Competitive gaming and elitism: I DON'T KNOW WHY THESE SCRUBS WON'T PLAY MY GAME

So I read a great blog post today about the elitism of competitive gaming communities, and I agree wholeheartedly. You can see it in action: people are often shitty to new players in any game where players compete, and it doesn't help anybody. Keep in mind I'm not even talking about the strongest players here: I'm talking about the medium-level, advanced and even the people just past beginner level who rub newbies' noses into their limited prowess.

Especially for the fighting games, which lack strong tutorials, step two or three of properly learning the game is going online and checking out the communities. I find Shoryuken's forums unreadable, myself, so these days I watch Youtube tutorials and match videos and pay close attention. In any case, the new players lean on the old, and the smartest of the old players understand that they need the new players just as badly. Guys like that (like Alex Valle, to name one) work to improve the scene. Without players, everybody is done.

The comments in the article prove the guy right: the first major objection comes from a dude who states his Starcraft rank before his objections. He tries to reframe the situation by saying that there are more know-nothing loudmouths than there are sincere newbies. It's true, there are a lot of these guys in nerd-land and they are particularly bad when it comes to competitive games. If you look at the non-enthusiast boards for fighting games, you'll see the most ridiculous statements made by low-level players from imagined positions of authority.

I've been playing Blazblue CS2 a lot, and I just fought a guy who quit in the middle of the match. I checked the guy's XBL profile, as I often do with ragequitters: I find they have weird stuff in there. Sure enough, the profile is a screed on Blazblue in which the player says he doesn't respect people who start their combos with jabs. (Unless you are playing Tsubaki, as I was, because "she sucks". He ragequit anyway.) I imagine he also doesn't respect throwing anything but strikes in baseball. Stuff like this is just foolish arrogance from a weak player with no desire to improve. I have no mercy for the "throwing is cheap" crowd, but I also don't think every situation is so black and white as that one.

Let me take an example from the tiny, tiny English-language Japanese mahjong scene. Every once in a while I try and read the forums at reachmahjong.com. Unfortunately, the community (only really two forums, one of which is much smaller) is bit of a ghost town. Whenever I stop by, I remember why.

Without fail, the only threads that get any activity, for months at a time, have been these threads where a hapless newbie walks in and all the seasoned players jump in to scream how wrong he is at him. After that, they ultimately go at each other's throats over some piece of minutiae like "you're not supposed to use the phrase deal in!". Here's the most recent one, in which a newbie posts an "Advanced Guide" and is promptly eviscerated in progressively more condescending posts from more advanced players, the last of whom (a high ranker on Tenhou) completes the circle by attacking the other regular posters.

The original poster's advice is certainly not the best (I looked up an early version of the post), but unreservedly attacking this totally hapless fellow, who only wanted to share what he had learned with people, is in really poor form. The guy is so humiliated that he takes down his post altogether and will likely never be seen on those boards again. Of course, to the experienced player and the mod, it was a lot more important to express their supremacy than to leave this guy's dignity intact.

Competition entails certain hard truths. You want to win consistently, so you want to do what works. In MJ you want to build a strong hand that's ideally also likely to come out. In Marvel, you want to build a strong team whose abilities complement each other (says Dave, the gimmick team player who most recently tried a Morrigan/Iron Man/Thor projectile team), rather than just picking three guys who look cool. There is a lot of hard work behind those goals. There is no way around that work. It just has to get done. No magic allowed. This is the first lesson, and strong players often find themselves tasked with teaching the weaker how deep the pool they are wading in really is. This is how it should be. But when you tell someone the truth like an asshole, guess what? There is no way they're going to listen.

Being good still doesn't make it a good idea to be a shit to those who aren't on your level. You can get away with it, yes, but it's unproductive. These competitive scenes-- especially the small ones-- require numbers, and representing the public face of your game as a petulant douchebag will make those numbers go down. Even if it isn't an organized activity, even if there isn't some authority to promote and enforce good sportsmanship, we need to practice it ourselves, on and off the game.

On that note, I will continue to push my friends in the USPML to finally run a tournament. Don't worry, they'll get around to it!

Comments

[Narutaki]

"But when you tell someone the truth like an asshole, guess what? There is no way they're going to listen."

Exactly what the internet has never learned.

I don't participate in any competitive gaming so I can't speak from that end. But considering the reputation of most gaming forums, and their attitude in general, it is not surprising this is the case.

[jpmeyer]

I still can't figure out why Magic never seems to have these sorts of problems on the various forums or on Magic Online.

My best guess is that fighting games (and to a slightly lesser extent Starcraft) have extremely opaque mechanics, which makes it so that you need to put in some insane amount of hours of practice just to brute force out how the how the game actually works. (a fireball does this many ticks of damage, flies this many frames per second, has priority over these moves, hits the opponent on these areas, etc.)

So because of this, the only people that can get good are type A personalities that are willing to put in all that time. And Type A people are assholes.

(also, lololololol at how that mahjong post was deleted!)

[TheBigN]

Pretty much. The annoying thing is that this sort of behavior is prevalent everywhere in different forms.

[Elliotpage]

"But when you tell someone the truth like an asshole, guess what? There is no way they're going to listen."
Pretty much.

I enjoy fighting games. I'd love to play them more often than I do. But, I'll gladly admit I'm not very good at them and/or can be slow to learn their quirks. If I get trounced by someone else online, I don't mind. If that person spouts abuse at me for being terrible and sends me an unpleasant xbox live message, I'm not going to want to play much any more!

One community that I have found has been at least bearable is the Melty Blood community, but even that can be downright unpleasant at times.

[rvr67michael]

Virtual On (OT) is the only competitive/VS game I've ever bothered to get really good at, and I think that's one scene where players are typically really friendly to one another, or at least on dedicated boards. Really early (when the first game was already fading from non-Japanese arcades) people were really emphatic that people needed to be taught how to play the game if they wanted it to stay in their arcades, and I think that philosophy has stuck with it.

Or it may be that I've just been really good at picking the message boards I visit.

[HCPolimar]

I remember a whole bunch of us on a particular imageboard dedicated to videogames dissected that blog post. While we agreed that we can all be assholes, especially when it comes to competitive play with fighting games, we disagreed that it was ONLY just the fighting game community that was at fault for this. We also agreed that the guy writing that article probably had that thing happen to him, got upset, and wrote the article.

One person mentioned that it probably has to do with how people conduct themselves online in general. He mentioned how in online forums for "real sports", the very same kind of behavior against new posters or new fans is rampant. It doesn't matter if you're discussing how to properly zone with a shoto or if you're talking about how the Giants should have played the other day. Everyone's going to dump on the new dude and want to prove their superiority.

Likewise, if someone who the rest of the posters don't really know comes bursting in and attempts to throw their weight around, it gets people pretty upset.

It's very different online then when you go play with people face-to-face. When I go and practice at my local arcade, I get tips and feedback from everyone I play against, and we're all friendly to each other.

As for the fighting game scene getting corporate sponsorship and being put on the same level as IRL sports...I don't know how I feel about it. The scene needs support and it needs its community. I would not like to see it go the way of corporate deals and whatnot, however. Maybe it's just the ingrained feeling of "this is something only a few of us really know and this is special to us".