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!


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