Competitive

Video Games in the Workplace

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Because I work at a super cool place, one of my team’s side projects was to design and build an arcade cabinet shaped like one of the products my company is famous for. Once it was ready, we started using it to work out some of the kinks in the system we had set up to act as the software for our cabinet. It was a desktop computer and a large TV, so it was nothing complicated, but the version of windows was leftover from a computer two company operating system upgrades ago and the computer itself was something basically built out of salvaged parts the company was throwing away. Needless to say, it did not work very well. We had it mostly working for a while, aside from an occasional crash, but someone tried to fix that and it wound up getting bricked.

For a short period of time, though, the entire team competed at Galaga. Mortal Kombat was popular, but almost everyone played Galaga at some point or another. Or at least we tried to get everyone to play it. Whether or not they actually did it has yet to be determined because, after a few weeks, a couple of front-runners emerged.

Galaga isn’t a terribly complicated game. The levels always happen the same way, the mechanics work the same from game to game, and it is possible to win by simply memorizing the game’s patterns. If you know where everything is going to be and how long it will take your bullets to get there, you can easily get your score super high. If you know the trick to get two ships and are confident in your ability to kill everything before it can kill you, it gets even easier to get up there. Unfortunately, new levels kind of kill your ability to remember your way into victory, so your high score tends to increase slowly unless you’ve got amazing instincts. Sure, all the levels are different, but the patterns are similar enough that you shouldn’t be caught entirely unaware.

Myself and two coworkers competed for the top spots. One, Competitive, of them took it very seriously, and the other, Infrequent, only occasionally played. Competitive liked to get me to take turns with him, since our scores were close and we’d trade top spot every week. Infrequent would have been the clear leader if he’d played consistently since he almost doubled our scores the first time he played and then set the leaderboard solidly in the six-digit range. It took me a week to figure out how to get my score that high, but I eventually got there. A week later, Competitive did as well. Infrequent stopped playing at that point, so it was mostly just me and Competitive taking turns.

I have nothing against a healthy rivalry, but it was getting frustrating. Competitive wanted to play every day and he’d just walk up behind me, grab me by the shoulders, and say “How about some Galaga?” or brag about the fact that he held the high score. It got to the point where I didn’t even want to play anymore, despite the game’s comforting repetition and engaging simplicity. Galaga is a lot of fun and I can see why people loved arcade games, now more than ever, but it wasn’t worth the amount of disruption Competitive brought to my daily life, especially when he started wanting to play twice a day.

The entire dynamic felt weird to me. Both Infrequent and Competitive had played Galaga when it first came out. Competitive seemed to just enjoy having someone to play against while Infrequent seemed like he was disappointed in his stellar performance. The first time I played it was in a combo arcade at a pizza place, while my family waited for a seat. I was six or seven, I think. The next time I played it was at work last year. I pick up games quickly, especially ones that rely on repetitive mechanics, and I’m stubborn enough to put in the time it takes to get decent at something. If I’d kept at it, I’m certain I’d have gotten quite good at it.

These days, no one plays. The computer that once held the games was bricked and now the arcade cabinet sits cold and empty. Competitive stays in his office and I need no longer worried about being accosted by a man looking to feed his competitive spirit. I kind of miss it, though. The game wasn’t amazing and the controls kind of sucked, but it was simple, it was fun, and it was a puzzle just waiting for me to figure it out. I hope we get the cabinet fixed again soon. I’d like to get my high scores back.

To Single Play or to Multi Play

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Despite my love for the almost entirely single-player Legend of Zelda franchise, I generally prefer multiplayer games over single-player games. My Steam account is full of single-player games I have never played or haven’t completed. I never actually finished most of my single-player console games, either. I just eventually lose interest or focus, getting distracted by some other video game or a new book, and never get back to finishing the game. If it is a multiplayer game that I’m playing with friends, I’m a lot more likely to stay interested and finish it.  There are exceptions, of course. I’ve played tons of games of Borderlands with friends and by myself, but I’ve only ever finished it once with a friend. It’s a longer game, so it is difficult to get someone to commit to the entire thing and then actually follow-through over the several sessions it’ll take to beat it.

I never finished all of the really cool extra content for Hyrule Warriors because I got bored doing the daily grind of beating thousands of enemies on my own. For the few missions I could do it, I enjoyed the multiplayer option much more. I started playing and loved Shadow of War last fall, but I never finished because Destiny 2, with its multitude of problems, came out. Destiny encourages cooperative multiplayer while Shadow of War’s multiplayer is only ever competitive.

I prefer cooperative multiplayer to competitive. Competitive games like Mario Kart and Super Smash Brothers are fun, but I prefer any game where I’m working with my friends rather than against them. Halo Co-Op was my preferred way to play with my friends in high school. I never really got into League of Legends because it was so competitive. Even the cooperative aspect of being on a team with your friends or strangers got competitive because people took the game so seriously. That, plus the toxicity, drove me away. Overwatch, on the other hand, is a competitive game but it encourages a lot more cooperation than I feel League of Legends did. Even when queuing for Quickplay and playing with random strangers feels better because not everyone is toxic and most people agree to a basic level of cooperation. Some of my best cooperative moments and matches have been with strangers. All it takes there is communication and willingness to participate.

