‘Playing to Win’ - The Ultimate Excuse?

By Plagiarize

Sirlin.net have for a few years hosted a series of articles on how to approach competitive games. For a good while now, people have used these well thought out articles as an excuse for ‘playing to win’ while at the same time missing the most fundamental point: Sirlin.net have a separate section where they talk about ‘multiplayer games’.

Sirlin.net is a website about game design. They cite the reason for hosting the ‘playing to win’ articles existing, as to help game designers build a game suitable for tournament play.

‘Playing to Win’ therefore is aimed at gaming at the highest level. Gaming when there are stakes, when there are prizes and glory to be had, and not gaming for fun. Playing to win is not how you approach a game to enjoy it.

The series of articles start off by defining a ‘scrub’. A scrub, essentially, is a player who believes given tactics are cheap, doesn’t use them and basically has no counter to them. ‘the scrub is only willing to play to win within his own made-up mental set of rules’ it says, and indeed it’s true. But as you can see, scrubs are playing to win, because they’ve entered a competition. What a scrub isn’t, is the average person playing online.

When I play an online FPS, there are certain tactics that I just won’t use. Sniping for one. I don’t snipe, because it’s no fun for me to snipe. I find it boring. I’m not going to do something that bores me, in order to win, because I’m not playing with the sole motivation of winning. I’m playing for two reasons, namely, to have fun, and to get better at the game. So if the only viable tactic online is sniping, and if everyone else online snipes, then that’s not a game I’m going to play.

Is that because I don’t like losing? Perhaps. But I’ve played enough games against people better than me over and over again to know that losing isn’t the problem.

If I won’t snipe, and sniping is the only viable tactic, then no matter how good I get at not sniping, a sniper will always beat me. How will I ever feel like I’m getting any better at the game? I won’t. So if it’s not fun for me to play against snipers and I refuse to take them on at their own game, like I said, I walk away.

Now there are games where sniping is a viable tactic, a popular viable tactic, but not the only viable tactic. I love those because they make me get better at the things I like doing in order to counter snipers. Nothing is more rewarding than landing a long range grenade toss at a sniper’s feet.

Sniping makes every game feel the same to me. If you’re finding a few good spots to snipe from, and cracking shots off at long range, you aren’t enjoying the nuances of the game. You aren’t learning how to move, or what weapon works best in what situation, you’re only getting good at one thing. I might have to get good at half a dozen things to effectively counter a sniper, but so long as it’s possible, if the game is fun for me, I probably will.

What I call a ‘cheap tactic’ is one that actually stops you getting good at the game. Here, the playing to win article and I differ. In a truly competitive environment, which is what the article was aimed at, indeed, only the people willing to face players that use so called cheap tactics will work out how to counter them. This only works when you have skilled competitive players all playing to win. It doesn’t work online… where the average player is probably going to find that, by using a cheap tactic they can win more often than not.

Thus ends their desire to get better. It’s cheap, because a very little investment of practice gets them inflated results. If they lose every now and then to a random player that knows how to counter their little trick, it won’t change them. They don’t play against people who have found the counters enough, and they’ll happily go on winning more games than they lose.

A player willing not to use a cheap tactic is still able to learn how to counter it. In fact I’d argue that someone unprepared to fight fire with fire is more likely to find any weakness in that tactic, if there is one.

The main problem is that these things take a while. Take a game like Mario Kart: DS. When the game was released, the majority of people hadn’t yet worked out the tactic that many people are now using. The game played differently. If you liked the way the game played in the first few weeks, for it to suddenly change, well, you might like what it changes into but there are without doubt going to be people that don’t like what it changes into.

To win at Mario Kart DS originally, required different skills, and more skills to those required now. Now it’s ‘snake’ or lose. The balance of the game hasn’t changed, but the proportion of people that snake has. If you don’t like to snake, you’re going to lose every game against someone that does. As you become more and more outnumbered by snakers, the chances of you being able to select a circuit other than ‘Figure 8’ diminish because the course selection works on a voting system.

For the people that don’t like snaking, the game is now broken.

I’ve seen ‘snakers’ citing ‘playing to win’ directly. ‘Go read this article little man, and stop whining.’

I’d be interested to know if they’ve read any other part of the website, which as I indicated before, is about game design.

‘A multiplayer game is balanced if a reasonably large number of options available to the player are viable—especially, but not limited to, during high-level play by expert players.’

