138: If Only Wally West Could Wavedash

[Vortigar]

Rob:
That's the essential difference and point of the article really. They were having a tournament on a level that a tournament level player would consider casual. It's very hard to make stipulations against that kind of thing, other than not throwing something open to the general public and keeping it internal.


This article came across to me as someone who's been harshly introduced to the concept of fighting game competition. Personally I think its rather funny to see a modern day example, as many have had these kind of experiences in long gone days with SF.

As for glitches in fighting games, simply said: they will be used. They have been used since SF2. And a lot of these glitches have been later interred into the game's design. Wavedashing in Tekken (where the Smash Bros name comes from) wasn't an intended technique but since then Namco has changed things to specifically allow or disallow its usage for some characters (creating a natural imbalance along the way). Guilty Gear's jump installs are also something I can't believe were an intended feature. As was the invention of fuzzy guarding in VF. Most of the time these kinds of things won't break the game, rather they create extra layers of depth, but every now and again they do break a game, prime example being Soul Calibur 3.

 

[incoherent]

Ah, Playing to Win. A sometimes overrated and overcited--but nevertheless essential--point about exploits, wrapped up in so much irreverential inanity. It's an important read for any gamer, not because Sirlin is necessarily right, but because it portrays the extremes of the exploit argument so clearly. Purposeful or not, Sirlin is so clear about his personal views that it makes him pleasantly transparent.

I think the greater message is not "do your best to be ruthless, the evolution of gaming technique will take care of it all in due time," but rather "play the game your own way." Even though Sirlin looks down on those that would shy away from his ideal peak of the game and instead "play their own homemade version of the game with made-up rules," there's nothing essentially wrong with that. Similarly, there's nothing wrong with the shamelessly exploiting, hypercompetitive types. They'll either stay away from one another and enjoy the same game in different ways, or they'll wind up in the same arena at some point and then both groups have to reconcile with one another.

Though, if I were to have a gripe with Sirlin's Playing to Win as the essay that it is, it might have to be where he cites the concept of game theory in a less than accurate manner as an explanation for depth in games. But alas.

I wouldn't say that Playing to Win is perfectly accurate, but the point he makes most clearly is that not every technique that beats you is "cheating". "You threw me/spiked me/used Jigglypuff's Sleep on me and therefore you have no skill and you suck" is an appeal used far too often, and that's the "scrub" archetype Sirlin uses.

I posted it in response to Rob, who said that any "glitch, cheat, shortcut, or exploit" is cheating, without specifying what those are. For that matter, Sirlin himself doesn't do a great job of distinguishing exploits that get absorbed into the larger metagame and exploits that don't (and that among the hardcore are considered "cheating").

 

[DuoM]

When me and my friend played against one another, I used Roy and he used Ganondorf. We were the types that didn't block, hell we refused to block. In FFA matches we might've been knocked around but our sheer tenacity usually made us the last two players in the game as we didn't back down from fighting head on. I'll miss Roy.

 

[Nakawa]

I had a similar experience at my college. The school sponsored a gaming league (Which was awesome) and at the end of the year there was a Brawl tournament. Now, my friends and I regularly beat the tar out of each other, we've also picked up the nuances of techniques like that, blah blah blah, but we NEVER took the game too seriously. At this tournament, he members of the league (and my small circle of friends) played it like a party game, we were having fun with all the crazy explosions and unpredicability, but then there were some high school students there who did the exact same thing in the article, took the game FAR too seriously, using every 'cheap' tactic in the book, only using Final Destination, no items, Fox or Falco only. Completely ruthless. And not even having a good time at the party either. Booooring and not fun to play against. They apparently only came to utterly crush anyone in the tournament, and be damned if they had to talk with anyone else. I don't claim to be a god when it comes to video games at all, but when I beat one of them, I felt pretty good about myself. He on the other hand, was livid. I could hear him cussing up a storm under his breath, which struck me as in the opposite spirit the tournament intended. And to be honest, I thought that it was an isolated event until I read this article.

 

[Alterayn]

Edit: Wait, why the hell did they put this in the featured content bar. Whatta waste of time

Goddamn February 2008