My first year of Melee
So I've been playing Melee against competent people for almost exactly one year now, and thought I'd write a little retrospective on my experiences. Some things I've chosen to do have been successful, and other things I regret. This is a way of getting this stuff out of my head and potentially informing some newer players who want a perspective on the road to learning this incredible game.
I played marth exclusively (99% of gametime) for the last year. This was a decision I made at my first tournament - to REALLY focus on a single character in order to simplify/consolidate the learning process. I'm pretty sure this was a good choice. It's the character I enjoy the feel and playstyle of most, which is pretty important.
Failures
The Cycle
This is starting to go away, but it was and is a huge detractor from the speed of my improvement. Basically, I had and still have this tendency to go home after a meet or a tourny, practice a ****load, become smoother or more consistent at some technique (or arrive at some melee-theory realization/understanding) and think that this thing would help my game get significantly better overnight.
Inevitably, I'd then go to the next meet or tourny and still get crushed by the decent players and become dejected. Writing it down, I feel really stupid because this seems so obviously naive. This stems from 2 things in my opinion: one, a delusion (or a desire for it to be true?) that there exist huge, magical leaps of improvement in this absurdly difficult game. And two, and I can't stress this enough, an overvaluing of "wins". I'm not sure if I'm particularly bad about this, or if this is a relatively common pitfall, but caring too much about winning individual games is extremely harmful if your goal is to learn and improve. In my first couple months when I learned a lot of the basics with Jbirds, he told me that I should be playing friendlies to try **** out, experiment and learn. I understood the words he was saying, but it took awhile to really grasp that playing to win comes later.
Misunderstanding Skill
There are situations in Melee that are really ****ing intricate and precise, and they happen really ****ing fast. There are sets of reactions or reads that bifurcate into other sets of reactions or reads, there are fuzzy situations where what's optimal changes based on a bunch of factors, there are so many ways to control your character, there are option trees even when you're being combo'd, it's pretty crazy and it's profoundly cool and that's why people are still playing the game. I kind of get freaked out if i think about it too much. This game is just insanely good.
It's also overwhelming. You see the fast players and you want to be a fast player. The mistake is when you start trying to play like them, but you really... aren't. It's what David Sirlin describes - you falsely attribute player skill to the moves that they're doing, when it's really not the moves or the speed but the mentality behind them that causes those moves to come out at those times. This is obvious to any competent player, but it's a common error of perception especially in a game with the pace of melee. It causes people to think that getting good at pressing buttons will make them good at the game. I'm losing - I just need to go learn to multishine! While it's true that the actual game only begins when you become technically proficient, it's false that the more techniques you can do consistently, the better you are at the game. As far as I understand it, there's a language analogy and it's kind of like this - you need a vocabulary to start writing sentences, but more big words don't necessarily make better sentences. Some of the best sentences for a situation contain no big words at all, but some concepts cannot be expressed without them.
Blame
I lost, your character is broken. I lost, I'm hungover. I lost, I wasn't trying. I lost, your style is annoying. I lost, my controller didn't read my input. I've done my best to stray away from this ****, but it can be a tenacious thing. I'd say I'm most guilty of blaming matchups. In my sane moments, I ask myself – would any top marth have lost to that? And since the answer is always no, I still have so much improving to do that it's not relevant that X circumstance was in play. Not only does it not really matter that you lost, since learning is vastly more important, but it's almost never even true that you lost only because of that external factor.
I feel like in some cases, johns are a vile way of devaluing/disrespecting your opponent. It's disgustingly childish and it'd be great if it didn't exist at all. Starve the ego, feed the soul.
Successes
Flow
At my best, I've had sessions where I'm indifferent to winning games or losing games – aware of mistakes, but not overly critical of myself... focused but calm. These tend to be the sessions where the bulk of the learning happens. The flow state in melee is deeply enjoyable; it feels like your rigid intellectual mind takes the back seat for a while, and that's when your A game comes out.
