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.


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