Playing to Win, Part 1
SirlinI 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.
;)
Historical Scrub: Neville Chamberlain. He didn't even try to win, instead offering "appeasement" to Hitler. (Caution: not serious historical commentary.)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.
;)
Historical Scrubs: The British Redcoats. The ultimate example of being too bound up by rules to actually fight. They fought "honorably" in a row. (Caution: not serious historical commentary.). 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
Scrub of the Future: Captain Kathryn Janeway. Voyager would have been home ages ago if it weren't for her silly rules. (Caution: Voyager is a bad show.)
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.
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.
--Sirlin
Reader Comments (308)
Connor: your conclusion makes no sense and doesn't represent anything said. It shows *respect* to your opponent to play as hard as you can. Also, looking forward to your explanation about why "use everything you can to win that's tournament-legal" implies "tournament organizers shouldn't ban gamebreaking things or cheat codes." One has little to do with the other, yet you claim they are "contradictions." I think reading more closely what's written would help.
Sirlin, do you think you could ever be able to explain the Akuma example any better than you do there? As you said before: It's frustrating to have to explain the same thing over and over, even several years later. Surely there must be a better way for people to grasp the concept you're trying to give, if so many people just don't get the big picture. Is there a game with an entirely banned character (or whatever) that doesn't require a cheat (is readily available to all players)? You spoke before of MTG, where a card may be accidentally overpowered (designers thought it was ok, turned out OP) but still allowed. The difference isn't really whether the overpowered-ness was intentional or not, is it? Akuma just seems like a grey area; sure he's a boss, but beatable like any other character (if by some miracle your opponent faints at his controllers). If he were absolutely invulnerable, it might strike home better, i guess...
Monfie: that would be a worse example though. Akuma is an excellent example, actually. We need an example of rare thing where a ban is actually warranted because of power level, and Akuma is warranted because of power level. It is disappointing that some people don't understand that "you should use all tournament legal things to win" does NOT imply that "nothing should ever be banned, no matter how extreme that thing is, even if it's so overpowered that there's no actual game left to play." There's really no reason the first thing should imply the second, and I think the vast majority of people actually do get that, and have been helped by my book. There is just a minority of people who not only don't understand the example, but then go so far as to be super hostile about it. I think the problem lies within those people rather than the example.
Also, I think even *you* have misunderstood the Akuma example. It's not a gray area. There is no reasonable stance for allowing ST Akuma, and this is very clear-cut issue to anyone involved with the game. There isn't any faction of players calling to unban him, and there isn't any faction of players claiming he is fair or that it's a better game with him, or that he's not completely broken. It's only "gray" to very misinformed posters in this thread who do not know what they are talking about. If you think he's a gray area then you are vastly underestimating his power and not realizing he is practically 10-0 in some matchups, or at the most generous, 9-1.
If Akuma were more powerful, say he was 100% invulnerable, it would be a less useful example. I think the best possible example is the *weakest* overpowered thing that is still so powerful that it should absolutely for sure be banned. That way you have some kind of measurement to compare to. If anything a *weaker* example that's still warranted to ban would be even more helpful, but if you go much weaker then it actually would be a gray area.
Well, I prefer to see it from a development point of view. After going through the trouble developing dozens of characters you don't want people at the highest levels of skill tending towards anything that wasn't intended. Sure there is going to be the odd one out but in general it works.
For the Akuma example it is pretty simple, if it was allowed then assuming equal levels of skill it would always(or nearly so) win therefore everyone would use it so to expand the possiblities of the game it is better to exclude it.
It is the same whatever it may be, if there are several choices then they must be roughly equal otherwise you might as well not have choices at all.
It's not the issue I'm worried about, its the naysayers. Is there no way to wholly convince them? if the issue were so black and white, why is there still argument being made? If these posters are misinformed, whats really missing from the Akuma example that could convince them?
I'd like to give another example on the Akuma subject: Pokemon.
