Diary of a Mad Gay Asian, Part One
Mood: 
Monday, May 5, 2008
Recently I started reminiscing about my video game playing history. I started to think about it in a way I have never thought about it before, systematically and objectively. When I was younger and still a gamer I used to play any game that I could get my hands on. I never formed an opinion until after I had my fill of the game, whatever it may have been. In my mid teen years, after video games where understood by the market to be a money making product and games were being mass produced, the majority of them were becoming sub-par to put it nicely. After I realized this I started looking at every game with contempt and formed a negative opinion almost immediately about every game I saw. I realize this now and I am trying to break myself of this prejudice against new age games. It is proving to be rather difficult. However, having been in the higher education realm for several years now my ability to solve inner problems like this has grown. I have the ability now to analyze my problems and ask myself questions about these problems and to make progress. My goal is not to strip myself of opinions about new games. My goal is to continue to make these opinions but instead make them in a sheer objective fashion and to keep personal biases out of my decisions. It is impossible to completely remove one’s self from their biases, but one can still try. This article is one of my early most attempts to take a subject and critically analyze it to form an opinion, and in this case a prediction of what is to come of this game. The game I will be talking about is none other than the newest installment of Nintendo’s Super Smash Brothers series, Super Smash Brothers Brawl.
Super Smash Brothers Brawl, from which now on will be referred to as simply Brawl, cannot be fully understood yet. One reason for this is it has yet to be released in the U.S. with exceptions of a very few amount of people who have imported a Japanese version. The entirety of my analysis is based off of video, abundant on the internet, that I have studied and carefully analyzed. So as one reads this they should keep in mind that I have no hard evidence and that everything I am basing this analysis on can easily be proven wrong, or possibly right, in the future. That being said I will start off the remainder of this article by instead of stating assumption or fact I will ask a question, a question I had to ask myself after I formed my initial opinion about the game.
Originally after viewing game play footage of Brawl I formed the immediate opinion that “Brawl will not be a tournament worthy game”. I took my opinion and I questioned it. I asked myself, “Why do I feel that Brawl will not be a tournament worthy game”? This was not the proper question yet, other questions should precede this one. I tried to go all the way to the roots of this opinion. After several days of questioning more questions I found the question I was looking for. Instead of asking, “Why do I have this opinion?” or, “What does Brawl offer for competitive play”? I needed to start with the root question that is simply, “What are the factors that make a game tournament worthy”?
I had this question for several weeks. I could not put my answer into fluid thought but I knew the idea I was trying to convey. Finally, while in a conversation with a friend on the internet during a discussion of the Brawl game, in a moment of shear emotion I wrote in the message box my answer without even thinking about it. I wrote, “…; a game with speed and strategy at its core, a game that requires accurate and precise control of one’s character/s, where the ability of the player is not limited by the character, but where the characters are limited by the ability of the player, a game that consistently allows players of better ability to win against players of lesser ability”. Those are the factors that make a fighting game tournament worthy.
The next question to follow is simply a question to inform my audience of my background and how I came to this conclusion. My question is a simple one. How did I come to that conclusion? The way I found the answer to my first question was not accomplished through critical thinking alone. Since the fall months of 2005 I have been playing Brawl’s predecessor Super Smash Brothers Melee competitively. I was a late starter in the competitive world considering the game was released in 2001. The factors that make a good tournament game were found almost entirely in the game play of Melee. Before I go any further it is necessary for me to state that no game is perfect but, I will make the bold assertion that Melee is the closest game to being perfect for tournaments and competitive play that we have seen so far. Arguing that point would require an article all its own. For the sake of the rest of this article one should keep that in mind.
I spent over 2 years studying videos and traveling across the nation not only playing professional players but asking them questions trying to understand the game more than just how to play it. After years of study and taking what I knew and applying it and figuring out my own ideas along the way I understood why Melee was a great competitive tournament game. There are hundreds of small and detailed points I could make that would support the overall idea, it just took me up until this last month or so to produce a small list of general factors that accurately describe the important attributes of Melee that make it so significant to tournament and competitive play. Now that I have the factors in a list I can take the list and break it down to illustrate why these are the factors that matter. As I do this I will be using examples from melee game play so if one is reading this article and has no prior experience playing this game from here on out they will have to keep an open mind and try to stay with me.
To restate the factors of competitive compatibility they are: speed factor, strategy factor, accurate and precise control factor (the difficulty to utilize the next factor), freedom of control factor, and consistency of outcome factor. This is not as simple as it can get, this is still somewhat of an expansion of the factors. The only 2 factors that really matter in this line up are the factors with the subject of control. Having total freedom to control the game contains the speed factor, and the speed and control should allow strategy. This eliminates the first 2 factors completely. So why did I even state them in the first place? They are discussed and highlighted because they play a significant role in competitive play even though they can be easily categorized under the other factors.
Looking at what I consider to be the most important factor in a fighting game to make it tournament viable, freedom of control, I can take this idea and put it into measurable numerical terms. Before I continue on that, however, I need to explain that in the beginning before I was able to identify these key factors by definition, this was how I tried to justify my idea. While in numerous discussions with peers in the recent months I have tried to make this a point only to find out that simply in the way I had been conveying my point of view on this factor was not sufficient. I needed to find a way in my native language of English to place my idea into a more compact and understandable statement other than a 5 minute sign language battle and a lot of numbers. So in essence, what my audience is about to read is what my argument used to try to stand on, but now I feel that coupled with my definition of this factor, this has become an example more than just the argument itself and the end result being they support each other and it gives my argument 2 legs to stand on. This article is wordy to say the least so I will try to restate some things in order to keep the points together.