It's worthwhile, but (in my experience) pretty difficult, to try and figure out ways of triggering yourself to be in a flow state. There's a post by PPMD where he talks about cuing your mind into the relevant stimulus as a way of triggering this – by occupying your mind with the sense data like the feeling of a dashdance or the sound of short hop lasering, you stop it from thinking about all the satellite issues like “what if I lose!?” and “i always have trouble with X character/player”. You want to try and let your unconscious mind drive with all its hours of practice, but you don't want to autopilot. In my experience you can tell you're flowing when you have a clarity of thought about the opponent's goals and strategies. You become aware more quickly of their particular habits or tendencies, and so their grab whiffs, or you shield something that may have hit you if your focus was obscured by irrelevant out-of-game concerns.
The flow state is almost definitely something that feels very different from person to person though. So take this preceding paragraph with a grain of salt. There's no magic, just your ability to concentrate.
Learning
Melee's my first attempt at approaching a discipline with this attitude, and it's taught me stuff that applies just as well to other tasks or problems. I've gotten way better at approaching stuff to learn.
Some of the things I fixed about my learning habits:
I'd never truly watched a game of melee. Jbirds said something to me in the early months like “you've watched melee but you haven't really looked”. I thought I'd watched a ****load of melee, but the truth was I'd just passively absorbed the images. It feels powerful when you realize how much there is to really see in what's happening. You can begin to fathom the ways in which these brilliant players are outplaying each other, and it strengthens your understanding of competition in general.
I had some deep seated desire to win without trying. This is something I'm still trying to gouge out of myself completely, but it's very important to condition your brain to relish having to TRY really hard and still get owned. It's almost a way of hedging – your ego wants to sandbag so that if you lose it's not really responsible. Definitely something I did more earlier in the year as some babyish way of coping with sucking really bad at the game. This **** is terrible and there are probably lots of you out there who never experience this – I envy you.
There's a laziness that you have to overcome if you want to master anything. Learning a discipline is very telling about your personality. How much are you able to face the ugly parts and honestly address them?
People
It's pretty cool that so many people still play melee. This game is possibly one of humanity's greatest achievements – but it kind of stands that if the scene wasn't a bunch of amazing, dedicated, skilled, sexy individuals, I might just be playing it in my room alone. 2014 with the Queensland homies was some life changing ****, and 2015 is set to be even more hype...
Some of my favorite memories
All the long sessions of getting demolished – spup, zac, jbirds, haikal, thanks for being patient with what was probably extremely boring for you at times
Early days netplay sessions with Dr. James Birds, I learned a ****load from these
Jackson's balcony meets were amazing, shout out to Jbirds wearing that mario hat, come back from Korea already
Gerard's pseudo balcony meet, blue vs g money rematch let's go~ when's GPBM2..
Playwarehouse tournaments have been kind of the bread and butter of QLD melee, lots of good memories especially post-PW dinners at Sunnybank
48hrs of melee at Jbirds' place, I'll never forget the wahoo legshake after cargo upthrow double fair
Watching GC kids level up, I really hope you guys stick with it @DutchGC @party @J1mbo
@J1mbo hype in the crew battle at gc smashgrounds...
Melee in Maleny (meleeny) in the shed with homies that made the trek up (pre-full time job @GeeMon was my practice partner for a solid 3 weeks... thanks to you I hate marth dittos now
)
Mission chips and grove OJ
Jeremy for being an amazing human being, we'll all miss you a lot when you go dude. Smashstock was incredible, also post-tourny sessions at your house have been godlike
Shout outs to Gords and Dr. Pepper
Going interstate 4? 5? times now and meeting all the amazing melee players from all over Australia who've been super ****ing cool at all times for all reasons,
ESPECIALLY SHADOWLOO SHOWDOWN which was hands down one of the best weeks of my life. Super late shoutouts to Billy for housing me, your drive is inspiring. All the Melbourne people rule, cheers to Redact for being a huge part of making that **** happen
Silent crew battle gords zelda vs sd's campy ness, high level ****
Playing Armada and Lucky that week was indescribably cool
I've enjoyed melee more than I could've imagined. Can't wait to keep playing and improving.
