The Life and Death of cK1-Laura

In the days before every game came with an account login, before ubiquitous voice chat, before social media, before matchmaking systems with stat tracking and MMR, a player’s identity was far more personal. Doubly so for the majority of players also working on forming a personal identity in their real life as they struggled through puberty and their teens. It was a strange time, and the story of cK1-Laura is emblematic of much of what made it so.

A New Golden Age?

Unreal Tournament 4. Reflex. Toxikk. Reborn. Wickland. Project Bluestreak And now ProjectRIK. The movement-based arena shooter is attempting a comeback. Which is great, because I grew up with those types of games, and I love them dearly. However, I also just went through the supposedly new Golden Age of fighting games, and got almost nothing out of it, so I’m a little wary.

As I know nothing about business, but everything about being an opinionated jerk on the internet, that’s the lens I look through. Write what you know, after all.

Tropes vs eSports

Tropes–or at least the modern idea of them–have been getting a bad rap lately. They are written off as crutches and cliches, when really it’s only overused tropes that end being cliches. Which is what makes a cliche in the first place. A trope is simply a tool, a sort of shorthand or symbolism between authors and audiences, and like any tool, it’s how it is used that gives it meaning.

I like the idea of tropes for more than fiction, because it’s more direct than pointing vaguely at some sort of cultural osmosis, but it works the same either way. It’s relevant for eSports because we are reaching a point where there are people interested in watching games that they have less (or even no) interest in playing. Ten or fifteen years ago that was not really the case. Then people who watched the games were the same people who were playing the games, partly because there was way less streaming going on, but also because they generally had to have played the games to be interested in watching them, or even know that there were competitions to be watched.

These days games that want to have competitive communities try much harder to integrate spectators, either directly through the game’s clients, or with replays, or by advertising, sponsoring, and even running leagues and tournaments. For now that’s mostly because they still think of the audience as being the same group as their general player population, but that’s not always the case, and it certainly wont stay that way.

Ease of Access

When I first started watching competitive gaming there were few methods that were both viable and easy. The barrier for entry was quite high. To watch a Quake game I needed to download a replay, same with Warcraft 3 and DotA games later on. That meant I needed to have the games installed, and those replays were completely self-serve: the viewer had to control the camera, when they could (Quake replays were limited to the viewpoint of the player who recorded them.), and if I wanted shoutcast commentary–if that was even available–I would have to download and run that concurrently with a different program and sync it up with the action. Of course, if a new version of the game was released that would often invalidate or cause errors in older replays, so a separate install or version switcher was also a necessity. And all of that was dependant on knowing which 3rd party sites had replays and commentary to begin with, and they were also all after the fact. It was possible to watch live Quake through QTV, but that was a whole different set of problems. For a game like Warcraft 3 (and DotA), the only way to spectate live was to be in the game as a spectator.

Fighting games were even worse, with very little video unless someone dragged a camera to a tournament, and pretty much no commentary at all. Viewers were expected to know what was going on, both mechanically, and in the player’s heads, and to this day many competitive players don’t think watching fighting game videos is very instructive or helpful (past learning what combos and setups people are using)–though that’s also mostly because it can be difficult to get into the player’s heads, and the actual game should be going on there.

The one exception, of course, was Brood War, where the games were being broadcast on Korean TV. Certain enterprising individuals (RIP Jon747) would upload recordings of the Korean broadcasts, but that often meant blurry video and Korean commentary. Which was always entertaining, but not very informative to non-speakers. Even the English commentaries depended on just muting the Korean language track and speaking over it. Yes, some of my fondest competitive gaming memories, as a viewer, were a result of that, but it was all more effort than most people were willing to put into watching or broadcasting.

All that started to change with YouTube and other video sites, which made it easier to post long VODs, and then HD videos, and then streaming sites came along, and everyone started to get faster connections with better bandwidth, but even a couple of years ago the only way to get replays of smaller fighting game tournaments and gatherings was if someone showed up with a laptop or camera to record and then upload them, and that was still a task that required hours of editing, transcoding, and uploading. And still none of it was live.

Nowadays it’s as easy as tuning into a Twitch stream to watch high-definition video and commentary of any live tournament. Being a viewer has never required less effort, and it’s only going to get easier.

How to Spectate

Concurrent with the easing of requirements for being a spectator has been the general increase in people watching games, which should be obvious. But it has also changed how some games, mostly the competitive ones, are marketed, and how they’re broadcast.

Used to be that people doing commentary for a game were just as much part of the community as their viewers. They were doing niche work, and they knew it, so they spoke directly to each other. There was very little effort made to be transparent or welcoming, or even polite most of the time. They weren’t looking to attract a wider audience, only to retain the viewers that already existed. That changed drastically when streams became the go-to source for gameplay and sponsors started to become more involved. When money was on the line there was finally incentive to clean things up and start looking to attract new viewers. Flaming and swearing started to die down as there was always pressure to keep a stream friendly for all ages, and any instance of off-colour speech was spread rapidly by the so-called stream monsters. Suddenly there was a difference between what someone could or would say on a stream and what they would say live at an event, because the stream audience and the players were no longer the same.