For those of you who don't know competitive Pokemon battling, the Pokemon (all 649 of them) are split up into different tiers. You can use lower tiers in a higher tier match, but not vice versa. For instance, if you play an OU match (Overused; standard battling tier, with only pokemon in the Ubers tier banned) you can use pokemon from any battling tier except ubers. These Pokemon, like Mewtwo and Deoxys, are powerful enough that they would overcentralize the metagame, thus creating a game in which 10-12 Pokemon saw usage, while the rest sat, untouched, in your pc boxes. Due to the wide variety of tiers to play, however, all sorts of Pokemon get usage. Those Pokemon made uber are voted upon by a committee of players (tiers are organised by a competitive battling site, Smogon University [smogon.com]), after which periods of play-testing ensue, where the Pokemon are tested on whether they over-centralize the metagame (force teams to build themselves around countering this certain threat), determining their final tiering position.
Additionally, Pokemon bans some moves in competitive play, such as Double Team and Minimize under the accuracy and evasion clause, not because they are too powerful, but because they make the game too luck-centric. If everyone was able to use these moves, serious competitive battlers would stand a fair chance losing to even the newest players, just through hax (essentially bad luck). As such, these moves are banned for the skill that they take out of the game.
In contrast, I know some people who use lower tier Pokemon who battle in the higher tiers (ie. Metang in OU), because they feel that the higher tier Pokemon are "broken" or "too powerful." This would be an example of being scrub-like: When both players are ALLOWED to be used by players, and WELL ACCEPTED in the competitive community, there is no excuse for using something less effective, with no advantages, to fill the same role.
Then again, occasionally I will bring a lower tier team into a higher tier, since it gives me more of a challenge (especially on days when I can't get anyone good on the ladder). While I would use my highest legal-tier team in a tournament, to challenge myself I will occasionally bring lower tier teams to friendlier matches, especially when I'm helping teach my (inexperienced) friends to battle and such; it just makes it a bit more fair, since I have years of competitive experience on my side. Just a little food for thought.
Um, yeah.
"You sent out Pikachu!"
"Rival sent out Chuck Norris."
"Chuck Norris looked at you."
"You Died."
"Game over."
The real difference between arbitrary scrub house rules, and elite competitive level custom rules is that one is the result of whining derived from uninformed knowledge of the game and the other arrives at a conclusion based on deeper understanding of the game and it's upper limits of mechanics.
Complaining about elements that they don't understand but that the game gives them the tools to deal with should the player only dig deeper is a scrub thing to do. They want to blame the game or some element of it instead of their lack of experience or understanding of the game.
Assessing the situation through a community wide accumulation of game knowledge that a particular element truly does in fact break the game and either take the sense of fair play out, or remove all elements of derivative is much more considerable. The players that arrive at this conclusion do not lack an understanding of the game. They understand the game so fully that they can be looked to as an authority on saying "This transcends the upper limits of what is actually sporting."
If a game is on the brink of failing it's player base and competitive limitations can salvage an otherwise lost cause I'm all for it.
It's not very often that bans are truly necessary. It's such a rare occurrence that I think many of these commenters are too hastily judging the Akuma example as hypocrisy. It's just an affirmation that yes, sometimes things do reach a point where they are "too broken" but it's generally not at the level of play that a scrub would believe.
The Soul Calibur 4 community was extremely hesitant and divided even about their Hildegarde tournament ban in the face of her "Doom Combo" coming to light.
"This transcends the upper limits of what is actually sporting."
And what exactly qualifies as "sporting" again?
For example, right now in Starcraft II, Wings of Liberty, tournaments are held in custom maps whitout gold minerals in the center and neutral supply depots at each player's base entrance. They both prevent cheap tactics that can tecnically be countered, but just make the game less fun. But they're not how the game was originally made. It's a decision by the players.
And that's where it comes down to it. The OP claims that super-competitive play is more "fun", and probably for him it is, but not necessarily for other people.
Following the pokemon example a few posts ago, pokemon has diferent leagues with diferent power levels and even self-called "non-scrub" players bring lower tier pokemons so they can have a better challenge, aka more "fun".
So, either with Akuma or other stuff, everybody ends up drawing lines between "cheap cheese" and "sporting". There's no scrubs at all, there's just people drawing that line at diferent heights.
I could also point out to super-pro players like Idra that would probably eat and spit me in a SC II match and actually makes a living out of it, but even Idra will cry cheap cheese when he's himself defeated by other super-pro players extreme tactics.