LiteralGrill
Smokin' Hot~
Mind Over Meta is a weekly series of articles on /r/SSBPM, the Project M subreddit. Written by several different authors, this series covers many of the mental aspects of playing smash and other subjects related specifically to Project M. While normally written on Sundays, occasionally infrequent editorial styled pieces are produced "as a way to express our own opinions or cover topics that are slightly outside our weekly MoM's range." For this Mind over Meta MessiNYC sat down to take a look at what grassroots really means for Project M..The original article can be found here. To read the rest of the series check out the Mind Over Meta Archive. Please remember the views expressed in this article are the author's and do not reflect on Smashboards or its affiliates. Sit down, read, and enjoy.
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Hey everyone, I’m Messi. Some of you may know me from the fairly new podcast “The Salt Mines.” I’ve also had the amazing experience of commenting Top 8 at Shots Fired this past March with RBD|Apollo Ali, as well commentary here and there at other events such as the Nebulous Weeklies here in the city of New York and Blacklisted in New England last month. For a while now I’ve discussed my hopes to write for the gaming community and I felt it was only fitting that my first piece be something relating to the Project M community. To start off, I think it’s only fair to give a little background on myself, instead of parading expecting to be the next big name.
My name is Giuseppe Messina I was born and mostly raised in Brooklyn, NY. I work in retail for the time being and I’ve been interested in competitive gaming nearly my entire life. This passion was amplified when I was uprooted and moved to Williamsburg, VA at the young age of 14. I started off as an avid player of Counter-Strike 1.5, with hours and hours spent playing my team, and even legitimate practices being held on a nearly daily basis. These practices sometimes would take a few hours and would pit us against ZERO opponents. Just studying the timings on “Rushs” (When a team rushes to one point of a map without stopping from their spawn points to catch slower teams), or the way certain grenades bounced off of angles and how to use these angles to our advantage. My Counter-Strike “career” - if you’d like to call it that - was fairly successful. My team was a Cal-Main team, with Cal-M being the 3rd highest rank available at the time out of 4 total (the order went Open, Intermediate, Main, Invite). It’s comparable to getting mid-high platinum in League of Legends, if you’re familiar with their rankings, so you could say we were pretty good. I followed Counterstrike for years and years studying the top players and what they did. Their various customizations and configurations had me interested, but the way they kept things so simple in such a complex game always had me wondering how it was possible.
This is all worth mentioning for two major reasons. First, my exposure to the completive scene of Counter-Strike mainly existed because I wasn’t really allowed to venture off as a kid. I couldn’t go into NYC, so when huge LAN events happened I was usually the one left out because of my traditional parents. While there isn’t anything inherently wrong with 13 year olds roaming the city, going into the heart of NYC in the early morning for an event simply titled “Lansomnia” isn’t exactly what I would call normal either. Counterstrike also gave me a competitive fire that I normally had only felt on a hockey rink or a football field, and it was such a great rush. However, the true X-Factor common to all of this was Will “Reno” Hsiao. I had met Reno through a mutual friend, and we quickly became friends due to our mutual love of gaming, even becoming teammates on the aforementioned Counterstrike team. There was always whispers about the competitive smash scene, and although I had played for a long time with my buddy Mike “Nox,” I never really put much thought into it. That changed a couple of years down the road, when I told my parents a fib or two and snuck off into the city and met up with multiple smashers, all of whom I were able to meet for the first time because of Reno. In a single summer I met the younger versions of D1, Wes, Dire, Bum, Jman, Alukard, PC Chris and god only knows who else. The real kicker in my opinion is that D1 was the only one who really remembers me, because I had him over the house once or twice and we shared Chinese food. In NYC that practically makes you family.
