I Win... Or Do I?

This is a response to "I Win! What Competition Says About Us". I encourage all of you to respond to it in your own way.

Human beings are at their best when faced with a challenge. Adversity forces a person to use everything at his or her disposal to guarantee success, and we can learn a lot about ourselves from it. Even in recreation, we intrinsically seek out things that will challenge us. Some people like to be challenged more or less than others, and that's fine. A trashy romance novel won't work a mind as vigorously as Tolstoy, but it still forces the mind to keep track of what's going on. It's a minor challenge, but a challenge nonetheless.

We play games for the challenge. What each game demands varies, but the reason we play remains the same. If victory was 100% certain at all times, we wouldn't insert a single coin or Press Start even once. The chance of victory weighed alongside the chance of failure is what excites us. At first, the rivalry was between players and monolithic arcade cabinets. From Donkey Kong's "How high can you get?" to the wordless glove-slap delivered by the descending aliens in Space Invaders, we've been at war with videogames for close to three decades. Once we learned how to dodge the springs at 75m and shoot through our own shields, the only challenge that remained was figuring out how to get our three-letter initials to the top of the high-score board. Arcade owners and game designers took note of this competitive aspect that seemed to drive players to continue pumping quarters and 100 yen coins into little metal slots just to earn bragging rights on a particular machine. The next natural step would be versus modes that force two players to face off against one another to see who really had the chops.

The versus mode helped me discover just how much I care about winning. I don't just want to win; I need to win. I crave it. I become extremely competitive when I play videogames with other people. But when I do win, I want to win fairly. I want an evenly-matched opponent, and I want to have a perfectly even chance of winning. I don't want to utterly destroy somebody who isn't as skilled as I am - I'll just feel like the win was undeserved. I don't want to be crushed by the heel of somebody who plays one game to the exclusion of all others - I'll put down my controller or ragequit. The problem is that it's very difficult to find evenly-matched opponents, or at least opponents close to your own skill level. Subconsciously, I find ways to even the playing field, so I can get the competition I desire.

I might abuse a particular move heavily in a fighting game, winning the round because of it, but I'll explain a counter or a property of the move post-game to explain why it was so effective. It seems ludicrous, giving away an advantage like that, and I've questioned myself about it several times. But whenever I ask myself why I'm making myself weaker, the answer is always the same: "I'm not making myself weaker. I'm making my opponent stronger." Giving up my trump card might make my next win that much harder, but in the end, we'll both be stronger for it. I have to learn to use different moves to accomplish my purpose, which makes me a better fighter. My opponent learns how to counter a particular maneuver, and learns more about the game. Everybody wins. It surprised me to learn that despite my need to win, my sense of fair-play overpowers it every time.

But can everybody really win? Don't we need losers to have winners? It depends on how you define winners and losers. Videogames have taught me that the winners are the ones having fun, and the losers are the ones ragequitting and complaining about game balance, since having a good time is what playing games is all about. Competition can make winners or a losers of us, depending on how we approach the games we play. As it turns out, my focus on winning and my attitude when I lose has made me into a loser. It's ironic that I'm only a winner at games when I stop caring about victories or defeats and simply enjoy the challenge and competition that comes as a result of what I play. Suddenly, that old saw about destinations vs. journeys makes a lot more sense.

I'd like to tell you about two friends of mine. I met them several years ago, and since I've known them, they've had an insane Tetris Attack rivalry. I couldn't even tell you which one of them is the better player, because their clashes are always so close, the win counts always so even. To commemorate a competition that will likely last a lifetime, they recently got matching tattoo's of the opening lines of the game. Though getting game tattoo's generally awards the label of loser from most internet pundits, I can't think of a better way to illustrate how competition can make us into winners, if we let it.