Sirlin talks about the strengths of balance. Sirlin talks about the necessity for everything to be counterable.

The games that sirlin cite in the playing to win article are balanced games that are played competitively to the highest level. Games that aren’t balanced end up coming down to one tactic and if that tactic stops that game being fun for you, it’s hard not to be angry and disappointed about it. The game used to be fun. In Mario Kart, you used to see a variety of characters, karts and circuits, now you’re likely to just see the same couple of characters and karts on the one track, unless you get together with a group of people that don’t snake.

This is especially crippling for a game like Mario Kart, which is meant to be a party game. There’s meant to be an element of luck involved, so that, even a poor player can get lucky and win occasionally with the right items. Unless you’re exclusively playing against the same people all the time, and not practicing by yourself, the game stops being fun once the same person can always win… and speaking personally, the game stops being fun for me, when I can always win.

If a cheap tactic isn’t counterable. The game is flawed. It’s not that I’m a scrub, it’s that the game only has one viable approach that didn’t rear its head until after release. It makes buying a multiplayer game a risk. I don’t remember my wins. I remember moments. I remember wins where I over came odds, came back from the brink of defeat, outsmarted my opponents. I remember the tactics I used and not the final score.

I’ve been called cheap in my time. No One Lives Forever was a game that I played in a tight group of competitive friends. It was brilliant fun, because it was the one game where anyone could win. Yes, it tended to be me, but then I was the one throwing my degree away by spending far too much time playing first person shooters.

I loved playing NOLF because I really had to be on my game. Any given map, anyone of the five of us could win. Nothing was off limits. No weapon or tactic was cheap.

Early on, on some of the more enclosed maps, people started to go crazy with the prox mines. It began with putting round corners just out of sight. The prox mines were fun because when one got you, there was just enough time between it going ‘beeeeeeeep’ and exploding for you to go ‘Oh shit!’ but not enough time for you to do anything about it.

We soon discovered that prox mines could be stuck to metal surfaces and started to find more and more devious places to put them. On top of door frames, on the back of metal pillars, anywhere where you wouldn’t be able to see them until it was too late.

But we soon learnt all the sorts of places that you could hide prox mines, and we soon started either avoiding those spots, or if we were armed with something explosive, we’d fire ahead to clear out any prox that might be just out of sight.

Prox wasn’t the be all and end all. We worked out how to deal with it and you didn’t need to prox mine to win.

And one day, after we’d been playing for months, I wanted to play and all my house mates were out. So I popped online. I had the worst connection of the game, nothing unplayable, but a ping in the low 200s compared to everyone else around 100.

Basically, at that point in a games life, it’s either become a pro game of choice, or the only people left playing it are the hardcore fans. Almost everyone on the server had clan tags, and when I started using prox, they cried foul.

But I knew prox could be dealt with, so I kept using it. In the games in our house, prox use was a given, because every now and then someone would slip up and you’d get a free kill, but no one online had learnt how to use it. I presume that early on, the close knit community had decided that prox wasn’t ‘fair game’ and outlawed it… because these hardcore NOLF players couldn’t stop themselves tripping up over it. They didn’t even seem to know it was magnetic.

They told me it was skill less and I told them to start using it. The suicides began apace and no one caught me out with prox. They just didn’t have a fraction of the skill my housemates had with it. Still crying foul, I finally stopped using prox.

I switched to a machine gun with phosphor rounds and carried on dropping people left right and center. Of course, I was instantly told that phosphor rounds were cheap too.

When the map changed to a more open one, where phosphor rounds and prox became unviable tactics, I showed them my adeptness with other weapons and they stopped calling me cheap and by this stage started accusing me of being all different great NOLF players using an alias. It seemed to me that by banning certain tactics, the NOLF hardcore had neutered themselves.

NOLF was a balanced game, but they’d never taken the time to learn that. I didn’t play NOLF to win, I played it because it was a challenge, and I was rather appalled to see that my house mates were far better at the game than the online competition. I never played it online again after that night, because there had been no challenge.

A tactic is only cheap when there is no counter to it. That is why ‘snaking’ in Mario Kart is cheap and its why I don’t really play Mario Kart online against anyone but people I know don’t snake. Its also why my friends and I never prox mined spawn points.

Playing to win is great when it makes you better at the game, but it sucks when it makes you only get good at one specific facet of it. Perhaps we shouldn’t blame the gamers that exploit such things, but the developers… but either way, whenever it happens to any game, it’s a real shame.

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