Commentary then started to lean more toward being informative, because they weren’t speaking to the people who were part of the tournaments anymore, they were aiming for a much wider audience, and most of them were new to competitive games. They had to tell players what they were watching in order to keep them watching, because even though it was easier to find video of competitive games, viewers still needed to know what was going on if they hoped to get anything out of it.

Soon enough these YouTube VODs and streams became a secondary source of advertisement for new games. Starcraft 2’s beta was widely streamed, and before that there were VODs of test matches to show off current builds, a tradition Blizzard has kept up, and other developers have emulated.

What’s most interesting about these is the way commentary has evolved even further. Where it was originally only speaking to players who already knew what they were watching, and then changed to speak to players who wanted to know what they were watching, with each new year and each new game it becomes more about speaking to viewers who really only needed to know how what they were watching was different from what they already know. Notice in that Heroes of the Storm video how very little time is spent on explaining the game’s objectives, it’s genre, or specific mechanics, unless they needed to be differentiated from the norm. Because a level of knowledge is now expected. Because the game is built around tropes that viewers are now expected to know. They can make a 20 minute video about a game that nobody watching has played and not have to spend 18 of those minutes describing what a hero is, why there are creeps spawning and rushing down lanes, and that the game is lost when a team loses its home structure.

Each new game lays down more groundwork, establishes more tropes, and makes it easier for the next game to find an audience.

But that also means that each new game has an audience for whom owning and playing that game is less of a requirement for watching it.

How to Broadcast

I suspect this is one of the prime reasons for most developers taking a more hands-on approach to their competitive communities. As far back as Brood War it was proved that an audience of non-players was possible–and probably even required–for a game to become successful as an eSport. The problem, of course, was that the developers still want to make money. I watched Brood War games for years, and though I did own a copy of the game, I felt no desire to start playing again. And KeSPA didn’t care, because they were making their money from viewers, not players (they also didn’t care because I wasn’t watching on Korean TV, but that’s besides the point). It was basically the same situation with Starcraft 2, though it didn’t hold my attention nearly as long.

As the tropes become more well known, as the games become easier and easier for non-player to become viewers while remaining non-players, there will need to be ways of making money from them. That starts the same way sports already do it, with rating and advertisement revenue, but it should eventually extend the same way sports do, with merchandise, both physical and virtual. Valve has gotten a jump start there, by selling team pennants that players can equip to show support during tournament matches, the same way someone might show up to a football game wearing a jersey. The next step in eSports development, at least for the developers, will probably be a bigger emphasis on all sorts of out-of-game purchases and tie-ins. It makes sense for them to want to make money as directly as possible from each fan, and it should be natural enough for fans to want to support their favourite players and teams.

In a much broader perspective, this positions video games, and eSports, to eventually take a cultural foothold that can put them on the map permanently. I had to play Brood War in order to understand competitive Brood War, and I played Warcraft 3 and DotA before I watched either. I played Quake and many different fighting games for years, even competitively. At the time that was the requirement needed to be a spectator. A decade or so later I can watch Starcraft 2 without ever having played more than its singleplayer campaign, as can many others. Most spectators don’t need to be told the reason for basic fireball-uppercut spacing games in Street Fighter 4 anymore, and that will hold true for the next Street Fighter game, and every other fighting game released in that mould. A new League of Legends clone only needs to tell viewers how it’s different from League before they can be expected to understand it. As time goes by each genre’s norms become more firmly established, their tropes become more well known, and eventually we may reach a point where the rules to fighting games or a resource management RTS games will be as well known as the rules to many sports, because–just like sports–everyone will have played or watched them in the past.

There are apparently 70 million people who have registered accounts with Riot, and millions more with registered DotA 2 accounts. Even considering all the smurfs in there, that’s way more people who know some basic rules to the genre than 10 years ago, and that number is only going to grow. Each one of those is a potential viewer.

An Alt+Tab Guide to Metagames

The problem of other minds is not just an abstract notion for pot smokers and old guys in cardigans to ponder while they smoke their pipes. It’s something that people who play competitive games have to tackle every time they plug in their sticks or click their launch icons. It’s impossible to know what an opponent is thinking, and that’s the draw, but it’s also impossible to play a game where one never knows what their opponent is going to do, so players establish routines and respond to patterns. A particular build order is chosen, based on past experience, arbitrary whim, or a perceived meta-game, but then information is gathered, because it’s still impossible to know. A probe scout finds the enemy base and now attempts can be made to understand their build order and game plan, but this is based on even more assumptions, the most basic of which is that the opponent actually knows what they’re doing–or what they should be doing–but it’s still impossible to know what they’re thinking.

What happens when that probe finds their base and sees something that shouldn’t be? It’s not a recognized build order, there are too many workers, or too few, or any number of other abnormal phenomena. Suddenly this opponent is more than Terran Player #327, running Terran Build #5. But is it because they don’t know what they’re doing, or because they really know what they’re doing? Is this just a really late barracks, or is there a bunker being built in the fog next to the Protoss player’s ramp?

