FrameSacred
Smash Rookie
- Joined
- May 12, 2021
- Messages
- 4
- Slippi.gg
- NEVR#625
I wrote this a few years ago, while on weed, and it's my right to hedge by saying that. Also, I did not finish it.
Imagine there are three camps of people, like the Mind, Heart, and Body groups from the Rishi video. Each camp has a current champion; Mang0, Zain, and iBDW.
Mang0 is in the camp of Play. Everything is Playing. What this means is that the game can never really be a job. They play, compete, and even sometimes practice for fun. This tendency to do what they enjoy makes them generally a little bit happier. This tendency is sometimes called Right Action. This group is only in it for the Play aspect of it.
The question then becomes; why does Play appeal to them so? There is only one “Tent Pole” of Play; it is social. All other aspects of play are held up by this one key fact. Every single game in existence can be thought of as yet another language. A game like Tic-Tac-Toe is a language with Nouns only. Communicating complex expressions of the self with Tic-Tac-Toe seems impossible. Melee is a language with: Nouns, Verbs, Subjects, Adverbs, Past Tense, Numbers, Future Tense, Imperatives, Adjectives, Superlative Adjectives, Pronouns, Prefixes, Suffixes, Slang, and History.
The point of this metaphor is that Melee is a game that garner’s the amount of devotion that it does because it is a language as capable of providing expression opportunity as any spoken language. A double-shine grab communicates in a way that combines the past and future tense, verb, and a bit of imperative. We can dance in this game. This aspect of Melee is what makes it fun.
Now, people in the Play camp are not the only ones who feel this fun. All Melee players play the game because they enjoy it, in whatever way they do. They all even realize how much better it is to have someone to talk with, an opponent. The main difference is that the Play camp doesn’t really care too much about the tiny details of things. They’ll put plenty of effort into the game, but never labor. This choice’s biggest effect on a person’s Melee is that it keeps them safe from the need to be perfect.
Here’s what I mean. Bear with me.
Has there ever been a player who actually had perfect tech skill? Has there ever been a player who always did exactly what they wanted to do? A player who never once had an opportunity to say, “I meant to do something else.”? The answer is, of course: No.
Or, how about this, has there ever been a player who always knew exactly what his opponent was going to do? People talk about “reads based” players, has one of these players ever won a Super-Major? Again, this player does not exist.
What these two truths establishes, as a Law, is that every match contains a certain type of moment that I will describe now:
This is the moment when something happens, that you did not expect.
I doubt any Melee player would ever honestly argue that a match of Melee is light on these moments. Melee is densely packed with these moments; moments of the unexpected. There are two kinds of Unexpected. There’s the kind that is caused by yourself, via so called “failures” of tech skill. You mean to do one thing and your hands mess it up. The second source of Unexpected is your opponent. I imagine I don’t need to give any more examples of these.
A Player who is always playing for simply the play of it, is never expecting themselves, or their opponent, to play “perfectly”. They are typically going to be someone much more capable at dealing with these inevitable “Unexpected Moments”. The reason this aptitude is powerful in Melee is because the game is so fast paced. When something goes wrong, a Play based player will be less surprised that any mistake occurred, they enjoy it almost, and more importantly, they will not be attaching any of their self-worth to whatever it is they thought was going to happen. They realize full well that perfect “Tech Skill” or perfect “Play” is not actually possible for longer than a few seconds at a time. They recognize the existence of Lady Fortune and have a relatively healthy relationship with her. They may get too full of themselves when she smiles on them but, they don’t get too upset when she takes her favor away.
When Mang0 gets hit, he doesn’t spend time trying to figure out if his approach plan might have worked in a different moment. He never expected the match to be devoid of surprises. He doesn’t get unhappy when he loses an interaction. He doesn’t spend a single moment switching from an Offensive mindset to a Recovery mindset. Rather, he remains in the play mindset. He doesn’t have a plan. He doesn’t think of Recovery as something different than Punish Game. It’s all the same game. If you analyze the way Mang0 plays you can see how quickly he transitions. Is there any transition at all? He doesn’t mind getting hit. He enjoys losing.