I’m not a terribly competitive person. I don’t really care about winning or losing, I just want to play well. I want to play a game skillfully and improve, not worry about who has the most kills or whether or not I’m consistently better than my friends. I get frustrated, sure, but only when I know we’re under-performing or one of my allies is deliberately messing us up. I generally won’t try to force people to cooperate with me in games, but I have little patience for people who find pleasure in throwing games or betraying their allies.

I like to improve myself. Daily blog entries here, figuring out how to add novel-writing to my schedule, and then trying to work out between work and writing is all my attempts to make myself the best me I can be. That includes being good at my chosen recreations. I like to play video games and the part of me that is what I identify as the most core part of me also wants to be good at video games. Not so I can go pro in some competitive e-sports league or so I can rule over my friends, but for my own personal satisfaction. I want to be good to see just how good I can be.

I thought I was Overwatch-ing Sports on TV

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I’ve never really been one for watching sports. Sure, I’ll keep up with the big-deal games and news, but more as a desire to participate in society than from actual interest. I’ve got nothing against sports or people who enjoy watching them, I just only really enjoy them as a way to interact with people. Watching the game with some friends is fun, but mostly because I’m with my friends. This has held true during the rise of e-sports, which have captured the attention of many of my friends who generally shared my apathy toward professional sports. Only this year has that changed. With the advent of the Overwatch League, I’ve finally started taking an interest in a professional sport.

Which it totally is at this point. There’s a league, a code of conduct, privately owned teams, merchandise, specialty merchandise, and publicly broadcast matches you can watch. Heck, you can ever get into twitter arguments about whether or not you think a team should have won. Thankfully, there are fewer moments where a loss can be blamed on a referee since software is the final arbiter of truth and anything you disagree with is a result of the tiny bit of lag between the server and your computer/display. The players make a bunch of money and the popular ones make even more, there are licensing deals in the works, and we’ve already had a few scandals that temporarily disqualified people. Finally, the most important part of determining whether or not something is a sport, ridiculously young people have already aged out of the professional scene. For e-sports, that seems to be somewhere in the early to mid twenties.

Every time I go to watch an Overwatch League match on Twitch, I remark to my roommate (who watches them all with me) that the players are all babies. I mean, sure, they’re required to be at least 18, but that’s still practically baby age. I recognize that I’m getting older and I don’t have to go back that far in my Facebook photos to find pictures of me looking like a baby, but it still feels ridiculous to see how young they all look as they sit on top of the world. Well, as they sit on top of this particular portion of the world. I feel kind of bad for them, honestly. They spend their teenage years getting good enough to qualify, lose their early adult years to professional gaming, and then age out by the time most people are graduating from college. That’s gotta be rough, you know? I don’t envy them their positions or problems. I doubt I’d do that even for the amount of money they’re making from streaming and merchandise. I want to enjoy my gaming.

Honestly, though, even for a first-year sports league, Overwatch is a lot of fun to watch. I’m a good enough player to recognize the flow of the game, key tipping points, and what a player did that resulted in their death or a big kill-streak. It is a lot of fun to sit on my couch with my roommate and discuss the matches as they’re going. I’ll admit I still maintain a certain degree of apathy, but I prefer to watch and dissect when I can. My roommate watches all of the old matches on YouTube once they’re over, if he misses a broadcast, but I’m content to just look for highlights and cool plays. I don’t have a favorite team yet, since I don’t really follow any of the streamers, but it has been really cool to see how much some of the strong solo-players have shined. I prefer my tanks, and really enjoy seeing a good tank play, but those are relatively rare given the current accepted strategy for the professional scene. I’ve still gotten to watch a few nice tank plays, though.

The popularity of the Overwatch League has brought a lot of players back to the game and I’ve enjoyed the wider variety of players. I’ve also enjoyed that pretty much everyone is trying to emulate the professional team compositions and play styles, because it makes it easy for me to work around them or take them down. Professional-style play only really works if you’ve got the skills to back it up. One person who knows what they’re doing can easily disrupt an entire group of people who are trying to emulate something they saw on Twitch and don’t have the skills to do. I was able to place in the top 45% of players, world-wide, for the current competitive season by almost solely playing to counter professional team compositions. Backup from a group of competent players who knew what I was doing was integral, of course, since it was up to them to actually do something with a disrupted and disorganized team.

I think I enjoy the professional e-sports league so much because I enjoy playing Overwatch. I don’t really enjoy playing most sports and most other games in e-sports, so I’ve never really had the chance to see something I’m good at and enjoy on my TV like this. I’m looking forward to how the Overwatch League grows and develops over the next few years. Maybe we’ll even start to see our first e-sports bars pop up around town! I’m willing to bet one already exists somewhere. An Overwatch-themed one would be a lot of fun!