Mechanical knowledge and proficiency are important for every player in every game, but just as important is how they make decisions. One thing that has traditionally set fighting games apart from other competitive games is the extremely localized nature of play. Until fairly recently it wasn’t even possible to play most fighting games online (and where it was, as on GGPO, the online communities were just as self-contained as the local ones). With smaller local scenes it was common for players to each focus on playing 1 or 2 characters so that the entire roster wasn’t even accounted for. When players travelled to larger tournaments (Majors) they would not only have to deal with characters they’d never played against, but also players they’d never played against. This is the stuff that upsets are made of. I remember a Soulcalibur regionals tournament years in which one of the best local players, who was also playing Amy (universally considered to be at least in the top 5 characters in the game), was knocked out early on by a Yun (generally considered to be around the bottom of the tier lists) player who came in from out of town. This miraculous defeat was put down to lack of character knowledge and a little too much arrogance, both terrible assumptions for anyone to be making in a tournament setting.

The word respect gets tossed around a fair bit, especially in fighting games. It’s a loose concept, but it boils down to how much one player is willing to let another player get away with. This is especially relevant in tournaments as there’s an implied standard in place for most people, so things they might do in a random casual match with no stakes they wouldn’t do during a tournament game when something is on the line. Well, usually: sometimes trolling is in order, as when good players go to anime conventions and win all their matches by using only 1 button.

There’s this idea that if someone is in a non-casual setting they must know what they’re doing, so they aren’t going to fall for simple scrub tactics or gimmicks. This is the same sort of attitude that keeps many people from entering tournaments to begin with, even though it’s often the case that many entrants are just average players who could be bothered to show up and are not inherently better or worse than the average player who couldn’t be bothered to show up (at least at first, because going to tournaments is an amazing way to make connections and improve as a player).

The video above demonstrates the absurd lengths that expectations can lead people to. The Sagat player is giving his opponents no respect, doing the same move over and over again just because, while his first two opponents are paralyzed by their conceptions of what a tournament match is supposed to be: two players trying to out think each other in a battle of wits and skill. There is no way he’s going to Tiger Uppercut again. That’s not how you play in tournaments. Yet I guarantee you that if they were playing in some random online lobby and ran into a Sagat that did nothing but Tiger Uppercuts they would know exactly how to block and punish and probably wouldn’t lose more than half their life bar, let alone a round (I’d also be willing to bet that they had already run into a dozen online Sagats that did nothing but Tiger Uppercuts.).

One of the things that separates a great player from a merely good player is the ability to make decisions and adjust how they play. While it may take an average player a weekend of hard work and research to figure out what went wrong during a match and how to counter it, there are some people who can make that adjustment by their next match, or sometimes even the next round. That’s why they don’t lose to gimmicks, and that’s how they earn respect. People can watch that happen on a stream or a VOD and get wildly inflated ideas what players are capable of. Just because Flash figured out how to counter that rush while it was happening doesn’t mean that anyone who isn’t Flash will. Just because Daigo only fell for that frame trap once doesn’t mean that everyone else won’t fall for it 20 times in a row.

When I played Soulcalibur 4 I used Rock, who is one of the worst characters in the game. When I travelled and played against people from other areas, ones who had very little experience against Rock, I mainly got two reactions. The first was that Rock meant they were about to get an easy win, the second was that a Rock player at a big tournament must mean I had something up my sleeve. Rock himself is the very definition of a gimmick character, and I was able to take some easy wins from players who didn’t know how to deal with him, mostly because of experiences I’d had playing in arcades. There was a time when it was quite common to give other players so-called mercy rounds, beating them to near death in the 2nd round and then allowing them to have the win so that both players could get an extra round of play (after all, the only one profiting from faster games was the arcade’s owner). Sometimes, though, I would get tired of having to play against some people, especially when there was a line of better players behind them. So when there were others around who I actually wanted to play against I wouldn’t give mercy rounds, and instead I would try to win as quickly and easily as possible, which usually involved hitting an opponent with the most obvious gimmicks in my arsenal (may as well be a little flashy, since nobody else will let me do that stuff). All assumptions are thrown out. This guy is going to get hit by everything I do because he doesn’t know how not to get hit by everything I do. There’s no need for complicated “yomi,” nothing harder than simple mid-low mixups. That same sort of swagger was required to steal wins with Rock.

Of course, the good players either knew what Rock could do, or learned quickly enough so that I couldn’t hit them with the same gimmicky setup more than twice. When my options had been exhausted I usually lost, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t steal games from much better players on occasion. On the other hand, I didn’t practice very much and was just as susceptible to being beaten by obvious stuff. It was only that implied level of respect that kept most players from trying to beat me by using the same moves over and over again. And even that didn’t always follow: two of the most brutal defeats I ever suffered in a tournament setting came from players who granted my characters no respect. The first came from another player who couldn’t be bothered to practice and just picked a better character and beat me down with a couple of moves that I couldn’t get around, and the second came from a player who’d come all the way from France, and who also played Rock. He told me that he considered the Rock vs Ivy matchup to be at least 1:9 in Ivy’s favour, and then showed me why. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even hit him during that match. The funny thing about it was that there were other Ivy players watching, yet none of them ever tried to do the same thing to me when I played Rock against them.

