The Brilliant Art of Fucking up the Easy Shit
There is a hilarious phenomenon that happens whenever you attempt to introduce a competitive game to someone who has never played before. For example, imaging that you are teaching someone how to play something like beer pong. It’s an easy enough game to understand, it probably wouldn’t take long to go from explaining the game to playing it, and there is actually a decent chance that the newbie will likely win.
Y’know, Beginners Luck.
The results of a game like beer pong don’t really matter that much. It’s also really easy to make excuses for why you lost such as someone banging the table or just being too drunk to care. Because of this, you can’t really gloat about a win in beer pong, not unless you put something on the line for winning anyways. Beer pong is an example of a game that doesn’t require a great amount of skill.
So what about games that require more skill? What if someone sets up Mario Kart or Smash in the next room? Especially if you walk into that room with a cocky attitude because you feel that you could destroy everyone else there. But if that’s your feelings going into it, how would you feel if the opposite happened? As in, getting annihilated by a comeback blueshell after establishing a huge lead with the best Mariokart combo of Metal Mario in the Blue Falcon with slick wheels?
Recently, I was at a family event where my brother invited me to play Magic the Gathering with some of the other Magic nerds in our family. I was lent a deck from among the huge shelves and boxes that belonged to my uncle, a seemingly random assortment of green, black and white cards. Nothing seemed to be intended to fit together compared to the werewolf, ent, nymph, and sorcerer decks that seemed carefully and purposefully constructed.
Keep in mind also, that I have barely any fucking clue how to play Magic.
I knew how to play land cards, how to summon and attack with creatures, and that was basically it. Even when I was declaring attacks, I didn’t really know how damage calculations worked or even know if they were a good idea.
Despite that, I ended up winning somehow. Early on, I had this orc dude who would summon a rat with death touch every time a creature died. By the end of the game, I had a small army of rats that my opponents couldn’t deal with. I also had a creature that was just some old with or hag that caused my opponents to lose health every time they drew a card, so I was passively winning from the halfway point. Finally, I had this vampire who would fly over and attack without repercussions and would also heal me. Nobody could stop any of this as they would have to sacrifice their own creatures to the growing army of death touch rats and constant healing.
I often think about how that must have felt to the family members that I beat. The ones who owned hundred or even thousands of dollars worth of cards and have been playing and collecting for years. To build these elaborate combo decks with powerful cards only to lose to me with the thrown together green and black extra deck, and my unstoppable rat army.
I realized that I have been in their situation before, but I’m going to need to do another quick tangent to try and get my point across.
Ok so, when was the last time you played Street Fighter? Or Mortal Combat, or Marvel Vs. Capcom, or any traditional style 2D fighting game? There are a lot of people who come into these types of games at a somewhat casual level whose only experience with the game is, well, button mashing.
For two casual players, the outcome of these types of games are basically random. I doubt I could get someone to immediately understand how to do a V trigger, a focus attack dash cancel, wavedash, hell even just a dp input or quarter circle input. Without practice or experience, many people might not even know that those moves are an option. Or conversely, they might look at the move list real quick, see those inputs, and only go for those moves. Not realizing the importance of just a regular standing jab or even just blocking.
Now to get back to my experience, I’m in the camp that finds things like neutral and frame data to be extremely fascinating. I enjoy watching people who understand what they are doing theory craft, lab out combos and extensions and watch their own replays to see what they can do better. However, This doesn’t translate well to my own gameplay at all.
when I try to introduce someone to a fighting game (Skullgirls being a recent one that I’ve enjoyed trying to figure out), I try to apply these basic ideas to my gameplay and I try to punish my opponent for button mashing a laggy option. The opposite happens though, admittedly because it’s basically impossible to call out someone’s mix up when they don’t even know what they are going for.
I will end up losing more to people who know less about the subject than I do. In any other situation, that sounds like the perfect opportunity to build rage, salt and insult my opponent. When I was younger and stupider, I probably would have. This reaction seems perfectly reasonable on its face, after all, we as humans don’t like to lose to things that were made out to be a joke or to lose to people who seem to put in no effort.
I didn’t really feel that way. Mostly because it was a game that I had no practice in and I was having fun explaining fighting games concepts to this friend of mine. When thinking about it further though, I realized how fickle these skills can be sometimes no matter how much I practiced or how easily or difficult something might initially be to me. It also reinforced how essential the basics are to any skill.
I had this continual idea throughout my college years that I was better a something in relation to how good my opponent or peer was at it. When playing the oboe in music school, I feel I played better with an actual orchestra than I did just a high school band. I feel that I played better in my local semi finals than my round one pools. It is all up to me to get better at these skills and to practice on my own time, but they become exponentially easier when you buckle down with scales and movement respectively.
It’s this human phenomenon where we feel stuck just after the initial dive into what we like. There is no low stake, beer pong level skill that isn’t going to take a lot of time just to do somewhat competently. Even beer pong played at a high level needs practice and dedication.
To make it worse, realizing that we can only realistically fit in so many activities and skills into our entire lives and leaving out or sacrificing entire skills can be demoralizing. Having the option to pursue anything but not having the time to go back for anything else can be overwhelming. It can make us question the merits of what we want to do, our goals, and how we judge other’s use of their time. We are told our entire lives to find our calling, that we have this duty to make a name for ourselves by doing something, anything worthwhile.
And if you still struggle with the easy shit, it can make you question whether this was a good use of the time you will never get back.
But we, as humans, live for the moment when it clicks. When we can wake up and be excited to do the things we want to do because it brings joy to other people, makes the world a better place, or simply makes you a better person.
We have a lot of sayings regarding trying, doing your best, accepting failure, doing and standing up for what you believe in. Basically one of the many facebook inspirational quotes like this one.
But I think that it’s become so ingrained in the way we were taught and what is expected from us that it kind of loses it’s punch. It treat’s failure as this unavoidable thing while still having the negative connotations of something to be avoided. Failure is going to suck, but you have to deal with it in order to be successful.
I think that it should be taken one step further at least mentally. Fucking up the easy shit should be met with honesty and accountability. Because our relationship to failure and the successes and failures of others changes constantly, it isn’t enough to simply grit and bear it because reducing failure to just another obstacle misses the point entirely. The obstacle itself can be a beautiful thing.
You know exactly what that bastard did. you teched in place on the platform and panic input a defensive option. Now you’re about to die at 40. You have every right to be mad.
But instead of the easy Fsmash, he went for jab into a suicide side B. And it just felt so fucking hype.