Peace and love
Woodley/phrase
So I've been playing Melee against competent people for almost exactly one year now, and thought I'd write a little retrospective on my experiences. Some things I've chosen to do have been successful, and other things I regret. This is a way of getting this stuff out of my head and potentially informing some newer players who want a perspective on the road to learning this incredible game.
I played marth exclusively (99% of gametime) for the last year. This was a decision I made at my first tournament - to REALLY focus on a single character in order to simplify/consolidate the learning process. I'm pretty sure this was a good choice. It's the character I enjoy the feel and playstyle of most, which is pretty important.
Failures
The Cycle
This is starting to go away, but it was and is a huge detractor from the speed of my improvement. Basically, I had and still have this tendency to go home after a meet or a tourny, practice a ****load, become smoother or more consistent at some technique (or arrive at some melee-theory realization/understanding) and think that this thing would help my game get significantly better overnight.
Inevitably, I'd then go to the next meet or tourny and still get crushed by the decent players and become dejected. Writing it down, I feel really stupid because this seems so obviously naive. This stems from 2 things in my opinion: one, a delusion (or a desire for it to be true?) that there exist huge, magical leaps of improvement in this absurdly difficult game. And two, and I can't stress this enough, an overvaluing of "wins". I'm not sure if I'm particularly bad about this, or if this is a relatively common pitfall, but caring too much about winning individual games is extremely harmful if your goal is to learn and improve. In my first couple months when I learned a lot of the basics with Jbirds, he told me that I should be playing friendlies to try **** out, experiment and learn. I understood the words he was saying, but it took awhile to really grasp that playing to win comes later.
Misunderstanding Skill
There are situations in Melee that are really ****ing intricate and precise, and they happen really ****ing fast. There are sets of reactions or reads that bifurcate into other sets of reactions or reads, there are fuzzy situations where what's optimal changes based on a bunch of factors, there are so many ways to control your character, there are option trees even when you're being combo'd, it's pretty crazy and it's profoundly cool and that's why people are still playing the game. I kind of get freaked out if i think about it too much. This game is just insanely good.
It's also overwhelming. You see the fast players and you want to be a fast player. The mistake is when you start trying to play like them, but you really... aren't. It's what David Sirlin describes - you falsely attribute player skill to the moves that they're doing, when it's really not the moves or the speed but the mentality behind them that causes those moves to come out at those times. This is obvious to any competent player, but it's a common error of perception especially in a game with the pace of melee. It causes people to think that getting good at pressing buttons will make them good at the game. I'm losing - I just need to go learn to multishine! While it's true that the actual game only begins when you become technically proficient, it's false that the more techniques you can do consistently, the better you are at the game. As far as I understand it, there's a language analogy and it's kind of like this - you need a vocabulary to start writing sentences, but more big words don't necessarily make better sentences. Some of the best sentences for a situation contain no big words at all, but some concepts cannot be expressed without them.
Blame
I lost, your character is broken. I lost, I'm hungover. I lost, I wasn't trying. I lost, your style is annoying. I lost, my controller didn't read my input. I've done my best to stray away from this ****, but it can be a tenacious thing. I'd say I'm most guilty of blaming matchups. In my sane moments, I ask myself – would any top marth have lost to that? And since the answer is always no, I still have so much improving to do that it's not relevant that X circumstance was in play. Not only does it not really matter that you lost, since learning is vastly more important, but it's almost never even true that you lost only because of that external factor.
I feel like in some cases, johns are a vile way of devaluing/disrespecting your opponent. It's disgustingly childish and it'd be great if it didn't exist at all. Starve the ego, feed the soul.
Successes
Flow
At my best, I've had sessions where I'm indifferent to winning games or losing games – aware of mistakes, but not overly critical of myself... focused but calm. These tend to be the sessions where the bulk of the learning happens. The flow state in melee is deeply enjoyable; it feels like your rigid intellectual mind takes the back seat for a while, and that's when your A game comes out.