As in real life, respect should be earned. There will always be expectations and assumptions, but they need to be measured. There is no point in jumping at every shadow, but there’s also no point in running headlong into the darkness hoping that there isn’t a brick wall in the way. One of the few things that I like about modern matchmaking systems is that they help players with making some basic assumptions about each other before a game starts. A Bronze League Terran with the wrong build order has a much higher chance of simply having done things wrong than a Diamond League Terran, who probably does have something up their sleeve. But most of the time it’s still important to know what they will let you get away with, and also to not make assumptions about their knowledge, especially knowledge of a perceived meta game. I see that happen all the time in DotA, where one player assumes that their opponent is following the standard competitive build order (Gyrocopter only takes 1 point in homing missile, so it won’t kill me!), only to get a rude awakening (He actually has 4 points in homing missile, and now I’m dead!).

The Real Burden of Knowledge

Large matchmaking systems also have that problem of further disconnecting players from each other, making the ability to think and make good decisions less valuable, or at least more difficult. Players are always trying to optimize, to min/max, to create flowcharts and counter-flowcharts. That is how metagames are established, and how entire swaths of mediocre players become interchangeable cogs. Players who rely on getting all their tactics from whatever GameFAQS equivalent or message board or alt+tab guide can get by for a fairly long time with not having to think very much about what they are doing, and every encounter becomes a pass/fail proposition where their guide and knowledge of a metagame tells them how to win and they do (unless their mechanical skill isn’t up to the task), or it doesn’t and they have to make a decision for themselves or lose.

I have to assume this kind of gameplay is attractive to a lot of people, and part of that must have come from MMOs like World of Warcraft. This past summer I played an MMO for the first time, and the situation was made crystal clear: in an ideal MMO setting every character of a given class is exactly the same, and the only thing that sets one player apart from another is their ability to learn and defeat dungeon mechanics and boss patterns, and the quality of their gear–and with the internet around they don’t even have to learn the dungeon for themselves when there are guides available. Once someone solves a boss fight, or establishes the ideal DPS skill rotation, every player will be measured by how well they can conform. And why not? Tackling a dungeon in an MMO means tackling a bunch of dumb AI routines that should perform the same way every time, so there has to be a way of beating them that is better, or at least easier, than all the others, and when players are entering the endless loot treadmill of end-game MMO grinding you can be sure that they will want to know the easiest ways to do it.

The problem is that in competitive games players are not taking on dumb AIs that perform the same way every time, they only start to think they are because of how most of them play the game in the first place. Being able to make decisions, to adapt, and to know when to and when not to respect an opponent is more important than how many guides a player has memorized, and always should be, but the even the way many modern games are designed and played removes the emphasis from what was the real reason for competition in the first place. Games like League of Legends or Smite go as far as trying to remove all decision making problems for the player by just telling them how a new champion should be played, from skill builds to item builds. Granted, they have a vested interest in making their new characters as transparent as possible, so that the only decision their customers have to make is whether they will buy the alternate skins as well. But it’s another way that developers are keeping gameplay decisions out of the hands of the community. (Whether such methods are successful or not is another matter.)

This is the biggest problem with DotA and all of its descendants: layers upon layers of memorization and metagame that further remove players from each other, on top of anonymous matchmaking systems. At their core, every competitive game is nothing more than a set of rules that allow people to compete against each other. Overly complex systems prevent players from actually doing that, as each of them is required to know all the rules (or at least as many as their opponents) before they can stop just playing the game. When a player can win on a technicality–and knowing something that their opponent doesn’t, whether it’s a skill build, item build, hero matchup, lane combination, or any number of different metegame ideas that give them an inherent advantage, is the gaming equivalent of a technicality–then they have one less reason to think about what they’re doing, let alone what their opponents are doing.

It’s both a disadvantage for the genre, and a draw for many players. In a fighting game a player can’t win because someone else carried them (unless it’s a team tournament, obviously), and while they can still lose because they don’t know a matchup, or they get counter-picked, actually learning those matchups and counterpicks is both easier and a personal process. There are guides in fighting games the same way there are guides in DotA or LoL, but the content and intent of them are quite different. Each player is still required to make their own decisions and depend on their own training and reactions, because there is no real alt+tab equivalent, just a series of suggestions and practical input from experienced players. And in fighting games even average players can get by in most situation by being mechanically sound and being able to actually out think their opponent. In fact, things like tier lists and character matchups are considered to only really apply to the highest level of players, where they already know all the rules and are mechanically competent enough that having an inherent character advantage causes a player who makes more correct decisions to lose anyway.

There are some games for which an alt+tab guide isn’t even practical, like Quake, where there are a few basic rules and ideas that every player should know (what powerups are for, how to time them, which guns are generally more important and should be protected or sought out), but once in a game everything comes down to mechanical skill, reactions, and the ability to make better decisions.

