’ll practice against the things that you know you’ll face? Basically, you’ll do it all “by the book.” Consciously preparing for a tournament is pretty much the opposite of exploring “unusual situations.” In your practicing, will you seek out a player of a character you think sucks? Will you play characters you have no intention of playing in the tournament? Probably not. But what happens when a mysterious player out of nowhere shows up with that “sucky” character, and shows everyone how good that character really is? That other character you were messing around with might be just the thing you need...too bad you didn’t explore that. You were “playing to win.”

The Karmic justice of it all is that love of the game really does count for something. Those who love the game play it to play it. They mess around. They pick strange characters, try strange tactics, face others who do the same, and they learn the secret knowledge. Those who play only to win can’t be bothered with any of that. Every minute they spend playing goes toward climbing their current peak, attaining their local maximum. Perhaps they don’t even like the game enough to be bothered with anything except the most mainstream character and the most mainstream tactic with that character.

I practiced pretty hard for a tournament in Super Turbo Street Fighter that occurred on August 9th-11th 2001. Before the tournament, I decided to play only Dhalsim and to practice him a lot against whoever I could. I also happen to actually like the game, and I’d sometimes mess around with my “fun characters” of Honda and Ryu, and occasionally with my “professional” character: Bison. Dhalsim was my focus, though.

When the actual tournament came around, I would have never guessed what it all came down to. My Dhalsim did well, and it came time for me to face a well-known Japanese player who plays T-Hawk. T-Hawk is known to be terrible, especially against Dhalsim, but this was a prime example of a player who could work magic with a “sucky” character. After one game, my Dhalsim was utterly destroyed, and I needed a change of plans. I figured that my “casual play” Honda would do well, since I could sit and do nothing the entire game and be safe from T-Hawk. If he ever got near, I could head-butt and knock him away, then sit and do nothing. (See my article on The Art of War: The Sheathed Sword.) Anyway, my performance, a true exhibition of stubbornness and boringness in tournament play, paid off. I defeated the Japanese player in an utterly ridiculous character matchup that no one would ever predict actually happening in a tournament. I went on to lose another ridiculous character matchup against a different Japanese player, but that’s another story.

The unlikely moral here is that playing to win is often counter-productive. Those who love the game and play to play will uncover the unusual nuances that might be important in a tournament. Those nuances might never be important, but the “play to play” player doesn’t care. It’s all for fun, and he’s happy to accumulate whatever knowledge he can. The “play to win” player might lock himself into perfecting certain tactics/strategies/character that will eventually be obsolete, as hard as that will be to believe at the moment. Meanwhile, the player who is able to take a step back and mess around will either discover new mountains to climb, or at least take a stab at climbing some other known mountains. The joke’s on you when his mountain turns out to be 10 times higher than yours.

Postscript—

Months after writing the above article, I traveled to Japan in March 2003 as part of Team USA, representing the US in Super Turbo Street Fighter. I also played a bit of Capcom vs. SNK 2 over there. One interesting thing about Japanese players is that they stick with just one character (or one team of characters in CvS2), since their tournament format requires keeping the same character the entire tournament. In the US, we can switch characters between games, giving us an incentive to learn at least 2 to 4 different characters.

The Japanese players definitely proved to me that by sticking to one character and learning EVERYTHING about that character, you win the unwinable matches. In both Street Fighter games I played in Japan, I saw Japanese players who devoted themselves to supposedly weak characters and demonstrated the topological peaks for those characters are miles higher than I had realized. One might think that invalidates some of the points I made in this article...yet the winner of the CvS2 tournament used the same old unfair, broken characters and tactics that we’re all aware of (A-groove roll-canceling Blanka/Sakura/Bison for those who care). That same player, Tokido, won the CvS2 portion of the 2001 tournament I mentioned above, so perhaps he’s proved my point after all. He’s identified what many players agree is the highest peak of that game, and devoted himself to perfecting it. Unfortunately he’s an incredibly boring player, but nonetheless a boring player who won the US National and Japan National tournaments!

--Sirlin

tl;dr

It read like a self help article that was thirty pages that could have been two.

Reading thru this article made me think of every post about "spamming" that I've read here at MK Online!

Excellent post--there are a lot of people who could benefit from reading this.

Thats all pretty good except for the fact that this guy thinks he knows what is more "fun"

He might think it is more fun to be critical and strategic and in depth.

Others may find it more fun to mash.

"He" is not one to say what is better for anyone.


Beyond that he is right about you know . . . playing to win

duh

I agree 100%

People complain that Kung Lao is cheap because his spin beats everything, or Raidens torpedo is to fast , ect but they forget that they are the ones jumping into the fucker everytime.

You have to learn to be patient. It doesnt matter how bad you want to attack, if you let go of block brfore a combo string ends your gonna get hit, there is no magic thing thats fonna make your punch beat theirs.

Learn to out smart your opponent, dont just rush after them mindlessly, because that is exactly why spam tactics work, you keep falling for it !

I use Sindel, and if I get distance you better believe im going to shoot fireballs from as many angles as I can to keep you there. i
Its not because I cant do big combos with her, its because there is less risk, and that is one of the tools that that character has.