It's worthwhile, but (in my experience) pretty difficult, to try and figure out ways of triggering yourself to be in a flow state. There's a post by PPMD where he talks about cuing your mind into the relevant stimulus as a way of triggering this – by occupying your mind with the sense data like the feeling of a dashdance or the sound of short hop lasering, you stop it from thinking about all the satellite issues like “what if I lose!?” and “i always have trouble with X character/player”. You want to try and let your unconscious mind drive with all its hours of practice, but you don't want to autopilot. In my experience you can tell you're flowing when you have a clarity of thought about the opponent's goals and strategies. You become aware more quickly of their particular habits or tendencies, and so their grab whiffs, or you shield something that may have hit you if your focus was obscured by irrelevant out-of-game concerns.
The flow state is almost definitely something that feels very different from person to person though. So take this preceding paragraph with a grain of salt. There's no magic, just your ability to concentrate.
Learning
Melee's my first attempt at approaching a discipline with this attitude, and it's taught me stuff that applies just as well to other tasks or problems. I've gotten way better at approaching stuff to learn.
Some of the things I fixed about my learning habits:
I'd never truly watched a game of melee. Jbirds said something to me in the early months like “you've watched melee but you haven't really looked”. I thought I'd watched a ****load of melee, but the truth was I'd just passively absorbed the images. It feels powerful when you realize how much there is to really see in what's happening. You can begin to fathom the ways in which these brilliant players are outplaying each other, and it strengthens your understanding of competition in general.
I had some deep seated desire to win without trying. This is something I'm still trying to gouge out of myself completely, but it's very important to condition your brain to relish having to TRY really hard and still get owned. It's almost a way of hedging – your ego wants to sandbag so that if you lose it's not really responsible. Definitely something I did more earlier in the year as some babyish way of coping with sucking really bad at the game. This **** is terrible and there are probably lots of you out there who never experience this – I envy you.
There's a laziness that you have to overcome if you want to master anything. Learning a discipline is very telling about your personality. How much are you able to face the ugly parts and honestly address them?
People
It's pretty cool that so many people still play melee. This game is possibly one of humanity's greatest achievements – but it kind of stands that if the scene wasn't a bunch of amazing, dedicated, skilled, sexy individuals, I might just be playing it in my room alone. 2014 with the Queensland homies was some life changing ****, and 2015 is set to be even more hype...
Some of my favorite memories
All the long sessions of getting demolished – spup, zac, jbirds, haikal, thanks for being patient with what was probably extremely boring for you at times
Early days netplay sessions with Dr. James Birds, I learned a ****load from these
Jackson's balcony meets were amazing, shout out to Jbirds wearing that mario hat, come back from Korea already
Gerard's pseudo balcony meet, blue vs g money rematch let's go~ when's GPBM2..
Playwarehouse tournaments have been kind of the bread and butter of QLD melee, lots of good memories especially post-PW dinners at Sunnybank
48hrs of melee at Jbirds' place, I'll never forget the wahoo legshake after cargo upthrow double fair
Watching GC kids level up, I really hope you guys stick with it @DutchGC @party @J1mbo
@J1mbo hype in the crew battle at gc smashgrounds...
Melee in Maleny (meleeny) in the shed with homies that made the trek up (pre-full time job @GeeMon was my practice partner for a solid 3 weeks... thanks to you I hate marth dittos now
)Mission chips and grove OJ
Jeremy for being an amazing human being, we'll all miss you a lot when you go dude. Smashstock was incredible, also post-tourny sessions at your house have been godlike
Shout outs to Gords and Dr. Pepper
Going interstate 4? 5? times now and meeting all the amazing melee players from all over Australia who've been super ****ing cool at all times for all reasons,
ESPECIALLY SHADOWLOO SHOWDOWN which was hands down one of the best weeks of my life. Super late shoutouts to Billy for housing me, your drive is inspiring. All the Melbourne people rule, cheers to Redact for being a huge part of making that **** happen
Silent crew battle gords zelda vs sd's campy ness, high level ****
Playing Armada and Lucky that week was indescribably cool
I've enjoyed melee more than I could've imagined. Can't wait to keep playing and improving.
Peace and love
Woodley/phrase
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