All of that still exists in very high level DotA, because the players know enough, and are good enough at mechanics, that being able to make better decisions once again becomes the prime factor for who wins and who loses. They also get to play more regularly against specific opponents, allowing them to learn their quirks, and to get into their heads. In a large, anonymous matchmaking system most players will never play the same opponents often enough to learn anything about them, making it even harder to get into their heads. Tournament matches and pro scrims will have respect bans, but when was the last time a random pub game had one? In a pro match one player can know enough about another to predict their positioning in fights, or how they like to juke, or even just what their most optimal options are in a situation, which lets them adjust, lets them make decisions, lets them try and out think them.

It’s not that any other player can’t do the same thing in a pub, but more that they don’t because they don’t have to and may not even want to. If they have the agreed-upon best guide on hand, or have a supposedly game-breaking lane combo, or know the flavour of month metagame gimmicks and are just playing against another pair of random pubs, then no decisions are required. Do A, then do B, and then do C, because that’s how wins are done. Even if they lose, if they are out played, that’s a statistical anomaly, and the next 3 games they win with that same build order will prove it. This is also the attitude that has players declaring a loss as soon as they see the hero picks or lanes.

By means of pointless self-aggrandizement (Honestly, this game that came to mind and I’m too lazy to look up another example.), take a look at this scoreboard, these picks, and decide which team is the winner.

Maybe a little too obvious.

What are the lanes? What are the item builds? What does the alt+tab guide to DotA say is the result?

What happened? Someone picked a lane that is supposed to just win and then they got out played. Even when they started losing they didn’t change anything they were doing, because the guides say they should win. That Keeper of the Light walked into the exact same setup twice, because why not?

Even easier than it looks.

There is no reason to live only by guides. They are a great place to start, but every player has it in them to make their own decisions, and where matchmaking fails there are plenty of in-house leagues and amateur tournaments where they can get to know each other well enough to finally get the chance to out think opponents instead of going through the motions. Every player who aspires to play a competitive game should know what it’s like when the layers are finally peeled away and behind those rules is another human mind, with its own thoughts and peculiarities. The feeling of having won not because a better guide was followed, but because an opponent was encountered, evaluated, and conquered on their own terms.

The motto of any competitive community should always be, “Play better,” and never, “Read more.”

I Was A Quake Player

My own journey through competitive gaming was bumpy, but it informs my current attitude on the subject in ways I’ve found difficult to articulate. Of all the games I played it was Quake 3 that I was best at and Quake 3 that gave me the best chance to compete. When I started playing online, venturing outside of my circle of real life friends and acquaintances, I stumbled upon the Threewave CTF mod, which was released fairly late in the game’s life, well after Rocket Arena 3, OSP, and CPMA were established. That was perfect for me because it meant everyone I knew was already busy with one of those mods, leaving Threewave wide open. I quickly made a name for myself on the main pub servers and the official board, and decided it was high time I took the next step. I was approached by a two guys who openly admitted that they had just bought copies of Quake 3 and had no idea how to even work the console, and with them I became an original member of clan Coldfire, which they told me was named after some series of books one of them liked. I thought this setup was perfect: everyone I knew was somehow much worse than I was and would even listen to what I told them. It wasn’t till we had our first “official” match that I realized things would have to change. We entered a small roster into the now-defunct WorldOGL CTFS ladder, which was basically the bottom rung on the competitive ladder, but just about all Threewave CTFS had at the time outside of scrims. I still remember our first match, which was against some West Coast (supposedly) all-girls clan who called them themselves Girls of Destruction (GoD).

I say West Coast now, but at the time I had no idea. The OGL site was a hands-off automated system where one team challenged another, that team accepted, and it spit out a date and time for the games to be played. That I had never actually played with anyone in that clan should have been an obvious clue, since players tended to stay as local as possible when choosing servers because everyone was an LPB. So of course I showed up for our 9pm match 3 hours early and wondering why nobody was around. An hour later I got a response on IRC laying out the facts, and even worse news: we would have to play on some garbage Central server to even approach balanced pings. Our first game I had upwards of 200 ping and as much packet loss as I could ever want. Things got ugly, and fast. My usual tactic of just whoring the lightning gun wasn’t going to work, and the match was only 3v3, and the other 2 players barely knew how to strafe jump let alone compensate for an extra 160 ping. Fortunately for us, I had other skills to fall back on when brute force failed. I dug my heels in and did the only other thing I was ever any good at: running like a little bitch. The combination of atrocious pings, my speed, and whole lot of spam to cover my tracks, allowed me to consistently capture flags during our attacking rounds, and though I didn’t put much damage on the scoreboard, we eventually won through points. After that win, something that should have been insignificant even at the time, I felt that I’d somehow made it through my trial by fire. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Understand that OGL was just a ranking ladder, not a tournament or even a league. It was automated and most teams didn’t even care. Since the team sizes were small, with games being either 2v2s or 3v3s, players would regularly split and reform new teams, leaving the ladder littered with their old, slowly decaying moultings. I played a few more OGL matches, but they barely mattered. I think people would have cared more about scrim results by then. This was Threewave’s biggest problem, that it had no formal competitive structures like the other mods did. As well, CTFS–the game type I was most interested in–was much more popular in North America than it was in Europe, where they were clinging to the last desperate gasps of CCTF. Everything changed when an enterprising clan put together the Avalanche Invitational, a solid tournament that invited all the established clans and gave them a place to finally really compete.