Outside of Melee, these players are more likely to play Poker or to be a sports fan. They love to gamble and they have no real struggles with the hard narratives of fortune.
The second camp of players is Championed by iBDW, who I will be referring to as “Cody” from now on because iBDW is weird to type. Cody has unconsciously taken up the mantle of his people’s former champion, Mew2King. Cody’s Camp is people I would refer to either as Reductionists or Controllers. Every time one of these players loses an interaction because of an Unexpected Moment they treat it like any other lost interaction.
They think to themselves one of 2 excuses.
Maybe this isn’t obvious but, both of these excuses are entirely Self-Driven. By this, I mean that in both instances, there is a simple solution to the problem that can be carried out by the self, independent from the influences of other people. They are in total control of their lives. Nothing is chaos. Lady Fortune does not exist.
For Excuse 1, the solution is to practice more. The Reductionist acts as if there is some level of practice that each move requires and a tech skill failure is easily explained as their own failure to reach whatever that level is.
For Excuse 2, the solution is to compete more, analyze more, and study more. These, and more, are often reduced down to the idea of “Work More.”
It seems that in the mind of Reductionists, every single aspect of reality can be broken down into understandable interactions. They don’t really get upset at themselves when they fail to understand something they’ve never seen before, but they quickly lose patience with themselves whenever the “Unexpected Moment” was caused by their own “failures”, especially if they’ve made that same “failure” in abundance.
Let’s talk about Mew2King for a sec. You see, in Melee, Reductionsists are typically much more comfortable in situations that have fewer variables. We can see this when we look at the areas of Melee where M2K excels and where he is weak. M2K’s strengths are: Grab Follow Ups, Edge Guards, Defense (this includes Recoveries), and Patience.
Let’s not worry about Patience right now, and instead look at the other 4. Some people might say that M2K’s strength is less “Grab Follow Ups” and more “Punish Game”, but I disagree. Don’t get me wrong, M2K’s punish game is great but his real strength can be better defined as Grab Follow Ups.
M2K plays Fox against Puff. He plays Sheik against Falcon, Sheik, and low tiers. He plays Marth against Spacies. What is the common trait among all these matchups? M2K’s characters has well defined follow ups off of grab. M2K’s punish game has always revolved around grab because it DRASTICALLY reduces the number of variables he needs to account for. All you need to account for is your Opponent’s DI, Percent, and Tech Options.
His second strength, Edge Guards, is a strength for nearly identical reasons. When your opponent is sent off stage they lose a huge number of mixup options. Your opponent can mix up when to jump, and when to use one of at most 3 recovery moves. There is still quite a lot of mixup potential here but the number of variables to account for is still drastically reduced from “True Neutral”, M2K’s biggest weakness.
Strength #3, Defense, is more difficult to handle emotionally since now M2K is the one getting hit. However, in terms of variables, it is similar to Chain Grabbing and Edge Guarding. The number of options you have is far fewer than in Neutral and this means that Decision Making is much less taxing.
Decision Making in Neutral is “taxing” because a Reductionist has to consider all of his options before he makes a decision. He knows full well that every decision made is hugely important. For Reductionists, this issue is solved by simply increasing the seriousness of conscious consideration. This response when seen in real life, comes off as seemingly effective, seemingly intelligent, very consistent, very reliable, and relatively simple. The virtues of this response, when adopted “in real life”, can be, and has been, debated immensely. I believe that Melee is an interesting source of insight into that debate. Let’s examine how the “Increase Consideration” method, or the Reductionist Method, is effected by the Mechanics of Melee.
The main aspect of Melee to point out here is that Melee is INCREDIBLY fast paced.
In real life I can consider my options for hours, weeks, even years. If I want to take a whole day to analyze a situation, weigh the pros and cons, ask friends for advice, do further research on the subject, read testimonials of people who have made the same decisions, or anything else. What is one day in the grand scheme of my life? How could I not be willing to sacrifice a single day when getting this decision right will make the entire rest of my life better?
