Play to WIN !
Play to win is the most important and most widely misunderstood concept in all of competitive games. The sad irony is that those who do not already understand the implications I'm about to spell out will probably not believe them to be true at all. Apparently, these concepts are something one must come to learn through experience, though I hope at least some of you will take my word for it. I was forced and compelled to write this post because I experienced and have seen many such incidents in IIITB . Eg : Volleyball matches , Cricket matches , online gaming , etc etc
In the world of Street Fighter competition, we have a word for players who aren't good: "scrub." Now, everyone begins as a scrub---it takes time to learn the game to get to a point where you know what you're doing. There is the mistaken notion, though, that by merely continuing to play or "learn" the game, that one can become a top player. In reality, the "scrub" has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He's lost the game before he's chosen his character. He's lost the game even before the decision of which game is to be played has been made. His problem? He does not play to win.
A common call of the scrub is to cry that the kind of play in which ones tries to win at all costs is "boring" or "not fun." Let's consider two groups of players: a group of good players and a group of scrubs. The scrubs will play "for fun" and not explore the extremities of the game. They won't find the most effective tactics and abuse them mercilessly. The good players will. The good players will find incredibly overpowering tactics and patterns. As they play the game more, they'll be forced to find counters to those tactics. The vast majority of tactics that at first appear unbeatable end up having counters, though they are often quite esoteric and difficult to discover. The counter tactic prevents the first player from doing the tactic, but the first player can then use a counter to the counter. The second player is now afraid to use his counter and he's again vulnerable to the original overpowering tactic.Notice that the good players are reaching higher and higher levels of play.
I've been talking down to the scrub a lot in this post. I'd like to say for the record that I'm not calling the scrub stupid. I'm not saying he can never improve. I am saying that he's naive and that he'll be trapped in scrubdom, whether he realizes it or not, as long as he chooses to live in the mental construct of rules he himself constructed. Is it harsh to call scrubs naive? After all, the vast majority of the world is scrubs. I'd say by the definition I've classified 99.9% of the world's population as scrubs. Seriously. All that means is that 99.9% of the world doesn't know what it's like to play competitive games on a high level. It means that they are naive of these concepts. I really have no trouble saying that , since we're talking about esoteric, experience-driven knowledge here.
In the end, playing to win ends up accomplishing much more than just winning. Playing to win is how one improves. Continuous self-improvement is what all of this is really about, anyway. I submit that ultimate goal of the "playing to win" mindset is ironically not just to win...but to improve. So practice, improve, play with discipline, and play to win.
posted by Munna / Rakesh @ 3:11 PM,
2 Comments:
At February 20, 2008 at 10:13 AM,
Big Foot said...
At February 20, 2008 at 11:57 AM,
Munna / Rakesh said...