Elite Mindset Development For Competitve Meta Dominance: Premium Nootropic Edition

Competitive games rock, and while I indulge in a fair amount of competitive play I wouldn’t really consider myself truly “competitive” in any of them. Dead average at best. I put the majority of my time into my beautiful, horrible, no-good fighting games - my love for these games is never really going to go away until my wrists collapse completely, and even then I might still try and jam a couple of games of GGXXAC+R, who knows. 

In my recent travels indulging in other competitive games like Yu-Gi-Oh and Warhammer 40k, I’ve been able to sort of broadly spot a trend in how fighting games differ from other scenes. See, fighting games are great because fighting games encourage people to be - hold on, let me take a second to think of an appropriate term here - “losers”. 

Literally: people who lose a lot. 

In a fighting game your new DLC character shouldn’t win. You probably don’t want them to win. Ideally, you should be paying howevermany bucks for a shiny new character with a shiny new costume, and you should be getting beat fifty, sixty times before you slowly become confident that you can plan and play your way out of situations. This is the grasping, tentacle embrace of the loser mindset - playing to learn so that you can play to win when it matters. Not just planning your way out of situations either, I think winning-as-a-goal all the time shuts you out of attempting to do stuff and the satisfaction with making that attempt. Trying something out in a pressured situation becomes another bullet point on a long “ah shit, probably need to practise this a few dozen times” list. 

Broski recently made a video about playing like a lunatic where he offhandedly mentioned a Balrog unplinkable 1f link from jab into Ultra 1 (translation: an intensely difficult and potentially risky maneuver). When you see something like that executed in a game… you gotta try it, right? I heard him talk about it and I wanted to try it. You have to put yourself in the right place mentally to be able to try it in a match, inevitably whiff it, do the little head nod, and then try it again when the opportunity comes up. A well-developed loser mindset (complimentary) lets you play to learn constantly, and if you can enjoy learning then no matter what happens in the game you get to have a bit of fun with it. 

I did a (now-deleted) video a thousand (two or three) years ago where I compared fighting games to learning a musical instrument, where the idea of playing against someone is only true on a surface level because the deeper you go the more it becomes about connection, about improvising together, about one-upping each other with your concept of play to synthesise ideas rather than simply “beating” a person. The more competent you get, the more you drive another to become competent, the more you get driven to not fall behind - situation after situation and cool optimisation after cool optimisation, all contained within this silly box of choices and consequences. THE FIGHTING GAME IS LIKE THE MODERN DAY AGORA, WITH THE PLAYERS AS COMBAT PHILOSOPHERS OF DEBATE AND REASON etc. etc. etc. kill me.

I see you've committed the ultimate logical fallacy of getting grabbed while I have meter.

 

I mentioned this above, but I have been much, much more engaged in the Yu-Gi-Oh card game recently. The experience of being part of a community that requires my physical presence for the game to actually start is a bit of a shift for me, a damp creature more predisposed towards hermitude than any kind of human contact, but the change in pace is refreshing, and the competitive drive that made me fall in love with fighting games has a new home in these far more rules-ambiguous spaces. It’s fun to have to do my research about interactions, to need to explain those interactions so that the game can function with the participation of all players, it’s cool! It is a little interesting how the YGO community demonstrates a significantly different approach to new versions, shifts in the meta, new releases etc. than fighting games. I think the community encourages people to be - and if you’ll give me a second to come up with the correct terminology - I think the best way to describe them is “losers”. 

Live footage of me reluctantly emerging from my apartment. 

There’s no polite way to put this, but I’ll give it a shot: I think that card-game players grossly overestimate their analytical abilities. To believe that your understanding of hypothetical future rules strength is overwhelmingly correct (e.g this deck is clearly the strongest, this is an obvious nerf, this completely kills the deck) is deeply annoying and provides an unhelpful rubric through which to view the game. This confidently stated, absolute understanding of what is good or bad based on a banlist leak or a translated card is often treated as gospel absent from context. More than absent context, it is a viewpoint that encourages the idea amongst mid and lower level players that there is a ‘correct’ way to approach playing the game that beats or invalidates ‘incorrect’ ways, and that if you aren’t right here in the present with the latest release, you are doomed to failure. It goes beyond not wanting to lose, instead discursively treating ‘loss’, or the possibility of future loss, as closer to a fundamental failure rather than a natural state in a game with more than one agent player. This, to me, is a loser mindset because it hamstrings meta exploration (again, particularly at a mid and low level) and provides a tangible, simple answer to the complex, multi-faceted question of ‘why did I lose?’. 

I understand that at a high level an accurate and fast assessment of deck strength in a game that gets monthly releases is a necessity if you want to make it to the big leagues and win a Nintendo Switch or an Air Fryer, but I think having the content-creator-powered insight into these assessment processes acts as a bit of a glue trap for a lot of players, and I think that the conversation both online and offline leans overwhelmingly towards this. 

Like… if you are an active YGO player, I want you to take a genuine look at yourself and honestly ask “am I high level?”. 

“Am I a high level player?”. 

If not then maybe you are being stopped from reaching a higher level of play not because you don’t have a max rarity Vanquish Soul core, but because you’ve stopped thinking about how to problem solve within the absurdly wide and endlessly novel confines of the game. I’m not naive enough to say that you can go out and win with your sick favourite monster utilising the heart of the cards to own your opponent, anime style, but I can definitely tell you that I consistently learn a lot more about how the game works by losing for 10+ games in-person than I do from booting up Master Duel and winning a bunch. I don’t think people need to go play games with set goals like “I’m gonna win EVO” or “I’m gonna win a YCS”, but I do think games like YGO would benefit from communities that publicly and visibly encourage more incremental and abstract progress. Without building a strong base that understands the subtleties and intricacies of the game and revels in it, I think the idea of competitive YGO is doomed to continue a cycle of “new thing objectively good” without the kind of intense meta development that revealed Vergil as an insanely highest-tier, nonsense character in UMVC3, or uh… Chun Li as an insanely highest-tier, nonsense character in UMVC3. 

I genuinely believe this tournament made me a lifelong fan of a game I don't even enjoy playing. Also I might be wrong here but I'm 90% sure Yipes talked about how busted he thought Vergil was on a Team Spooky stream like... week 1 of the game coming out. Absurdly ahead of the curve.

 

This is already slightly too long. Go forth and lose, losers. You don’t need to be the most winning to contribute, you just need to enjoy it enough to start being creative about what you are trying to do and mindful about what it means for you to engage in an activity where you should lose a lot. Playing a game against others, trying to win, losing, and being able to develop alongside them is an intensely valuable experience for me, and I think in games like Yu-Gi-Oh (although I should mention this game is in NO WAY unique here, I just care about it) the cadence of conversation around 'losing' and 'loss' can cheapen a huge, beautiful part of playing and hamper the development of opinions about playing. 

YOUR MOVE dun dun dun dundun, dun dun dun dundundundun IT'S TIME TO D-D-D-D-D-D stop reading it's over the blog is over. 

 

Bonus! This is my favourite monster card in the entire game, and an actual, no-shit, random game-winning draw. I'd love to see an expanded Lava Golem archetype, I think it's just such an odd and interesting monster.