This cannot be done in Melee. No matter what you think about “sacrificing a day”, or the efficacy of analysis, you cannot deny that while playing Melee “Time” is an incredibly valuable and rare resource. Let’s use an example situation to get a good understanding of just how short on time we are when we play this game called Li-- I mean… called Melee.
Let’s say that Fox is grabbed by a Puff at 36% and is immediately up-thrown. We’ll say that Puff started her Grab on Frame 1. Puff’s grab comes out on frame 7 and she can very quickly begin her up-throw. If Puff is frame perfect on her up-throw, not difficult, than Fox will have only until Frame 13 to input DI. Remember that The grab animation started on Frame 1 and on Frame 14 the opportunity to DI the up-throw is gone. Commonly Fox mains successfully DI Puff’s up throw on accident, that’s how fast it is. They haven’t even had time to react to getting grabbed. They didn't realize they were getting grabbed and were doing something else like a dashback input, or maybe they were trying to short-hop drift away. This is the speed of Melee.
If you talk to Professional Boxers or UFC fighters, it won’t be long before someone talks about the idea of instinctual action. You’re in the ring, 5 feet from your opponent, and you notice your opponent begin to shift his weight, a key indicative-muscle tenses, signifying the approach of quick jab. In that moment you CANNOT think to yourself, “Oh, hey! They tensed that muscle! Now, Maybe they’re going for a feint, but I remember that my coach told me this particular opponent doesn’t really use feints. Ok, that’s solved! There is definitely a Jab coming. Let’s dodge to the left to set up a counter hit.”
Exaggerated as that internal dialogue was, a true fighter would never waste their time thinking like that. That’s what practice is for. In practice a UFC fighter is trying to instinctualize as many of those lightning quick reactions necessary for victory as they can, to transform them from conscious choices into instinctual reactions. When you practice the Dodge-Left-Counter 1,000 times in the gym your body and brain will be able to simply see the signal from your opponent and immediately, almost involuntarily, initiate the Dodge-Left-Counter. This is a huge part of fighting because, as in Melee, time is an incredibly important resource.
You might be asking why I bring all this up?
As I see it, Reductionists are players who, to some extent, believe, or operate on the assumption, that Melee can be “solved”. Of course, they know full well that the game can’t be entirely solved. They consciously admit that, even if it could be solved, they probably aren’t good enough to do it. Reductionsists are not mindless robots trying to compute a math problem. This is one of those moments where a person knows and believes something to be true and yet they operate as if it weren’t true. Let’s look again at M2K to see how this effected him.
M2K revolutionized the game in his early years. No one had ever spent so much time studying the game and solo practicing. He showed up on the scene with a level of understanding that made players feel like Melee had been “solved”. People quit the game thinking, “There is really no point in playing any more. The game had been reduced down to a set of simple consecutive interactions, and the memorization of these interactions has been accomplished and is unbeatable, when executed well.”
But, now we know that this isn’t true. M2K had 2 main weaknesses, both of which stemmed from the same desire to Reduce and Understand that led to his impeccable grab game, his greatest strength. His weaknesses were Neutral, and Mental Fortitude. While I would assert that M2K’s lack of Mental Fortitude can also be traced back to his Reductionist tendencies, we’ll focus on the Neutral game weakness since physiological analysis would take too much time.
M2K had bad Neutral. Maybe some people would disagree but I don’t think I could convince those people of much anyway so this writing isn’t for them. M2K biggest strength in Neutral was his understanding that alternating between aggressive and “campy” playstyles was a powerful strategy. When you start adjusting to his aggressive play, he switches to defensive. If you finally adjust to that, he switches back to aggressive. People don’t talk about this simple idea very much but I think that majority of Smash players have quite a bit of difficulty dealing with these strategy mixups from their opponents.
To turn to Ultimate for a moment, I think this is one reason why so many players struggle against MKLeo. When Joker, as a character, has Arsene, he is incredibly powerful. The natural expectation is that the Joker player will play more aggressive. Without Arsene, Joker is undeniably weaker, and therefore should play slightly safer. While all of MKLeo’s opponents realize this dynamic it still creates a certain situation where they are inexperienced; it creates an additional layer of “Pacing Expectation”.
