Break and Gameplay

I meant to blog this earlier but didn't.  I had a nice holiday break.  My family and I went up to my wife's parents' home in PA for Christmas for the week.  It was great to be able to relax a bit, eat good food, and have some extra hands to help out with Noah.  Plus, while we were up there, I made the drive out to NJ to hang out with Bioslayer and his brothers, Biodrunk and Bioblaze. 

Yes, we drank plenty of beer and played a bit of Halo, which might surprise some.  Probably the best part of the night was toward the end.  We were sitting around sort of bored with Halo by that point and had 8-10 beers in each of us.  Biodrunk started playing rumble training.  He also has his wireless headset sitting on the table, and we can hear this one guy running his mouth.  We were all just yelling in the room and being obnoxious.  Then Bioblaze got out his wireless phone.  For some reason, he had this .wav file of the most god-awful cat meow you've ever heard.  It sounds like a cat taking crack while in heat.  The thing lasts about 30 seconds.  So he took the wireless headset and starts playing this file for everyone to hear in the room.  We're all dying, I'm hung over the couch LMFAO, and the guys in the rumble game were yelling all sorts of shit from "STFU!" to another guy that was making cat noises of his own.  Ah, drunken fun.  This continued for about 8 games or so until it was no longer novel.  But oh man, that's great stuff.

After I got back to PA, I got the sinus cold from hell and am just now past the worst of it. To be honest, I'm surprised I didn't miss a day of work this week.  Tuesday and Wednesday, I thought either an eye or a tooth was going to pop out from the pressure.

Noah got entirely too many toys over Christmas.  Off the top of my head, he got a toy piano, a Radio Flyer, a Little People's castle, a Little People's pirate ship, about 10 books, 3 puzzles with like animals, trucks, and vegatables that you put in and out of a wood piece, clothes til summer, a rocking pony, some car thing, a rotating zebra thing that he can sit on and ride, etc.  That's crazy.  So now all this shit's in my living room and he's still dragging around a shirt that I used to sleep in like it's his blanket and he's Linus.  Kids.

A good number of folks from the site have gamed with Onslaught and probably know that he's a very skilled player.  He doesn't use combos or glitches much, he just shoots people.  I think I mentioned this before, but back in the day he LAN'd Halo CE with Rippon, Stew, Canada, Trainee, DirT, Naka, Nataku, and other Utah gamers.  So he's been a Halo guy from the start and is just a natural at FPS.  Anyway, this game is a 3v3 on Ivory Tower.  It's a good vid to see how to whore the OS and move around on your onesy.  Enjoy.

BTW, sorry about the interlacing.  He just started capping and this one of his first.

Jared

Posted by biorod @ 3:31 pm EDT | Permalink | 4 Comments

Christmas Party

Tonight's one of the nights I dread all year long - party at my wife's boss's house.  As much as I threaten to introduce myself as "Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger" or fake illness or drink myself into a coma, my wife still insists that I have to go.  I don't like the people in her lab.  They're the kind of people that you can have a conversation with and yet, when it's over, you never really felt like you were acknowledged in any way whatsoever.  There are a couple that are nice, but they're actually friends of ours, so it's unnecessary to attend a lame party to hang out with them.  That's the good news, I suppose.  My buddy Adam will be there and I should be able to throw down enough beers to render everyone else tolerable.  At least I'm off work tomorrow, so that's something to look forward to...that, and the party ending.

We're leaving for PA on Friday night.  Usually we break up our drive by stopping at my wife's aunt's home north of Balitmore and spending the night there.  However, I'm thinking about heading up VA-17 to I-81, making the entire trip all at once, and avoiding DC.  I figure that since Christmas is Monday, the world will be on I-95 on Friday night.  Thanksgiving was an absolute nightmare traffic-wise the Tuesday before turkey day, so I'd prefer to not experience that unpleasantness again.  Of course, Amy's worried that this will upset her aunt, but I'm sorry.  Oh yeah, I'm taking my XBox 360 up there.  Amy asked me if I was taking it, which, strategically, is a mistake since posing the question implies permission. 

Oh yeah, yesterday we're driving to Southern Season and about a mile or so from my house we see a crime scene unit, several police officers, and law enforcement vehicles outside of this house.  Apparently, four men posed as police officers, invaded the house, handcuffed the occupants, put plastic bags over their heads, and got to stealing stuff.  The word is that it was drug related and the perpetrators knew the occupants of the home, but I'm still waiting to find out.  I'm glad they caught the guys because I'm always nervous when someone knocks on my door.  The world's not a safe place and I don't have an eye hole in my door.  Usually I just yell "who is it?".  If police come to my door, I might just call 911 to find out if it's really the authorities.

