I'd Like Some Poundcake

So, I wrote a bunch of stuff about the BoLShit that's been happening lately at YTTH. Twice, actually. In the end, though, I scrapped the posts because they just went on too long and weren't very good.

See, I have this problem where I have trouble putting my thoughts into words so sometimes I try to just keep writing in the hopes that I will somehow accidentally get it right. A thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters; that sort of thing. I tried it twice on this subject, but both times ended up with nothing as comprehensible as I'd like.

The point I was trying to make is that this whole competitive vs non-competitive thing is stupid. My competitive background is in fighting games, and I feel like the 40k community could stand to be more like the fighting game community. In the fighting game community, regardless of why you enjoy the games, everyone plays competitively and there are NO douchebags and NO whining.

If someone brought Sean to a Third Strike tournament and then bitched about how everyone there was just playing 'cheesy' Chun Li and weren't playing for fun or were ruining the game, the whole room would go quiet and every other player would slowly turn to stare at the Sean player until they slowly backed out of the venue. This sort of behavior is just not acceptable or tolerated.

Awesome* Street Fighter David Sirlin felt so passionately about this subject that he wrote a book about it. Except that he felt it was too important for this sort of limited distribution so he put it all on his website, word for word, for free.

His message was simple: if you're entering a tournament, play to win. The game doesn't know about "cheese", or "honor", or whatever other attributes people project onto it, nor does it care about these things. The only thing the game knows are the rules. So if you lose because of arbitrary limitations you placed on yourself that aren't part of the game, then you have only yourself to blame.

If you're going to a 40k tournament, play to the best of your ability, period. And don't go with a chip on your shoulder either.

**

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* - By awesome I mean, "inspiring, or characterized by, awe" not "Woah, awesome, dude"

** - Some things I wrote in my previous ramblings that I thought were neat:

I thought it was very interesting that after the initial ETC list criticizing Stelek did of the American team and then their resulting backlash, the other teams all started personally emailing him their lists saying "Haha, what you're doing is awesome, we want in on some of this! Here are our lists."
There has been some further backlash from European teams since then, however the fact remains that while these teams are making a fuss about what a mean doodie-head Stelek is, other teams think he's awesome. From what I've gathered, it seems like a lot of the teams complaining are about the American team equivalents of that country in the sense that they're all circle-jerking d-bags who in no way accurately represent their country's 40k community.

Like an overtaxed citizen making a last stand against their town's oppressive mayor, Stelek seems to be saying "We've dealt with your nonsense for long enough, we aren't going to take it anymore!"
This I just thought was some colorful writing that I didn't want to throw away. It is still the feeling I get from Stelek as of late.

Nobody ever goes all Hulk-smash on an event (back from the safety of their computer chair) because they just wanted to get together and have some fun games with their friends, but the other attendees were all mean, game-breakers who weren't playing for fun, and everyone was just playing Yun and repeatedly crushing their Remy into the ground.
In the fighting game community, competitive and non-competitive events and environments are very strongly disparate so these sorts of encounters don't happen.

If a couple of friends or renowned players show up [at a non-competitive fighting game event], things can often turn into everyone trying to beat those few people. Imagine Stelek showing up to your local shop's casual game night and tell me it wouldn't turn into everyone trying to test their mettle against him. The only real difference would be that in the world of fighting games, these are always friendly matches regardless of how heated the competition gets.

Everyone should play more like Brent.