“Messi, why is this stuff all important?” Shut up, I’m getting to it eager disembodied voice. The reason I’m writing today is that I think the Project M community, for as great as it is has the wrong idea about a few things, and hopefully my outside perspective can help instead of falling upon deaf ears. One of the most common sentiments I see and hear is a mentality of “We gotta be grassroots.” Yes, Melee grew from even further beyond grassroots, hell, they were practically un-growable seeds at a certain point, but you know what the main difference was? It was 2007. EVERYTHING was grassroots. In 2007, the average Americans internet speed was 1.9 Mbps. Smash players were recording sets on the VCR. There are still articles on Smash Boards where if you had issues recording one of the first answers is “First of all, make sure that the system is hooked up through the VCR...” The Project M Paragon LA 2015 Grand Finals was won by a player who I would imagine would have a hard time spotting a VCR out of a old-school electronic line up. Hell, these were the average specs of a “good computer” as late as 2010. I point all of this out without even touching on capture cards, affordable audio equipment and actual streaming options because it would only serve to prove just show how old I am. Games like Counter-Strike had a built in spectator mode for most servers, not to mention HLTV (Half-Life TV, a built-in bot that allowed functions similar to modern spectator modes, with multiple viewpoints and a delay of 2 minutes). Now it wasn’t all glamorous on the PC gamer end either, there’s a reason you could find pictures such as this one with a quick Google search. Some players may say your first event is your roughest but compared to this… I mean seriously he’s taped to the ceiling. I bring this up because in comparison, Melee was handcuffed. No one was spending thousands of dollars to record sets of a game that no one knew would be a top esport in a couple of years, and even fewer people envisioned the future that Melee & Smash as a whole had. If you speak to somebody like D1, GIMR, TK, or EE, who all can arguably be called a face for the community even though they’re not known for their play, I’m sure most of them are shocked by the changes that have shaken the scene in the past year. The bright future of Melee is hard to predict today, even with professional sponsors and up-coming tournaments. How could someone predict what the game had in store for us back in the mid 2000s? In today’s modern world, high speed internet access in major cities is available through most if not all internet service providers in the area. We can build stream machines at a fraction of the cost and still get something that is like night-and-day in terms of quality. Yet every week some college dorm, club, or weekly venue posts their streams up on Twitch, Hitbox, or Youtube but never really thinks about the representation of the game they throw up onto the screen. Can I defend the commentary back in the day? No, not really. Players got overhyped and made references to their genitals and the current level of pain it was going through and no one cared, because it was the norm. That’s fine. I don’t speak for anyone who has had their “Rough” commentary define them, because like anything else in life, the times have changed. If they knew a job could be looming or a career could be born out of that I’m sure there would have been at least some more “professional” commentators out there, and I can 100% guarantee there would be people who still didn’t give a damn. That’s all good though, because every community needs all these players and all these minds that enjoy going against the grain.
Back to present day. Project M is maintaining and even growing in popularity in many scenes across the scene. We have finally found a small but fantastic home on hitbox.tv, where we seem to be truly welcomed. Now more than ever I look online and see “CAN’T WAIT TO START STREAMING” “CAN’T WAIT TO START MY NEW WEEKLY!” But here’s the thing, this mentality encourages low-quality, low-effort streams that reflect poorly on our community. Now, I’m not telling you to stop throwing events or to not try something new, because that’s where we find the best TOs and new ideas; when people turn a small weekly into an event that needs to be attended or when idea never thought of before becomes the latest side event that people want to be a part of. The issue is, why throw it all out there to be seen before it’s a finished product? (inb4 3.6 beta jokes). If you were to submit an essay before it was finished you’d be corrected and told to improve, and then if you were lucky you’d get one more crack at it. Project M doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt, we don’t have anyone holding the communities hand, no proverbial teacher to correct our mistakes. Many, many times people who attend an event or watch a stream that is poorly put together will simply walk away, they will then go on to tell their friends about the lack of equipment, the poor quality and the lame experience they had.
I say all this not to be negative but instead to heighten the expectations that everyone should have for this game. The excuse that “e-sports is lame” is no longer valid, it has always been a crutch to have an excuse to fall back on when an event was missing out on simple accommodations. There are great TOs out there and great players and streamers that try to do their best day in and day out, but are immediately thrown under the bus for something as simple as wearing more than just a plain T-Shirt when commentating. Is it necessary that everyone who goes up on the mic or that runs an event needs to be someone that can go through the entire roster tell you every option in every match up circumstance? Some people are just good at organizing things, other people can market, and other people still are people that can’t play the game for their lives, but can verbally paint a picture of a scenario that clears it up better than any Frame by frame breakdown can. So, it’s time we forget about the idea of wanting to be involved with “grassroots’ and instead remember a time when players before us played just for the love of the game. They weren’t constantly comparing themselves to others or attempting to follow in the footsteps of something bigger. Instead of following the footprints before us back into the dark, maybe it’s time we instead usher in a golden age – one that’s our own, that nobody can ever take from us.
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SmashCapps hopes readers enjoy these articles as he always finds them well thought out and insightful. To keep up with his own writing adventures be sure to follow him on Twitter.