All Smash players are talented at adjusting to new tempo’s. Each different opponent has a unique tempo and each character has one as well. The thing that smashers aren’t so good at is adjusting to the back and forth tempo changes of better players during one individual game. M2K didn’t just switch tempo’s at random, he watched his opponent and when he felt like his opponent was becoming complacent, or forgetting just how quickly they could be attacked, that’s when he would strike.
The Reductionist, when presented with an Unexpected Moment, will commonly repeat this sequence: First they’re surprised. After that, they will immediately want to figure out what actually did happen. Sometimes, “what happened” is obvious, like missing a ledge dash, but other times the sequence of mechanic interactions cannot be so easily understood.
If their match is still going on they’ll be forced to live with the mystery and move on. To them this is a frustrating experience. If Increased Consideration is the solution to a problem than being forced to ignore a problem equates to abject lack of progress, sometimes even to abject failure.
Now, there is one incredibly quick and easy Strategy to solving this “Mystery” problem. Not all Reductionsists use this strategy. I am not even claiming that iBDW does this. the strategy is this: Blame Existence. This typically involves looking at your controller, or blaming it on the failings of Melee as a game. You could even blame it directly Life, and how depressing/unfair it is that stupidity is so commonly rewarded. For M2K, this umbrella strategy was a favorite.
By adopting the “Blame Existence” strategy you can accomplish 2 very useful things.
Obviously, the main problem with this strategy is that it is often a lie. Over and over I have heard Falco mains exclaim, “How did that Grab reach me? Marth is broken!”. It take almost no time at all to go back and see that the Falco was starting up his own Jab, moving his hand far out in front of him, in perfect position to get grabbed. The game interrupts the Jab animation before his hand fully extends, making it seem like Marth’s grab is infinite. Falco mains, even having been the ones to input that Jab, cry out in confusion at how that could have happened, as if it was some sort of glitch in the Matrix. Why God? Why hast thou Forsaken Me?
This type of lie is not necessarily malicious, unethical, or even useless. However, any lie, by definition, is not the truth, and the truth is universally a more powerful resource than untruth.
The Reductionist’s biggest mistake is that they underestimate Melee. They want to reduce it down to so many known interactions. They act as if they can do just that. They act as if knowing every possible detail about every possible outcome will lead to ultimate victory. They act as if they can hold all their knowledge and experience in their head like RAM memory, active and volatile. Hax$ believes in the prophecy of 20XX, a time when Fox mains have solved the game. M2K actually achieved this, to some extent, but only in those places where the game is inherently simplified, like offstage play.
No player in Melee history has been able to “solve” Melee via a Reductionist method, scientific method, empirical, logical, or any other type of method. Even I must admit that the possibility always exists, that one day, some incredible player will finally perfect the game. Maybe, iBDW can be that player. M2K’s strategy was to know the game more than anyone. Hax$ still toils away in that particular coal mine, the coal dust building up, hampering his sanity. iBDW’s strategy to achieve that goal is a strategy that is incredibly common throughout our society. iBDW’s plan is very simple: I will have the most unbelievable work-ethic of all time.
So many people, with personalities like iBDW, turn to this strategy. Outside of Melee, it seems to be effective, at the very least it’s reliable. Most of the time followers of this work-ethic zealotry become Lawyers or Stock Brokers. iBDW found Melee and, being way smarter than any Lawyer or Stock Broker that ever was, he knew “good” when he saw it. He knew what was good and had the balls to commit to it. I respect the **** out of him and he seems like a mostly happy guy.
I simply just do not believe that any human will ever be able to reach the goal he seems to be pushing towards. I do not think it’s possible, using anything like the Reductionist’s strategy, for iBDW, or anyone, to ever truly join that Tippy-Top echelon of players like Armada, Mang0, Hbox, and PPMD. Yes, I did leave M2K out of that “top” tier.
Imagine there are three camps of people, like the Mind, Heart, and Body groups from the Rishi video. Each camp has a current champion; Mang0, Zain, and iBDW.
