Always Design Competitive

Why you should (almost) always design competitive

There's this curious one-sided hate/love relationship between brawl players and Nintendo, especially since brawl was confirmed as dropped for MLG 2011 (on a side note: congrats to APEX, Pound, and Genesis, among others, for destroying MLG in entrants to the brawl event-that's how we do shit in the brawl community). On one hand, we love nintendo for giving us what is one of the most fun, popular, and deep competitive fighters around. On the other hand, we HATE Nintendo for their continuous and repeated "fuck you" messages to both the competitive brawl community, and the competitive brawl hacking community (seriously nintendo, you needed to push THREE updates to kill homebrew that did nothing except remove the hacks that we added legally to make your lousy system slightly more worthwhile?) which is tied loosely to it. This is accredited as a major reason that MLG dropped Brawl-Nintendo simply did not supply the support that MLG needed. In the end, Nintendo didn't even allow MLG to record the matches, be it on-site or by recordig saved replays later on! That's a lot of absolute top-quality video which is just GONE (although some of it was recorded on camcorders by other players)! If you're into fighting games, you know how much of a big deal this is.
Nintendo is basically trying to alienate the competitive community. "Brawl is not a competitive game," they're trying to say, "It's a party game. Stop playing it competitively." In fact, a fairly large number of Brawl's design elements point to this actually being the case (note: brawl is still one of the most competitively deep and consistent fighting games out there, with a slightly tweaked ruleset. Melee players who ride on this can go die in a fire). However, this baffles me. The fact that they would design a game to be worse for competition than it has to be, and openly oppose competition in said game is ridiculous. Why?

Because competitively designed games can easily include the casual audience, but casually designed games are only considered as such because they, by design, ignore the competitive crowd.

To make this slightly more clear: have you ever seen a hardcore competitive game that has not been played casually? Any noob can pick up and play a round or two of street fighter with his friends for shits and giggles, laughing when one player screws up the other by knocking the controller out of their hand or nudging them (whenever I play Budokai Tenkaichi 3 with a certain friend, he always starts his most powerful super, and then tries very hard to stop me from dodging it by getting my controller away from me). A friendly round of Halo, Call of Duty, Rock Band, Guilty Gear, Tekken, Pro Evolution Soccer 2010... You can't claim this doesn't happen; in fact, most of the sales of these games come from people who play them casually. And yet, they are massively competitive and played at an extremely high level for very large cash prizes (just an example: the prizes for halo at MLG 2010 were upwards of $20,000!).

However, a casual game, by definition, is not competitive. You'd never see massive cash prizes offered for the best Mario Party player. It's impossible to play these games in any way other than as casual nonsense. This has various causes; usually caused by a lack of competitive depth (name a random wiimote-waggling minigame collection) or excessive inconsistencies (name a random wiimote-waggling minigame collection). Neither really has an excuse, but somehow inconsistencies point to a more serious problem. When a game is not deep (Wii Sports, Rayman Raving Rabbids, etc.), it lacks a degree of difficulty or depth. This indicates that the studio simply didn't have the resources/talent to do it right; it sucks, but oh well. But when a game is just too inconsistent to perform well under the light of scrutiny, then it means one of two things: either the studio was trying to artificially pump it up through randomness because it doesn't have the content to stand up otherwise, kind of a weak cop-out cover-up; or they don't want it to be consistent because they don't want it to be competitive. This is what I like to call "willful destruction". Remember-competitive games which are non-random can be played casually too.  But a game which is overly random is simply worse for the competitive than the same game, made less random and more consistent. For the casual crowd, it's about the same. I'm going to take a little example from the field I know best: Super Smash Bros Brawl.

In Brawl, there is a stage known as WarioWare. This video sums it up fairly well. The stage is not really plagued with serious issues. It's fairly well-sized, doesn't have any abusive tactics on it... So why does EVERY TOURNAMENT ban it? Well... After X amount of time it switches to a random minigame. These minigames are selected randomly and often contain random elements in themselves (For example, one minigame where you have to dodge a car coming from the right side has 4 different kinds of cars; one is chosen randomly and they all move very differently, so dodging is tricky unless you're a char who can stay airborne for a long time). And at the end of this minigame, the stage is reset, and each person who "won" the minigame is given a random prize. Sometimes you receive 5% healing or something like that. Sometimes you get a giant mushroom, sometimes you get a power star. The game can swing drastically depending on what you get, and it's completely random. This is a stage that could've been legit. If the prizes were constant, or consecutive (like, win once: get healing; win twice: get mushroom; win three times: get star), or had some kind of followable pattern, it could've been salvaged easily as another stage in the game which is very different and adds loads of competitive depth. But it was crafted with randomness in mind, and you really have to wonder, "why"? The casual crowd gains a stage where it is amazingly easy for really gay shit to happen-where you end up jaded because your opponent was handed a free win. The competitive crowd gains a stage that simply cannot be used due to inconsistencies. As opposed to a stage that the casual AND competitive crowds could've loved.

And this is one of Nintendo's follies. They see competitive and casual as incompatible. Which is only half true. They are compatible, but only in one direction-what works for the competitive gamer works for the casual gamer. Now would someone please tell this to the nintendo execs so that they can give MLG the goddamn rights to the brawl videos?