Had some fun customs last night with Shawntomitall, Bioslayer, Rebirth, Torn, Psybertech (Bioslayer's brother), MrWhite, and Stridog.  I think we did a good job to keep the teams well-balanced.  I'm happy to see my assists per game is rising.  I think VoD has really helped out with showing me how to keep active, not chase, and establish strategic positions on the map.  I was hoping to upload a CTF Midship game that I unfortunately had to end early because Mr White dropped out.  The game went almost 9.5 minutes and I had 13 kills, 12 deaths, and 16 assists.  After every game, I look at assists, shots fired, and shots hit.  I've consistently been in the top of THC and custom games with shots fired and hit.  I'd like to get my hit % up a little, but that's hard to judge since I'll often fire off multiple bursts in the hopes of landing just one of them.  Oh well.

Here's an oddball game on Lockout we played last night.  Sort of a messy game but it was fun and a close one.  Enjoy.

Jared

Posted by biorod @ 3:53 pm EDT | Permalink | 1 Comments

Home With the Boy Next Week

My son's daycare closes for two weeks this month.  The good news is that we only paid 1/2 of the normal month's fee this month.  The bad news is that we don't have anyone to watch him.  So I'll be home Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday with the boy and my wife will be home Monday and Wednesday.  It'll be nice to hang out with him those days as long as he's done teething!  His mouth has been swollen this week in the 1st, 3rd, and 4th quadrants so he's been a bit of a nightmare at times.  If that continues to next week, well, dad's gonna give him some tylenol and it'll be nap time.

He normally naps about 3-4 hours a day, so I'll be able to get presents wrapped, clean up a bit, and of course, play some Halo!  So if you see me on those days, shoot me a message.

Jared

Posted by biorod @ 2:12 pm EDT | Permalink | 1 Comments

The Dresser Night

Last night was fun.  My wife has been dying to order the chest of drawers that matches my son's crib and changing station.  It was normally $300-something but went on sale at Sears for like $140.  So we ordered it and had it shipped to a nearby store to avoid paying the shipping.  Of course, it had to be picked up last night.  We went over the weekend but the box was too big for the back of our Ford Escape.  We asked our friends to borrow their truck, which they said was fine, but my friend Adam was working until 9:30.  I didn't want him to work late only to have to help me pick up furniture after he got off, so we agreed that I'd meet him at work, take the truck, pick up the dresser, take it home, take the truck back, and drive my Escape home.  That took about 2 hours.  As I'm driving home, my wife calls me and asks if I can go by the grocery store and pick up a few things so she can make meatballs for a picnic they're having at daycare today.  I've never been in and out of the grocery store so fast...I didn't want to be late for the FFA.  How sad is that? 

I finally got home, gave my wife the groceries, and started heading upstairs when I heard, "Aren't you going to help me make meatballs?"  "Um, no."  Then I got this rather unpleasant look but I kept heading upstairs.  "I'm the defending champion, I have to go!"  "Don't you feel the least bit guilty not helping me?", she asked.  "Yeah, but baby, you know how it is!" 

That's right.  That's how it works in my house!

All in all, I spent from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM getting the dresser and groceries.  Then right before the FFA starts, she was having problems with the printer.  Jeeebus!  Long story short, I'm fixing that tonight.

The FFAs were pretty good though I finished 5th in the final game.  That was a rough game and I never really had anything going.  The best I did in the three games was 2nd place in the 2nd game of the first round.  I apologize in advance for always seeming to find sys in there.  I wasn't looking for her, honest, FFAs just go that way.

Afterwards, Bioslayer, MGK, Onslaught, and I did some THCs, which we won save for a game against a modder that claimed to be DSing us like crazy.  We also did an oddball Lockout game against Profanity, which I've also uploaded.  That game was decided by 2 seconds, and let me say, I'm glad the clock expired when it did.  So GG to them.  I didn't do very well in the game, but since it was fun and very close, I uploaded it.

Jared

Posted by biorod @ 6:53 pm EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments

"Play to Win" Article

I found this article a while on this site or another, I forget where, and I read it from time to time.  Anytime I hear someone complain about shotgun, noob combo, sword, nades, whatever, I think of it and I smile:

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, we have a word for players who aren’t good: “scrub.” Now, 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.

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.

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.

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 every 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

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 an arcade game that lasts years in an arcade versus one that lasts 4 months. This is the difference between a PC game that lasts years on the shelves (Starcraft) 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 one player side of the game. There are a few esoteric tricks in various fighting games that are side dependant—that can’t be performed on the 2nd player side, for example.

Here’s an example of the grayest area of all. 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 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.”

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.

Posted by biorod @ 11:01 am EDT | Permalink | 7 Comments