Mang0 is in the camp of Play. Everything is Playing. What this means is that the game can never really be a job. They play, compete, and even sometimes practice for fun. This tendency to do what they enjoy makes them generally a little bit happier. This tendency is sometimes called Right Action. This group is only in it for the Play aspect of it.
The question then becomes; why does Play appeal to them so? There is only one “Tent Pole” of Play; it is social. All other aspects of play are held up by this one key fact. Every single game in existence can be thought of as yet another language. A game like Tic-Tac-Toe is a language with Nouns only. Communicating complex expressions of the self with Tic-Tac-Toe seems impossible. Melee is a language with: Nouns, Verbs, Subjects, Adverbs, Past Tense, Numbers, Future Tense, Imperatives, Adjectives, Superlative Adjectives, Pronouns, Prefixes, Suffixes, Slang, and History.
The point of this metaphor is that Melee is a game that garner’s the amount of devotion that it does because it is a language as capable of providing expression opportunity as any spoken language. A double-shine grab communicates in a way that combines the past and future tense, verb, and a bit of imperative. We can dance in this game. This aspect of Melee is what makes it fun.
Now, people in the Play camp are not the only ones who feel this fun. All Melee players play the game because they enjoy it, in whatever way they do. They all even realize how much better it is to have someone to talk with, an opponent. The main difference is that the Play camp doesn’t really care too much about the tiny details of things. They’ll put plenty of effort into the game, but never labor. This choice’s biggest effect on a person’s Melee is that it keeps them safe from the need to be perfect.
Here’s what I mean. Bear with me.
Has there ever been a player who actually had perfect tech skill? Has there ever been a player who always did exactly what they wanted to do? A player who never once had an opportunity to say, “I meant to do something else.”? The answer is, of course: No.
Or, how about this, has there ever been a player who always knew exactly what his opponent was going to do? People talk about “reads based” players, has one of these players ever won a Super-Major? Again, this player does not exist.
What these two truths establishes, as a Law, is that every match contains a certain type of moment that I will describe now:
This is the moment when something happens, that you did not expect.
I doubt any Melee player would ever honestly argue that a match of Melee is light on these moments. Melee is densely packed with these moments; moments of the unexpected. There are two kinds of Unexpected. There’s the kind that is caused by yourself, via so called “failures” of tech skill. You mean to do one thing and your hands mess it up. The second source of Unexpected is your opponent. I imagine I don’t need to give any more examples of these.
A Player who is always playing for simply the play of it, is never expecting themselves, or their opponent, to play “perfectly”. They are typically going to be someone much more capable at dealing with these inevitable “Unexpected Moments”. The reason this aptitude is powerful in Melee is because the game is so fast paced. When something goes wrong, a Play based player will be less surprised that any mistake occurred, they enjoy it almost, and more importantly, they will not be attaching any of their self-worth to whatever it is they thought was going to happen. They realize full well that perfect “Tech Skill” or perfect “Play” is not actually possible for longer than a few seconds at a time. They recognize the existence of Lady Fortune and have a relatively healthy relationship with her. They may get too full of themselves when she smiles on them but, they don’t get too upset when she takes her favor away.
When Mang0 gets hit, he doesn’t spend time trying to figure out if his approach plan might have worked in a different moment. He never expected the match to be devoid of surprises. He doesn’t get unhappy when he loses an interaction. He doesn’t spend a single moment switching from an Offensive mindset to a Recovery mindset. Rather, he remains in the play mindset. He doesn’t have a plan. He doesn’t think of Recovery as something different than Punish Game. It’s all the same game. If you analyze the way Mang0 plays you can see how quickly he transitions. Is there any transition at all? He doesn’t mind getting hit. He enjoys losing.
Outside of Melee, these players are more likely to play Poker or to be a sports fan. They love to gamble and they have no real struggles with the hard narratives of fortune.
The second camp of players is Championed by iBDW, who I will be referring to as “Cody” from now on because iBDW is weird to type. Cody has unconsciously taken up the mantle of his people’s former champion, Mew2King. Cody’s Camp is people I would refer to either as Reductionists or Controllers. Every time one of these players loses an interaction because of an Unexpected Moment they treat it like any other lost interaction.
