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It’s a bit funny, but I’ve always been a bit of a coward. You wouldn’t really notice it at first if we spent time together, especially if we were playing any co-op game. My strategies in any PvE scenario is usually guns blazing with as much damage as possible in an attempt to overwhelm any computer foe. For instance, Lepcis and I have been playing through the Souls games recently and he often comments about my complete unwillingness to use a shield as I instead prefer to two-hand everything.
The truth is though, I just want the fight to be over with as soon as possible. I know that if I get the drop on a CPU, they’re not going to be able to fight back. A CPU won’t learn my tricks and if I can find a pattern that obliterates them before they can take action, then I won’t have to learn theirs. In effect, I remove their ability to play the game the need for me to do anything aside from my one trick. I’m afraid of a fair fight.
This doesn’t work against a humans though; a fact I’ve discovered at every turn when I play with others. While dating my wife, we held a Poke’mon battle with our level 60 team in Pearl and Diamond. My team had been built up the entire game doing what I always did–an entire roster of glass canons each devoted to four moves of a single element. Each individual member was a blunt tool used to overwhelm a particular set of elemental opposition by taking advantage of their weakness. My wife on the other hand diversified her team members, giving them 3 to 4 unique elements each, in addition to abilities that gained advantage from more than just their damage.
When we met to fight, I remember initially feeling bad since my team was a few levels higher than hers. I needn’t have worried; she beat my entire lineup without losing a single Poke’mon. Even when I thought finally, my time had come to take down at least one of her prized fighters, she used a move that flipped the fight backwards and used my own stats against me. While feeling incredibly salty, I learned a valuable lesson that day. Efficient stats do not win fights.
Many years later and many different kinds of PvP games later, both virtual and physical, I sit here typing after feeling an intense knot of stress in my stomach. Due to the Corona virus, I’ve been attempting to play more games online with friends and as an extension of this, I’ve gotten back into League of Legends (which to some might be like saying “I’ve gotten back into meth,” but bear with me). For some reason, in spite of knowing exactly how the game is played, in spite of winning and doing well in the game, I ended feeling as if I had just gotten out of a job interview. My stomach hurt, my breath was quick and I had trouble recollecting any feelings of confidence from the last 30 minutes.
So what caused this? Naturally, as I do with all things, I began to break down the situation and analyze it piece-by-piece. I concluded, not for the first time, that when I play a competitive game, I tend to play in a way that is incredibly indirect. I’ll innocently prick an opponent over and over again until they realize too late that they’ve died a slow death. I’ll hide from their view to give them a false sense of security until I obliterate them in one fell swoop, only to slink back to the shadows. I’ll take wild and unpredictable actions to throw them off their game and then strike when I notice a weak point. Worst still, I’ll remove an opponent’s ability to play the game before applying any direct confrontation. But these are simply strategies–perhaps cowardly, but legitimate all the same if played within the game’s rules. What does any of this reveal?
Digging deeper, I realized that I do all of these things, because like a long chain of dominoes, I have a deep-seated need to put together a logical, superior plan that is guaranteed to win before the game even starts. And why? Because in the middle of the game, I can’t trust myself to analyze everything.
The game of League I just came out of, I played as Evelynn. She’s a character that after a certain point in the game becomes permanently invisible. Her abilities innately do not assist her team, she doesn’t benefit from fighting in groups–her whole premise is to catch people off-guard and obliterate them.
Before the game even started, I read over each and every ability I could choose from. I had my runes (perks) min-maxed to achieve the highest amount of mathematical efficiency for my one trick. I read up on the most efficient order to purchase stat-boosting items, the proper ability order usage to maximize damage output–I even read up on the exact exp value that each monster gives you so that I could plan in my head the most effective manner to obtain a stat lead. All of this, because I’m terrified of what happens when I start playing the actual game.
You see, once a game begins, there is total chaos. If I let it, my mind will attempt to analyze every little piece of information from the game all at once–and there’s enough information within just the first few seconds of a game that it could take hours if not days to properly analyze (after all, several people make a living these days doing just that). This idea, this concept, that there is an infinite number of wrong choices I’ve already made even before the first minute of a game ruins me.
It’s not helped by the overly critical hindsight nature of anonymous teammates’ comments either. If I’ve engaged on an enemy and I die and one of my team members angrily pings that the enemy was 2 levels higher than me, I panic and begin to wildly discredit myself for not having checked before the engagement. If I attempt to assassinate someone but my numbers are off and they live, I have to fight off thoughts that I was a fool for even attempting such a feat–that I should have somehow analyzed every single numerical interaction within the game to know that I could not have succeeded. Every single death my allies suffer, I play “should-have” as I blame myself for not having predicted the turn of events that lead to the tragedy.
The truth is, I simply cannot analyze everything quick enough. In fact, in life, I cannot analyze everything quick enough. In the time that it takes me to write this sentence, there is a lifetime of things happening all around me that I can’t possibly fully understand or even properly be aware of. For every second that I spend progressing in Demon’s Souls is a second that three new games are coming out across the globe that are worth my time but I’ll never be able to pay attention to. For every card I draw in a match, there are thousands of possible connections and combinations of card interactions that I won’t even consider. All my optimization, all of my perfect statistics and best laid plans can and do fall within an instant if any number of unknowns come together to defeat me.
And so I employ strategies that attempt to remove the need for analysis. I simplify the game by pulling it away from my opponent and interacting with them as little as possible. I focus on perfecting a single trick and hide that trick as if my gaming life depended on it–because, well it does.
The best gamers out there aren’t like me. They don’t get stuck in the while loop that is over-analysis. They strike out truly into a game without fear. They see the larger picture; they see the game as a whole and don’t get caught up in the unknowns. To them, the unknowns are a given. They are to be expected. They don’t try to know everything because they can’t. Instead, they use what they do know to navigate any situation to the best of their abilities.
And so in closing, I suppose I must let go of complete analysis. Perhaps in my next League game, I should focus far less on the maximization of a few numbers and instead think more about the flow of the entire game overall. Perhaps the next time I’m in the grocery store, I should just buy the cooking ingredients I need instead of comparing each brand’s weight-to-price ratio and then wondering if I could get it cheaper online in bulk anyway. The next time I’m programming for work, instead of stressing out about the dozens of potential more efficient ways to code something I should just let it go because what I’ve got works. I’m probably not wrong in these scenarios–there will always be a better way but in the real world we just don’t have don’t have the time to analyze everything.
This is an interesting perspective, and one that I’ve found is common to people who write computer programs. There’s always one more edge case or one more bug to smash, and it’s hard to ignore problems with a good plan. But as much as I hate to admit it, a former coworker of mine is right: done is better than perfect. Sometimes, a perfect strategy just isn’t possible – and not only when your opponents in a game are human. I’d argue, though, that you may do yourself a disservice by claiming that the best gamers aren’t like you. I’d say the best gamers were all in your position at one point.
I think this fear is common. If you recall our first game of Advance Wars, you let me choose the rules – so I chose the most extreme ruleset possible: crazy high inflation, tons of money, etc.. I did this (and I avoided PvP games before Netrunner) because I don’t want to lose. I know other people are going to be better than I am, and I fear that my only path to victory lies in either changing the rules or a Hail Mary gambit – by putting my opponent off-balance so we both have to re-learn the rules (with them at a disadvantage because they may still strategize with normal rules) or by making a crazy play that no experienced player would (in the hopes that it’ll look like an innocent mistake).