Smokes teleport is the same way. If you knock me down, and I wake up telepot punch you and land it every time, its not spam ... Its you not being patient enough, or having the fore sight to wait and block so that you can counter it.

Winning is fun, so play to to win.

Well i think we can agree, there is some assumption in this article. as far as what one considers fun, but we can all agree, getting pissed over a losing a game is definately not fun. After i read this a while back i took getting destroyed in a positive way and it has gone a long way in helping me get better.

Agreed. Great article, perfect place for it. Pity the people who need it won't bother to read it.

wow, that's a hell of good article that CyRaXdF put here ! Well done, dude ! XD

Ummmm.... Ive only been saying this shit on here since the game was released, and everyone critised me and told me to stfu?


... What the hell?

I think it's funny that he defines what is a fun way to play. If I put the amount of time into fighting games that he does I would be bored out of my mind. He also undermined the entire point of his writing in the last paragraph when he said the player who won the tournament was an incredibly boring player . Boring? I thought it was playing to win, not playing to be flashy and excite your competitors and spectators.

What hes stating is that when you play to win and give yourself the best advantage. It will often involve a strategy that will not appease the masses, " boring". he isnt complaining about that style of play. Its more of a real life example of what he is talking about. Also I would say to the comment of him defining a fun way to play, my argument is that if you are someone who curses the game and loses and thinks its a scam or a cheat. Then obviously your not having fun the way YOU play anyway. That was the whole point of posting this article. If you have fun win or lose (very few do) and you dont mind losing countless matches, then you dont have an issue to begin with and none of this article will apply to you. Pretty much the main point to practice while playing, is take your losses, but instead of getting pissed about it, use the energy you would waste sending a hate message or cursing to sit and think about what the other guy did that got you so mad and destroyed your play style. And do your best to adapt your style instead o getting mad.. You should actually play the same guy who beats you over and over even if you lose for two reasons. 1. everyone knows you only get better playing better players. 2. The more you practice against a guy with a set strategy the better prepared you are when you see it again. and you will see it again.

Ummm, yes, you've posted things saying that people shouldn't get mad about online, but this is a very well written article by a tournament level player that provides experience and insight--that's like wanting credit for something that someone else invented and made a reality because you once has an idea for something that was kind of similar.

Not trying to bust your balls here, but it's not even close to the same thing.

lol, fuckin' Sirlin.

Must be your eloquent use of language. Shakespearian english turns the regulars of this site off so keep that in mind and try dumb down all your well written posts.

I don't know if you know this but, not jumping at them doeasnt help, I've had time where I've had my special beaten by both of those moves, when I attacked first at sometimes second, they just have to much priority over others moves.


Some characters are almost defenseless against Kung Lao, seriously, try fighting a kung Lao that does nothing but air kicks, low hats, teleports and spins and maybe that one combo that kicks you into the air USING SHANG TSUNG. He's to slow to get a normal hit or combo in and kun can teleport behind him when he goes for a fireball.

I really think that kung's spin should be like Baraka's spin.


And it's not about losing, it's because it's REEEAAAAALLY annoying. I've just as many Kung Laos as I've lost to. they ALL fight the same with minor differences.

That spin is like a giant middle middle finger, it's like a big spinning "fuck you" that sets up an easy +40% combo.

All that Im saying is that since I played goosu2006 about 2 days after PSN was availible, I explained to him about playing to win and not criticizing the style of others.

Throughout posts where people complain about "spam" I have repeatedly said that there is not spam, and that crying spam is a scrub mentality. I even used those exact words.

Then recently I made a very long post describing my own evolution from a scrub to a more mature player.

I had the same message as this article, and yet I was criticized as someone who was too harsh, not fun, and probably a spammer. None of which is true.

I am not a tournament level player (610-510 I think is my record), but I have embraced the play to win philosophy.

Im paraphrasing here, but essentially I was told that I was an idiot and for saying the exact same thing that is said in this article, and I dont understand why that is.

I spam low kicks. Spammers unite!

Why are combos admired but spam is looked down upon? Combos make your opponent totally defenseless with no out. Spamming allows countering with careful observation and planning. If you feel spamming is unfair, look in the mirror, because I can't get out of that 26 hit combo, and I haven't complained once about it.

Wow. This whole post has opened my eyes to a lot of things. Every1 on MKO should at least read this, in full. Changes my whole attitude about online gaming.

I have to honestly say that I do not want to be a large combo-player. It's just not my style. I do get destroyed by combo players much of the time, but I accept that for now. (It's always fun to beat them though - I frustrate the hell out of some scorpion players who rely on that teleport by anticipating it and low-kicking - then of course, I'm a newb who should learn how to play, even though I beat them).

It's just the style of play that I don't want to engage in. I don't really like the fact that you can get 1 hit in and the next 32 hits are free. I don't fault players who use combos and I admit they are better players than me. I don't complain when they beat me, either. I know what I'm getting myself into.

So, does that make me a scrub? Or am I just an average player who enjoys playing other average players?