They think to themselves one of 2 excuses.
- I meant to do something else and losing that interaction was my fault because I failed to practice enough.
- I’ve never seen that happen before. How could I have been expected to know what to do? I just lack experience. This lacking isn’t something I can be insulted for. No one could really criticize me for that.
Maybe this isn’t obvious but, both of these excuses are entirely Self-Driven. By this, I mean that in both instances, there is a simple solution to the problem that can be carried out by the self, independent from the influences of other people. They are in total control of their lives. Nothing is chaos. Lady Fortune does not exist.
For Excuse 1, the solution is to practice more. The Reductionist acts as if there is some level of practice that each move requires and a tech skill failure is easily explained as their own failure to reach whatever that level is.
For Excuse 2, the solution is to compete more, analyze more, and study more. These, and more, are often reduced down to the idea of “Work More.”
It seems that in the mind of Reductionists, every single aspect of reality can be broken down into understandable interactions. They don’t really get upset at themselves when they fail to understand something they’ve never seen before, but they quickly lose patience with themselves whenever the “Unexpected Moment” was caused by their own “failures”, especially if they’ve made that same “failure” in abundance.
Let’s talk about Mew2King for a sec. You see, in Melee, Reductionsists are typically much more comfortable in situations that have fewer variables. We can see this when we look at the areas of Melee where M2K excels and where he is weak. M2K’s strengths are: Grab Follow Ups, Edge Guards, Defense (this includes Recoveries), and Patience.
Let’s not worry about Patience right now, and instead look at the other 4. Some people might say that M2K’s strength is less “Grab Follow Ups” and more “Punish Game”, but I disagree. Don’t get me wrong, M2K’s punish game is great but his real strength can be better defined as Grab Follow Ups.
M2K plays Fox against Puff. He plays Sheik against Falcon, Sheik, and low tiers. He plays Marth against Spacies. What is the common trait among all these matchups? M2K’s characters has well defined follow ups off of grab. M2K’s punish game has always revolved around grab because it DRASTICALLY reduces the number of variables he needs to account for. All you need to account for is your Opponent’s DI, Percent, and Tech Options.
His second strength, Edge Guards, is a strength for nearly identical reasons. When your opponent is sent off stage they lose a huge number of mixup options. Your opponent can mix up when to jump, and when to use one of at most 3 recovery moves. There is still quite a lot of mixup potential here but the number of variables to account for is still drastically reduced from “True Neutral”, M2K’s biggest weakness.
Strength #3, Defense, is more difficult to handle emotionally since now M2K is the one getting hit. However, in terms of variables, it is similar to Chain Grabbing and Edge Guarding. The number of options you have is far fewer than in Neutral and this means that Decision Making is much less taxing.
Decision Making in Neutral is “taxing” because a Reductionist has to consider all of his options before he makes a decision. He knows full well that every decision made is hugely important. For Reductionists, this issue is solved by simply increasing the seriousness of conscious consideration. This response when seen in real life, comes off as seemingly effective, seemingly intelligent, very consistent, very reliable, and relatively simple. The virtues of this response, when adopted “in real life”, can be, and has been, debated immensely. I believe that Melee is an interesting source of insight into that debate. Let’s examine how the “Increase Consideration” method, or the Reductionist Method, is effected by the Mechanics of Melee.
The main aspect of Melee to point out here is that Melee is INCREDIBLY fast paced.
In real life I can consider my options for hours, weeks, even years. If I want to take a whole day to analyze a situation, weigh the pros and cons, ask friends for advice, do further research on the subject, read testimonials of people who have made the same decisions, or anything else. What is one day in the grand scheme of my life? How could I not be willing to sacrifice a single day when getting this decision right will make the entire rest of my life better?
This cannot be done in Melee. No matter what you think about “sacrificing a day”, or the efficacy of analysis, you cannot deny that while playing Melee “Time” is an incredibly valuable and rare resource. Let’s use an example situation to get a good understanding of just how short on time we are when we play this game called Li-- I mean… called Melee.
