4 ms·

I choose to play fighting games, and I get my current fix from Dark Souls - an asymmetric fighting game. I enjoy winning, and I structure my play around intenti

I choose to play fighting games, and I get my current fix from Dark Souls - an asymmetric fighting game. I enjoy winning, and I structure my play around intentional practice so that I can improve. But I don't want to win. This is an important nuance. Do you know what winning means? It means the game is over. It means there's no more challenge, no more adversary. It means boredom and purposelessness. Rather than winning, what I want is to fight. Focusing on the outcome of the fight is missing the forest for the trees - the fun is in the conflict, in the struggle with your opponent(s), in the instinctive collaboration with your occassional teammate. In the glory of the defeat, as well as victory. Unless you've got firsthand experience of this, you won't believe how wonderful it feels to get your ass handed to you by a truly superior player. To put the gaming analogy aside, life will always have its ups and downs. Life will always take you somewhere unexpected. Fixating on outcomes will blind you to opportunities and invite needless suffering into your life.

biren34 5y ago
In video games--and life--the only rewards for success are a transient celebration and a harder level.
Noos 5y ago
It really doesn't feel wonderful in fighting games. A superior player can easily trap you in a corner and take your life down to half or more with a single combo string. It's like playing chess against someone entirely more skilled; everything you try to do gets responded to at a level far above you. There really isn't any "wonderful" about it; you could end up watching a video and getting the same result, for all you could do in the match. There is no "glory" in this. A lot of the "play to improve" mindset is a result of needing to make a stupid level of effort to win games, with players going on long loss series due to low population and over-skilled players in the brackets they are in. This is why the fighting game genre struggles to get new players in the game at all-you have to work so much to get to where the fun is or to feel good about your efforts.
- stavros_ 5y ago
  So game and metagame are important here. Overall, I agree with your point. This is the reason I don't play those games, or in those ultra-competitive brackets. I don't think we're necessarily contradicting eachother. I choose to play fighting games for the fight, rather than the victory, and thus tailor my choices within that genre to suit me. To offer a couple of 'parallel' examples to your own: Player A is at a significantly higher level than player B, and 'stifles' player B through consistent reads and conditioning. Nothing player B tries works, everything player B does seems to play exactly into player As hands. This is almost a restatement of your example, except it was a highly rewarding experience for me. In the language of cognitive psychology, it brought about a powerful flow state. The two key differences: 1.) that the skill imbalance was not too great - just great enough - and 2.) that the nature of the game's design and the players' choices in tactics/playstyles ommitted the more obnoxious elements of combat. My second parallel example is simply my first, reversed: I am player A, and my opponent is player B. Everything plays out the same. Interesting, that. Because implicit in player A's skill is that they are in control of the fight - they can, usually, make things fairly unpleasant and dirty for the opponent. It doesn't take much to push someone past the mental edge, to knock them off balance and keep them there; to destroy their flow state. Why is player A so restrained? He didn't want to win, he wanted to fight. Players motivations in games are often what makes the difference between a positive and a negative experience. So we nicely return to the beginning: if you're focused on winning, you're not going to have a good time and neither are the people playing with you.
  - Noos 5y ago
    Yeah, this is you being idiosyncratic. If you look at most people in these situations, they do not get in a flow state from being pummeled, nor do the pummelers restrain themselves to have a fun match. In example 1, the player often DCs or rage quits, because there's no value in such a matchup. If they see the end of the match, they quickly leave to find one more balanced to their skill. You could have just stayed in training and worked on labbing combos for all the effort you went through. And labbing is one of the big problems of that genre, where people feel they have to train hard just to have fun. The second...yeah, no they usually demolish them and move on. A high skilled player also gets little value out of owning someone, and they often smurf in lower ranks for an ego boost. "Watch me stream bronze to grandmaster!" A lot of this is more people trying to convince people to stick with something despite a lot of negative experiences. Fighting games are seriously at risk of being a dead genre, and a lot of the problems are not easily solvable.
ZephyrBlu 5y ago
> Fixating on outcomes will blind you to opportunities and invite needless suffering into your life I think having an outcome in mind is important as your north star and/or driving force, but I agree about fixating on it.

biren34 5y ago

In video games--and life--the only rewards for success are a transient celebration and a harder level.

Noos 5y ago

It really doesn't feel wonderful in fighting games. A superior player can easily trap you in a corner and take your life down to half or more with a single combo string. It's like playing chess against someone entirely more skilled; everything you try to do gets responded to at a level far above you. There really isn't any "wonderful" about it; you could end up watching a video and getting the same result, for all you could do in the match. There is no "glory" in this. A lot of the "play to improve" mindset is a result of needing to make a stupid level of effort to win games, with players going on long loss series due to low population and over-skilled players in the brackets they are in. This is why the fighting game genre struggles to get new players in the game at all-you have to work so much to get to where the fun is or to feel good about your efforts.

stavros_ 5y ago
So game and metagame are important here. Overall, I agree with your point. This is the reason I don't play those games, or in those ultra-competitive brackets. I don't think we're necessarily contradicting eachother. I choose to play fighting games for the fight, rather than the victory, and thus tailor my choices within that genre to suit me. To offer a couple of 'parallel' examples to your own: Player A is at a significantly higher level than player B, and 'stifles' player B through consistent reads and conditioning. Nothing player B tries works, everything player B does seems to play exactly into player As hands. This is almost a restatement of your example, except it was a highly rewarding experience for me. In the language of cognitive psychology, it brought about a powerful flow state. The two key differences: 1.) that the skill imbalance was not too great - just great enough - and 2.) that the nature of the game's design and the players' choices in tactics/playstyles ommitted the more obnoxious elements of combat. My second parallel example is simply my first, reversed: I am player A, and my opponent is player B. Everything plays out the same. Interesting, that. Because implicit in player A's skill is that they are in control of the fight - they can, usually, make things fairly unpleasant and dirty for the opponent. It doesn't take much to push someone past the mental edge, to knock them off balance and keep them there; to destroy their flow state. Why is player A so restrained? He didn't want to win, he wanted to fight. Players motivations in games are often what makes the difference between a positive and a negative experience. So we nicely return to the beginning: if you're focused on winning, you're not going to have a good time and neither are the people playing with you.
- Noos 5y ago
  Yeah, this is you being idiosyncratic. If you look at most people in these situations, they do not get in a flow state from being pummeled, nor do the pummelers restrain themselves to have a fun match. In example 1, the player often DCs or rage quits, because there's no value in such a matchup. If they see the end of the match, they quickly leave to find one more balanced to their skill. You could have just stayed in training and worked on labbing combos for all the effort you went through. And labbing is one of the big problems of that genre, where people feel they have to train hard just to have fun. The second...yeah, no they usually demolish them and move on. A high skilled player also gets little value out of owning someone, and they often smurf in lower ranks for an ego boost. "Watch me stream bronze to grandmaster!" A lot of this is more people trying to convince people to stick with something despite a lot of negative experiences. Fighting games are seriously at risk of being a dead genre, and a lot of the problems are not easily solvable.

ZephyrBlu 5y ago

> Fixating on outcomes will blind you to opportunities and invite needless suffering into your life I think having an outcome in mind is important as your north star and/or driving force, but I agree about fixating on it.