We were lucky enough to get invited, but were seeded low, which wasn’t much of a surprise. Half the people on our team were still learning how to play, and we didn’t even scrim. On top of that, the day our first match, there was yet another one of our clan’s frequent internal squabbles (something that seemed to happen whenever I wasn’t around), forcing us to use a ringer for the first game, some kid that had always wanted to join, but who we had never formally played with. That first game was my first experience with real tournament nerves. There were official tournament moderators watching, the replays would be posted online afterwards for everyone to see. All my status as a pubstar was on the line, and I suddenly knew that nothing I had done had prepared anyone for the game. I still felt like it was my job to take on the greater responsibility for our results, and during the 1st map of our best of 3 everything came crashing down. My mouth dried up, my muscles froze. By the 3rd round both my hands had actually gone numb and fallen asleep. Not only was nothing I was doing working, but I couldn’t even do what I wanted to begin with. I could feel my heart pounding, reverberating through my headphones. I kept my eyes open and stumbled through the game, which we lost handily, with me at the bottom of the scoreboard.

We took a 10 minute break before the 2nd map, and during that time I forced myself calm. I felt the pressure lift: what they had said was right. We were a bottom seeded team, only invited because we were established and they needed to fill out the ranks. We were not meant to win this match. On IRC we worked our differences out, letting the ringer go so we could at least play with our intended full roster. The next map was one I liked, while the one before (q3wcp15) was an open railgun festival, something that I had never been comfortable with. This new map (q3wcp5) was smaller, full of tighter corridors and choke points. Plenty of opportunities to put my speed to good use, and a lot more of the fighting that I enjoyed.

I have three distinct memories about that game. The first was one of the admins, after having zoned out during the first map and assuming that the 2nd map would be more of the same stomping, coming back into the game and accidentally announcing in all chat that “they’re doing way better than I thought they would.” The second was that I was finally, and maybe for the first time, living up to whatever potential I may have had. I was relaxed, and I was doing exactly what I wanted to do. This team that was surely expecting another free win suddenly found themselves fighting to stay even. At around 18 minutes out of the 20 minute game timer they were the attacking team, and only down by 2 points. At the time the most points an attacking team could get in a round was 3, 1 for touching the flag and another 2 for either killing the enemy team or completing the flag capture (Later on I would suggest a rule to either take away the flag capture point if the player holding the flag died, or grant an additional point if they survived the entire round. This was to put breaks on the propensity for teams to just suicide zerg rush the flag at the beginning of every round in order to get a free point without having to worry about teamwork or the aftermath.). What might have been the last round in the game started, and I led my team on a mad, desperate rush for the middle of the map, from where a team could easily control both the high and low exits from the other team’s base. My intention was for us to just keep them back with spam, running out the final minutes on the clock. But they saw the writing on the wall and rushed just as hard. When I made it to the middle of the map I may have outpaced every other player, but I wasn’t running faster than their rockets. I died instantly, hit by multiple rockets and going up in a fountain of blood and mixed body parts. The rest of my team was on my heels and that was just about the shortest round in the entire tournament. Then we heard the sound. Because they had killed us so fast they couldn’t get to our flag, so they only earned 2 points, which tied the game up with about a minute to go on the clock. This was overtime. This was it. And my last memory was reality decided to intrude.

I was playing at a net cafe downtown, because my computer at home could barely run Quake 3. This was rarely an issue because I rarely did more than pub, and generally the connection there was stable and actually better than what most people could afford for a home connection at the time. However, a shared connection is a shared connection, and obviously someone started to do something, because during that last round, during our final defence, where all we needed to do was survive long enough to break even and at least force another overtime, I started to lag. Suddenly, when we were that close, my connection froze up. They were coming in from bellow, and I couldn’t stay out of sight. My team was being picked off, and I couldn’t help them. One moment I was popping out from around a pillar to fire some rockets at the flag room’s entrance, the next I had lost half my health and armour from a shot that I didn’t even appear on my client. There was nothing I could do, and though my team dug in with all they had, we ended up losing that final round, and the map, and the series. I was made MVP for that game, even though I was on the losing team. The game’s official write up made special mention of my play, and how I helped my team fight back against overwhelming odds and certain defeat. I was ambivalent about the whole thing, and mark that as the exact moment I began my decline as a competitive player.