Let’s say that Fox is grabbed by a Puff at 36% and is immediately up-thrown. We’ll say that Puff started her Grab on Frame 1. Puff’s grab comes out on frame 7 and she can very quickly begin her up-throw. If Puff is frame perfect on her up-throw, not difficult, than Fox will have only until Frame 13 to input DI. Remember that The grab animation started on Frame 1 and on Frame 14 the opportunity to DI the up-throw is gone. Commonly Fox mains successfully DI Puff’s up throw on accident, that’s how fast it is. They haven’t even had time to react to getting grabbed. They didn't realize they were getting grabbed and were doing something else like a dashback input, or maybe they were trying to short-hop drift away. This is the speed of Melee.
If you talk to Professional Boxers or UFC fighters, it won’t be long before someone talks about the idea of instinctual action. You’re in the ring, 5 feet from your opponent, and you notice your opponent begin to shift his weight, a key indicative-muscle tenses, signifying the approach of quick jab. In that moment you CANNOT think to yourself, “Oh, hey! They tensed that muscle! Now, Maybe they’re going for a feint, but I remember that my coach told me this particular opponent doesn’t really use feints. Ok, that’s solved! There is definitely a Jab coming. Let’s dodge to the left to set up a counter hit.”
Exaggerated as that internal dialogue was, a true fighter would never waste their time thinking like that. That’s what practice is for. In practice a UFC fighter is trying to instinctualize as many of those lightning quick reactions necessary for victory as they can, to transform them from conscious choices into instinctual reactions. When you practice the Dodge-Left-Counter 1,000 times in the gym your body and brain will be able to simply see the signal from your opponent and immediately, almost involuntarily, initiate the Dodge-Left-Counter. This is a huge part of fighting because, as in Melee, time is an incredibly important resource.
You might be asking why I bring all this up?
As I see it, Reductionists are players who, to some extent, believe, or operate on the assumption, that Melee can be “solved”. Of course, they know full well that the game can’t be entirely solved. They consciously admit that, even if it could be solved, they probably aren’t good enough to do it. Reductionsists are not mindless robots trying to compute a math problem. This is one of those moments where a person knows and believes something to be true and yet they operate as if it weren’t true. Let’s look again at M2K to see how this effected him.
M2K revolutionized the game in his early years. No one had ever spent so much time studying the game and solo practicing. He showed up on the scene with a level of understanding that made players feel like Melee had been “solved”. People quit the game thinking, “There is really no point in playing any more. The game had been reduced down to a set of simple consecutive interactions, and the memorization of these interactions has been accomplished and is unbeatable, when executed well.”
But, now we know that this isn’t true. M2K had 2 main weaknesses, both of which stemmed from the same desire to Reduce and Understand that led to his impeccable grab game, his greatest strength. His weaknesses were Neutral, and Mental Fortitude. While I would assert that M2K’s lack of Mental Fortitude can also be traced back to his Reductionist tendencies, we’ll focus on the Neutral game weakness since physiological analysis would take too much time.
M2K had bad Neutral. Maybe some people would disagree but I don’t think I could convince those people of much anyway so this writing isn’t for them. M2K biggest strength in Neutral was his understanding that alternating between aggressive and “campy” playstyles was a powerful strategy. When you start adjusting to his aggressive play, he switches to defensive. If you finally adjust to that, he switches back to aggressive. People don’t talk about this simple idea very much but I think that majority of Smash players have quite a bit of difficulty dealing with these strategy mixups from their opponents.
To turn to Ultimate for a moment, I think this is one reason why so many players struggle against MKLeo. When Joker, as a character, has Arsene, he is incredibly powerful. The natural expectation is that the Joker player will play more aggressive. Without Arsene, Joker is undeniably weaker, and therefore should play slightly safer. While all of MKLeo’s opponents realize this dynamic it still creates a certain situation where they are inexperienced; it creates an additional layer of “Pacing Expectation”.
