The Gamer's Quarter

[kirkjerk]

So, coming late to the party, I'd like to talk about "Sirlin" and the whole "Play to Win" idea as seen on http://www.sirlin.net/

He presents some compelling arguments, and is worth the read, but I had a few objections I'd like to bounce off of people here:

First off, Play to Win exhibits great faith in game designers, that in "99.9%" of the situations, there isn't a simple strategy that wins over all others, or that the community will serve to eliminate those games that do fall to a simple pattern. So therefore, any arbitrary restrictions by "scrubs" are largely pointless and out of the true spirit of gaming. But Sirlin himself points out some exceptions to this, cases where the "Pros" agree it is justified. Essay 1 talks about Akuma:

[benreed]

Eh. I like Sirlin and I agree with the majority of what he says because I, too, am a fighting game nut even if I can't compete at the level he does. Due to the relatively simple interface of fighting games (limited or no healing, no multiplayer team dynamics, no terrain dynamics to speak of in terms of outright evading combat, short time limit), it's easy to see where he really starts the deep-thoughts shit about the metagame, and how certain people thrive at dynamic mindgames and others -- myself included -- tend to stagnate at certain points in assessing risk-reward and the proper way to approach a competitive situation.

I personally make it a point to defend his point of view even when I don't entirely agree with how he perceives certain things because I believe too many people who consider themselves gaming afficianados don't properly appreciate that for some people, yes, they derive the greatest satisfaction from playing to WIN at a game against another person, rather than playing simply to appreciate aesthetic or stylistic components. I never used to take many games seriously on the basis of minor aesthetic quirks, until I first saw a video of competitive Guilty Gear players going at it (including a certain rough trick named Daigo Umehara). As a kid, my fighting-game strategy basically revolved around "use sweep, use throw, mash buttons until you get either a fireball or a Shoryuken", and I wrote off the technical depth of fighting games at that level. What more could there be than that?

When I saw that video it was like something turned on in my mind -- I wasn't really considering the true depth of these games. For half my life, I'd only played HALF A GAME -- and from then on I gained an appreciation for the different ways different players approach these games at the high levels of competition, and the ways they learned how to intercept, outwit, confound, and eventually defeat each other using static, well-known toolsets.