That doesn’t say as much about me as it does about the game itself and the players involved. Prior to the first Avalanche Invitational I was the star player of a tiny clan full of brand new players, only known for pub prowess. Soon after I was just a top player in a growing clan, in a growing scene (as tournaments became more organized players from other mods started to take an interest), and with increasingly smaller chunks of time on my hands to play and practice. I’d already reached my plateau, and wasn’t putting in the effort to get to the next level. Other players began to catch up, which was a relief for me at the time, because I never wanted to be in a situation where I felt I had to carry everyone else again. After that I was content to fade out a bit, becoming another player on the team, or so I thought. By the time of the next Avalanche Invitational things were different enough that I found myself with a new set of problems. My inability to stick to team play was starting to show. I was often out on my own, hoping to disrupt the other team, playing like I was in a pub where I could run in and as long as my damage/time ratio was high enough everyone was happy. Instead, I was being ambushed by 2 or 3 players at a time, muting my contributions. I could feel my desire to play the game I wanted to play coming up against cold truths. I was no longer good enough, and they were no longer bad enough, that I could do whatever I felt like doing and still come out ahead. So I did my best to swallow my pride and adjust my play to taking on roles.

Which is where playing at net cafes was starting to hurt again. I tried to reserve regular computers for regular times, hoping to keep things consistent and comfortable, but more than once I found that I was being suddenly moved to a different machine mere minutes before a match was starting, forcing my team to delay while I hastily cobbled together a new config file, downloaded mouse drivers, and installed map packs. This is the sort of thing that can put a player out of sorts, and I wasn’t confident enough for even small changes to not throw me off in some way.

The second Avalanche Invitational went much better for us. We were a solid mid-tier team now, and won matches we were supposed to win. Eventually we were battling for a playoff spot against clan Vindication, who were probably the next rung above us. Our final game was on another long, open, rail fest map, which I hated (q3wcp6). The large central courtyard between the bases made rushing impractical, as even the fastest players would be caught out in the open once defenders reached their top entrances, leaving them easy railgun targets. It was possible to quickly rocket jump across and fall into the lower part of the base, but that was even easier for defenders to get to. Every offence round was a relentless march through railgun and plasma spam trying to get a foothold at one of the top base entrances, forcing the defenders to fall back to their open flag room where the situation could be reversed, with the attackers hiding in the corridors and peaking out to take rail shots (if they still had ammo) until there was finally an opening to rush the flag, or more likely all the defenders were dead.

As the game became more popular so did the Avalanche Invitational, and this second tournament was even broadcasting games through QuakeTV, which allowed for the game to be shown live to many more observers than could ever fit on the server. Because of scheduling conflicts this series was the first of ours that was being broadcast live, since it was a battle for a playoff spot and one of the last games on the non-playoff schedule. Mostly I didn’t care. I wasn’t playing well enough that the observers would follow me, but there were times when I was keenly aware of the extra audience. But not as aware of them as I was of what had happened last time I’d been in a clutch situation for my team. On that last map I found that I was always playing 10% more aggressive than I needed to, and not just because I found the rail portions of every round to be tedious. I knew that I wasn’t the reason we were there anymore, and I was trying to be fine with the rest of my team doing the job while I got to do what I thought I needed to do. It tried to fit into a role of making space for the rest of them to work in, which I did well enough.

The map was hard fought on both sides, and it came down to the wire again. It was overtime, and this time we were the attackers, down by 1 point. I held back. I went in carefully. It was important for my own peace of mind that, in this case, I didn’t blow it by doing something reckless and stupid. Win or lose, I didn’t want regrets. Unfortunately, the inertia of indecision is a powerful force, and something that can creep up without notice. We successfully breached their base, but with heavy losses. We were down to 2 players against their 4, and both of us were hurting for both health and ammo. I was on the right side of the map, my teammate was on the left. If either of us could create enough of an opening all we needed was a flag touch to get a point and push the game into another round. I felt the nerves kicking in, and I started to sweat. I turned off all my music. In Quake 3 there two guns that make noises even when they’re not being fired: the lightning gun and the rail gun. Sound is a very important part of the game, as it was nearly impossible to sneak into a position with the rail gun already out, and if I did manage to get there I’d have to switch to it anyway and the weapon switching sound is even louder. I could hear them on the other side of the wall, all 4 of them were top, covering both top entrances equally. I walked back and fell to the lower level in a place I thought they wouldn’t hear me from. I then had to walk back toward the flag room because any strafe jumping would broadcast my new route. I got there, I saw where one of them was taking turns firing rockets at the top entrance and the bottom entrance. I waited. I timed it out in my head. I stepped forward and took my shot. The rail hit him and he died without gibbing. Now there were 3. I immediately started taking suppressive rocket fire at my new location. All 3 of them could track the trail of my railgun fire. This was a chance for my partner, who stepped out and put 2 mid ranged rockets into another defender. Now it was 2 on 2. It was 2 on 2 and I had completely run out of ideas. I crouched there, near the bottom entrance to the flag room, and my mind blanked. I couldn’t charge into the rockets, I couldn’t go off the jump pad to the high ground without letting them know exactly where I was, and I didn’t have enough health and armour to trade a railgun shot and survive.

