Sirlin's "play to win" theory made significant impact in the meta-gaming community, but it's rejected in the wider gaming community. This theory claims that the performance of the player largely depends on his attitude, rather than his playing experience. I expanded this theory by the explanation why there are people who don't play to win: they want to pull stunts that impress real or imaginary peers who want to see sparkles and "ownage" instead of a "boring, cheap" play followed by a "you won" screen.
However the above lacked experimental proof, and without it, the bad players (large majority) can keep claiming that performance is only function of gaming time, dubbed as "no life". The claim is hard to disprove because successful gamers indeed spend lot of time in games. Unsuccessful ones too, but how to catch them? I mean some can be caught by doing extremely time-consuming "achievements", while getting little progress in the main line of the game. However they are a small minority, the large masses cannot be caught playing more than the "no lifers". In absence of accurate time data, anyone can claim that he just "has life" so he doesn't play as much as the other guy. Similarly, if good play is presented, they can simply claim that the performer plays 80 hours a week. Even if someone starts a new game and book his hours, one can easily claim that his previous gaming experience helps, since games are similar. They reached an unbreakable circular argument: anyone who plays good surely plays a lot and playing a lot makes anyone good player.
So I took a different approach. What if I could win while playing bad? I mean if you have "low skillz", you must be a casual. The perfect test-game was League of Legends. It's a pretty grindy (or costy) game, where you battle against other players using units called "champions". There are hundreds of them. They are purposefully unbalanced, every champion has a "counters", champions who can easily defeat it. So the only way to win is to have a large stable of champions so you can always pick one for the job. A champion costs 3-6000 game money and you get about 100-300 for a game if you play for free. Alternatively you can buy one for $15-30. So to have an "OK" collection of champions, you need to play thousands of hours or spend several thousands of USD. Add that the game is fast-paced, so you need to develop muscle-memory for each champions and memorize how to move against each enemy champion. It's easy to say that one must be a no-lifer to win here.
Here I come with nothing like that:
Knows nothing about the game, did not grind gear, moves sloppy: everything is ready for a disaster. And indeed I got insane amount of flame from teammates for being unskilled, noob and a troll just for playing. Yet, it's not them, but me who got this:
Now being in silver league isn't a great thing. I wish to elevate at least to gold, but something very unexpected happened in EVE that will take up my gaming time. You will soon hear about that. Anyway, according to the game wiki, 68% of the players are in bronze. Despite I'm being utterly horrible in the game, I got into the top 1/3. How?
Simply by playing to win, as opposed to trying to kill enemies. The unsuccessful players want to "pwn" enemies to show off their "l33t stats" to peers. I preferred farming NPCs for gold and XP, defending and attacking towers, which are the objectives of the game. Players respawn you know. Most hate I got for completing an objective at the cost of letting a teammate die. That, and helping them which is dubbed as "kill-steal".
The above can be easily repeated, and having some meta-gaming knowledge, I know now that I picked a pretty bad champion as jungling needs teammates to somewhat cooperate, like be defensive when facing a stronger opponent instead of just rushing into the enemy, feeding and spamming "come gank jungler ffs". Some day I might repeat with an easier champion.
The result is that someone with a play-to-win mindset outperforms other players, even if he is utterly incompetent in the game, because most players don't even try to win. A snail easily wins a running race against a rabbit which runs in circles. The bronze players don't need more champions or better reflexes as they already 10x better than me on those fields. They just need to play to win.
PS: please note that there is a "normal game" mode in League of Legends, which is more fun, due to the lack of lengthy pre-battle selection (ban, pick turns, someone quit queue). So the people who picked competitive ranked games are surely attempting to win. They are just failing to.
However the above lacked experimental proof, and without it, the bad players (large majority) can keep claiming that performance is only function of gaming time, dubbed as "no life". The claim is hard to disprove because successful gamers indeed spend lot of time in games. Unsuccessful ones too, but how to catch them? I mean some can be caught by doing extremely time-consuming "achievements", while getting little progress in the main line of the game. However they are a small minority, the large masses cannot be caught playing more than the "no lifers". In absence of accurate time data, anyone can claim that he just "has life" so he doesn't play as much as the other guy. Similarly, if good play is presented, they can simply claim that the performer plays 80 hours a week. Even if someone starts a new game and book his hours, one can easily claim that his previous gaming experience helps, since games are similar. They reached an unbreakable circular argument: anyone who plays good surely plays a lot and playing a lot makes anyone good player.
So I took a different approach. What if I could win while playing bad? I mean if you have "low skillz", you must be a casual. The perfect test-game was League of Legends. It's a pretty grindy (or costy) game, where you battle against other players using units called "champions". There are hundreds of them. They are purposefully unbalanced, every champion has a "counters", champions who can easily defeat it. So the only way to win is to have a large stable of champions so you can always pick one for the job. A champion costs 3-6000 game money and you get about 100-300 for a game if you play for free. Alternatively you can buy one for $15-30. So to have an "OK" collection of champions, you need to play thousands of hours or spend several thousands of USD. Add that the game is fast-paced, so you need to develop muscle-memory for each champions and memorize how to move against each enemy champion. It's easy to say that one must be a no-lifer to win here.
Here I come with nothing like that:
Knows nothing about the game, did not grind gear, moves sloppy: everything is ready for a disaster. And indeed I got insane amount of flame from teammates for being unskilled, noob and a troll just for playing. Yet, it's not them, but me who got this:
Now being in silver league isn't a great thing. I wish to elevate at least to gold, but something very unexpected happened in EVE that will take up my gaming time. You will soon hear about that. Anyway, according to the game wiki, 68% of the players are in bronze. Despite I'm being utterly horrible in the game, I got into the top 1/3. How?
Simply by playing to win, as opposed to trying to kill enemies. The unsuccessful players want to "pwn" enemies to show off their "l33t stats" to peers. I preferred farming NPCs for gold and XP, defending and attacking towers, which are the objectives of the game. Players respawn you know. Most hate I got for completing an objective at the cost of letting a teammate die. That, and helping them which is dubbed as "kill-steal".
The above can be easily repeated, and having some meta-gaming knowledge, I know now that I picked a pretty bad champion as jungling needs teammates to somewhat cooperate, like be defensive when facing a stronger opponent instead of just rushing into the enemy, feeding and spamming "come gank jungler ffs". Some day I might repeat with an easier champion.
The result is that someone with a play-to-win mindset outperforms other players, even if he is utterly incompetent in the game, because most players don't even try to win. A snail easily wins a running race against a rabbit which runs in circles. The bronze players don't need more champions or better reflexes as they already 10x better than me on those fields. They just need to play to win.
PS: please note that there is a "normal game" mode in League of Legends, which is more fun, due to the lack of lengthy pre-battle selection (ban, pick turns, someone quit queue). So the people who picked competitive ranked games are surely attempting to win. They are just failing to.
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