To further define freedom of control we can make a scale of numbers. First, I will go over an example of a game that limits control. In hypothetical game A we see 2 players compete in a match. Both players select the same character for the purpose of simplicity. Player1 has an ability of 300, while Player2 has an ability of 50. However, the character they have both selected to fight each other with only has a maximum capacity to be controlled at an ability level of 20. Is it not too unimaginable to see how this can lead to an unfair victory and loss? At this point the player’s individual ability levels do not matter, or matter less. Both of them are limited to the character which is stuck at a maximum capacity of 20. So in this instance we have a 300 versus a 50 and it’s obvious by looking at their skill who is the better player, but Player2 still has just as much of a chance to win as Player1 in these circumstances where neither of them can play any better than the ability level of 20.
Immediately if one questions this who has competitive experience they may discredit this example and make an understandable argument that even though they are still evenly matched, Player1 with a higher skill in the game none-the-less would still be able to use a more developed strategy, or what it is commonly referred to in the video game community as “mind games”, to defeat Player2 who is of lesser ability with less strategy. This would be a good argument that I would love to get into, however, that is another subject for yet another article, but I will still address this with a point I have already made. In my hypothesis I link speed and strategy directly with control. I firmly stand by this assertion. If your control is decreased, one’s ability to produce strategy is lowered proportionately with it. Less control means less “mind games”. Inversely, a game with more control is able to grant more strategy in play.
Now I take the game that is limited by the player’s ability. Hypothetical game B is being played by Player3 and Player4. For simplicity again we will say they are both playing the same character against one another. Player3 has an ability of 300, while Player4 has an ability of 400. The character’s full potential is an ability of 1,200. Now the players are free to fully control the game to the best of their ability and the contest is no longer in the hands of a flip of a coin. The player with a 400 ability in this game should, in theory, consistently win most matches against the player of a 300 ability. These outcomes seem a lot fairer to me, as they should to anyone. To tie this lengthy example together, this is what I mean by the control factor. A good tournament worthy fighting game is one where a player’s ability defines the game play. From this hypothesis of control stems the; speed factor, strategy factor, accuracy and precision factor and, consistency of outcome factor.
Melee is a game where several characters are so complex that it seems almost humanly impossible to ever truly tap into their full potential. The limit is set far beyond the ability of any player the game has ever seen. Melee is an example of a game that allows a player the freedom to use their full potential in some cases. Not all characters in the game are completely controllable, as previously stated Melee is not the perfect fighting game. Melee players have constantly been improving as a whole, the bar keeps getting set higher and higher and the limit has yet to be reached. Players are proving every year in every tournament that they can play even better than previously observed. Every year the tournament videos are faster and more complex and the matches even more exciting than the year before without fail. However, no one has even come close to controlling the game at its limits. This is demonstrated in a series of videos made by a player who goes by the alias, or “tag”, Super Doodleman. He slows down the game to a frame by frame state (one sixtieth of a second intervals) using special software called “Action Replay” and demonstrates just where the limits of the characters lie. The videos are shown in real time and are truly impressive to a player familiar with the game; to someone not familiar with Melee these videos will not make sense to you. Refer to the end of this article for the links to these videos.
Examples of fighting games that limit player control are a lot easier to name. One could take almost any classical fighter and identify how confined you are to every character in the roster. Games like; any Street Fighter (Capcom), any Dead or Alive (Tecmo), any Tekken (Namco), the list goes on. This does not mean that these are bad games. The point I make is that they are not tournament and competitive play conducive as much so as Super Smash Brothers Melee. This is the reason I make the bold assertion that Melee is the world’s best fighting game so far.
This is all the analyzing that I had to go through just to prove to myself that I had reason for my opinion and that I wasn’t just jumping to conclusions. When doing exploration into a subject like this with critical thinking and logic one has to keep an open mind to the facts and not “fall in love with one’s own ideas” (Keith Edwards). Ready with this open minded mind set I started looking at this subject not to justify my opinion, but to reform it if necessary. After my analysis I was successfully able to logically place Brawl’s visibly slower and more constricting game play under the “not tournament conducive” bracket. It has already been confirmed by many sources that several of the techniques that gave far more control in the previous games do not exist in Brawl giving the player far less control. My prediction stands. I believe that Brawl will be a step backwards in tournament play from its predecessor Melee.
I am sure a lot of my readers disagree and are not happy with my conclusion. I am aware I have probably made some enemies with this article. However, there is hope. All I have done here is based my judgments off of observation. Once the game is released widespread in America the Super Smash Brothers community will be studying the game play non-stop like a nationwide task force. If there is hope for Brawl to be played at a higher tournament level than Melee, we have nothing but time to find out how. So, my prediction is nothing more than that, a prediction. No one can tell the future accurately, we can only make our best guesses, and I am sure I stand along-side most of you in the hopes that I am absolutely wrong.
kid who can't discern Bahahah