This was worse than what I’d imagined. This was worse than last time, where at least I had the excuse of lag and the score to back it up. I wasn’t leading anyone in anything this game, and I wasn’t lagging either. And everyone was watching. So I sat there trying to think of something to do. I sat there the entire time while the round timer ran out. I heard the error beep and I exploded into another flower of gibs and that was the end of the game. As far as I was concerned I did nothing and we lost. Everyone else took it in stride. We’d done much better than we had last time, making it almost to the playoffs, and losing a close game to a better team. I said sorry and then went home. I didn’t know what else to do.

After that things got weird. I played less frequently, and in less games that mattered, though I scrimmed more with other teams and often did well. I remember a scrim against that same team, Vindication, where I was untouchable, playing so well that even people at the net cafe stopped to watch and comment. I didn’t care because I was just listening to music and running in circles. That’s all I ever wanted to do those days. The idea of real competition was having strange effects on me. For a while every time I was in a match where I thought something other than my own free time was on the line my left eye would start to leak tears as if I was crying. I got no other symptoms, and didn’t feel sad, and it was only ever my left eye, but it did make playing awkward. That persisted when I took up Warsow, in which I was compelled to start duelling for the first time as the only other option was clan arena, and clan arena is awful. I’ve never enjoyed duelling, and even though I did reasonably well at it in Warsow I still didn’t like it very much. I kept at it, though, until I finally got over my spontaneous tears. By then I’d long since decided that whatever damage there was to be done had already been done, and when circumstances arose that forced me to take upwards of 6 months long breaks from Quake and Threewave the only things I missed were my friends and random pubbing with my music on. I’d enjoyed playing in competitive games, but I felt no desire to get back into it, even when I could play more regularly again and had opportunities.

I’ve known plenty of people who take up competitive gaming to different degrees. I learned early on that everyone has their own reactions to the stress. I saw smashed keyboards and mice being thrown at walls. I saw the look of serenity on the face of a good player playing up to their potential and getting exactly the results they wanted. I saw the hours and hours of restless practice that drove them to start trolling worse players (and I laughed a lot at the results). I saw people burn out on the games they loved. I’d told myself that I would never become like that. I would never grow to resent doing something that I liked. But I found that the more rigid competition had that effect on me.

It took me a long, long time to get comfortable with not playing anymore. There was this idea that I could just do a few things, talk to some people, and get back on the horse. I was comfortable pubbing, I enjoyed pubbing, but it always felt like settling when I could be striving. My competition was just names on a scoreboard. They weren’t actually good. They weren’t the people I knew. I could be on top again if I really tried. But my distance from the game in the real world started messing with my time spent in game. Every time I came back it was like starting again. New players, old players with different names, new clans, new tags. The only things that stayed the same were the servers, and even they would rename and add new maps to the rotations. Eventually even my social reasons for coming back started to disappear, and I stopped playing altogether. That also took getting used to. I never unistalled Quake 3 from any computer I owned. I still have it to this day, with both the config I made sure to email to myself and the one I had built into the mod (/exec page for that old thing, excised of all my “secret” settings, which were a decent zoom script and a couple of rocket jump scripts). I even tried moving on, both with Warsow and with other FPS games, but that was a hopeless endeavour. I only bought 1 multiplayer FPS game after Quake 3, and that was the travesty of a game Brink. I tried a few others, but a combination of Quake’s mechanics (nothing else delivers) and an odd feeling stopped me from ever getting into another FPS. Which seems like an anomaly, since I didn’t stop playing other games during that time. I went from years of playing almost exclusively FPS games–and I’m quite sure I’ve played more Quake than I played Diablo 2, and I played whole lot of Diablo 2–to going the better part of a decade not playing any FPS games at all.

I did figure out what the odd feeling keeping me away was. It was a feeling akin to completeness. I eventually realized that when I thought about playing FPS games again I couldn’t see what I’d get out of them that I hadn’t already experienced. My time playing Quake competitively was the most fulfilling and complete competitive experience I had. I’d learned a lot, and it changed how I thought about games. I didn’t need any more.

I was not born with the killer instinct, and I never learned it while playing Quake. I can recognize it in others, but it’s something I can’t even emulate. My time playing Quake taught me that competition doesn’t have to be about being the best. Playing games competitively is a moment to moment experience, and in the end all I have are memories (even if those are few, because my memory is quite bad). I don’t regret not being #1. I don’t regret the games I lost (at least the few that I can remember). And I certainly don’t feel like not coming in first place invalidates the time I spent with the game.

There is one concrete bit of nostalgia for me. When I stopped playing as much and stopped competing as much I began to lament all of my old, lost demos. Playing mostly at net cafes meant that very few of my games lasted anywhere (would that I had the foresight to burn some of those Avalanche Invitational demos onto a CD when I had the chance), so I decided it was high time I made myself a little highlight movie. As is always the way, all the stuff I really wanted had already been deleted, but I still had a few demos left, and I was still capable of occasionally making a decent shot, so I cobbled together a series of kills using no editing techniques and the worst video processing options available. It is all of my Quake experience that I can leave to posterity.