All Smash players are talented at adjusting to new tempo’s. Each different opponent has a unique tempo and each character has one as well. The thing that smashers aren’t so good at is adjusting to the back and forth tempo changes of better players during one individual game. M2K didn’t just switch tempo’s at random, he watched his opponent and when he felt like his opponent was becoming complacent, or forgetting just how quickly they could be attacked, that’s when he would strike.
The Reductionist, when presented with an Unexpected Moment, will commonly repeat this sequence: First they’re surprised. After that, they will immediately want to figure out what actually did happen. Sometimes, “what happened” is obvious, like missing a ledge dash, but other times the sequence of mechanic interactions cannot be so easily understood.
If their match is still going on they’ll be forced to live with the mystery and move on. To them this is a frustrating experience. If Increased Consideration is the solution to a problem than being forced to ignore a problem equates to abject lack of progress, sometimes even to abject failure.
Now, there is one incredibly quick and easy Strategy to solving this “Mystery” problem. Not all Reductionsists use this strategy. I am not even claiming that iBDW does this. the strategy is this: Blame Existence. This typically involves looking at your controller, or blaming it on the failings of Melee as a game. You could even blame it directly Life, and how depressing/unfair it is that stupidity is so commonly rewarded. For M2K, this umbrella strategy was a favorite.
By adopting the “Blame Existence” strategy you can accomplish 2 very useful things.
- You absolve yourself of blame. It was not my fault. It was inexperience, or technical issues, or simply bad luck. The only possible things that can be at fault are; The unfairness of life and/or Melee itself.
- It provides a wonderfully quick and instinctual explanation, that takes up very little Time; a resource we can’t afford to waste. This can actually help Reductionsists forget the desire to understand, and instead stay focused on the game at hand.
Obviously, the main problem with this strategy is that it is often a lie. Over and over I have heard Falco mains exclaim, “How did that Grab reach me? Marth is broken!”. It take almost no time at all to go back and see that the Falco was starting up his own Jab, moving his hand far out in front of him, in perfect position to get grabbed. The game interrupts the Jab animation before his hand fully extends, making it seem like Marth’s grab is infinite. Falco mains, even having been the ones to input that Jab, cry out in confusion at how that could have happened, as if it was some sort of glitch in the Matrix. Why God? Why hast thou Forsaken Me?
This type of lie is not necessarily malicious, unethical, or even useless. However, any lie, by definition, is not the truth, and the truth is universally a more powerful resource than untruth.
The Reductionist’s biggest mistake is that they underestimate Melee. They want to reduce it down to so many known interactions. They act as if they can do just that. They act as if knowing every possible detail about every possible outcome will lead to ultimate victory. They act as if they can hold all their knowledge and experience in their head like RAM memory, active and volatile. Hax$ believes in the prophecy of 20XX, a time when Fox mains have solved the game. M2K actually achieved this, to some extent, but only in those places where the game is inherently simplified, like offstage play.
No player in Melee history has been able to “solve” Melee via a Reductionist method, scientific method, empirical, logical, or any other type of method. Even I must admit that the possibility always exists, that one day, some incredible player will finally perfect the game. Maybe, iBDW can be that player. M2K’s strategy was to know the game more than anyone. Hax$ still toils away in that particular coal mine, the coal dust building up, hampering his sanity. iBDW’s strategy to achieve that goal is a strategy that is incredibly common throughout our society. iBDW’s plan is very simple: I will have the most unbelievable work-ethic of all time.
So many people, with personalities like iBDW, turn to this strategy. Outside of Melee, it seems to be effective, at the very least it’s reliable. Most of the time followers of this work-ethic zealotry become Lawyers or Stock Brokers. iBDW found Melee and, being way smarter than any Lawyer or Stock Broker that ever was, he knew “good” when he saw it. He knew what was good and had the balls to commit to it. I respect the **** out of him and he seems like a mostly happy guy.
I simply just do not believe that any human will ever be able to reach the goal he seems to be pushing towards. I do not think it’s possible, using anything like the Reductionist’s strategy, for iBDW, or anyone, to ever truly join that Tippy-Top echelon of players like Armada, Mang0, Hbox, and PPMD. Yes, I did leave M2K out of that “top” tier.
