The Beginning of the millennium I succumbed to a myth of Super Smash Bros Melee: I thought I was fine. On weekends and weeknights, from my smug perch on my parents’ sofa, I snap back and forth between the GameCube’s little yellow C-bar, and I crush my opponent. And when these competitors — two non-console friends and my 7-year-old brother — cried, swore, and were told it was time to go to sleep, I thought, “I’m not that good, But I’m the best. This is it, the pinnacle of my talent.” That was happiness back then.
When a few kids get older then bang I at an installation in GAME, the British equivalent of GameStop, I was punished, but not dismayed — the silent prodigy, I told myself. Then I entered a modest size Smash Bros tournament, organized by a boy from school. I was obnoxiously confident until about a second after the first match, when my opponent’s Marth started swishing back and forth, spewing white smoke from her legs. It was a short while later — when my Jigglypuff was soaring through the air like a pink saucer and I was pretending I knew something.”waves“Meaning — that I realized that no legend would ever write about me, that on the player skill curve, I was stuck at the top of a mountain. I did medium.
Video games have always fostered competitive comparison: they, after all, the game. But I was completely oblivious to my abilities, which, as I was as a child, were only possible in an era when the internet was just background noise. Today, thanks to charts and YouTube clips, we know our little island Mule, with sad weeds and aimless roads, not comparable to someone’s stretch of paradise with stately mansions and Orchestra in front of the beach. We know we’re not that good Dark souls players take off their underwear before they get rid of you. Your kill/death ratio is less than ideal, and you know it. Actually, everyone knows that. It’s never been clear how average we are in games.
There’s an element of nostalgia here that transcends games, namely that having access to a wealth of information about our interests makes those preferences less of a mystery. Folklore games like finding the Frozen Key in Banjo Kazooie or I win Red Pokemon used for word of mouth or magazines; now you can find it on your phone.
There is a direct line between this shift and the competitive, consumer-driven spirit of the internet (and of course, the consumer capitalism beneath it). Just as a quick surf can instill a toxic mix of envy and ambition — people’s outfits on Instagram, their achievements on Linkedin — certain games make us we have to go through a brutal, semi-public show. In his book Criticism of Play and Design in the Age of Gambling, the academic Partick Jionary argues that many modern games are purely “thrifty.” Check Candy Crush Saga, he points out that all achievements are tracked and ranked: Players are assigned scores, rated on a three-star system, and their performance plotted on a leaderboard, which is linked to Their Facebook. On social networks, players can earn extra lives by recruiting and interacting with other players. The game “mapped activities such as social media use and career competition,” he explains, concluding: Candy Crush Saga “Encourage players to develop their own value and compare that value with others online.”
