SOCI 498X – Bart Simon Final Paper Robin Psaila 27246269 The Super Smash Bros. Series and Super Smash Bros. Melee: the origins and consequences of a socio-cultural based videogame from casual to competitive play Games are components of human life and bring meaning to how we make sense of our cultural and social world through the play experience. Therefore, I have and continue to study how the Smash games and especially Super Smash Bros. Melee affected, and still affects, gamers and especially competitive gamers or players into uniting around a common play consciousness for the sake of smash play, because of its players’ social and play usage of a socio-cultural based videogame. From this perspective, I will use academic sources around the play forces of this game as well as fighting games, competition and game studies in general to try and prove some of the relationships between sociological and cultural processes that formed the smash gaming culture. We will see that those relationships where mainly created in the shift from ‘smash casual play’ to ‘smash competitive play’ and the origins of the smash games. I will start by explaining how smash culture and play (smash play) came to emerge by looking at their origins. Then, I will add how Smash play can be defined by making distinctions between Smash’s casual and competitive play. In order to try and see how both influenced the Smash culture through various play forms and shared socio-cultural gaming appurtenance. This study will be mostly based of the use of Joeri Taelman’s thesis Playing with the script: Super Smash Bros. Melee, Todd Harper’s book The Culture of Digital Fighting Games: Performance and Practice and my understanding of the class objectives and readings as well as my personal research, information gathered, survey and interviews, through an active participation into understanding this gaming culture. SOCI 498X – Bart Simon Final Paper Robin Psaila 27246269 Where does Smash play originates from? – The origins of the Smash Culture (Description: Timeline of the creation of every smash characters, i.e. the date of release of each character’s debut game associated with the date of release of each smash games.) The Super Smash Bros. Series and smash culture began in Japan in 1999 when the first game came out Super Smash Bros. At the very beginning, it was on Nintendo 64 and included 12 playable Nintendo characters and many features. However, as one can imagine before having the idea of the first Smash game, Nintendo created many videogames which where the origins of smash games and part of the start of the videogame culture. A lot of gaming subcultures were already present in what I would call the ‘Nintendo gaming culture’ which was to created with their first videogames series and through various gaming characters. Game and Watch was the first one in 1980 followed by Mario and Donkey Kong, Luigi, Zelda and Link, Samus, Megaman, Captain Falcon, Kirby, the fire emblems characters, the various Pokémon and others which were incorporated inside videogame culture through time and different videogame developers to form the Nintendo gaming culture and parts of the overall videogame culture. Those characters make reference to a lot of gaming universes (also called franchises) and cultures. Therefore, each represents a Nintendo gaming subculture: The Mario and Donkey Kong universe, the Kirby universe, the Legend of Zelda universe, the Metroid universe, the Starfox universe, the Pokémon universe and many others. As one might be aware of, each gaming universe and storylines are filled with a lot of iconic characters with notions of good and evil but also they were released in different times and represents a lot of different generations of players. It could SOCI 498X – Bart Simon Final Paper Robin Psaila 27246269 explain why they are a lot of ages groups included in Smash play. I have seen players of between 10 to 14-year-old play alongside players of 30-year-old whereas the formers were not even born when Super Smash Bros. Melee came out. For example, to briefly go over the Mario universe and franchise (best-selling videogame selling franchise in the world with over 500 million copies), it originally included Mario (first game in 1981 and most iconic videogame character => included in over 200 videogames)1, the hero, and Donkey Kong, the antagonist or ape monster, where Mario mistreated the ape, therefore the ape captured the Lady (Pauline) and he ‘had to’ save her, his beloved, out of his hands. Then this original storyline developed (and is still developing) to include other characters (about 30 in total so far2) such as Peach, Luigi, Yoshi, Bowser, Bowser Junior, baby Mario, Daisy, Toad and many others. The development of each universe and Nintendo’s gaming subcultures alimented the development of the overall Nintendo gaming culture through the many series that were created. Then some of those characters where included in the later Super Smash Bros. games or other Nintendo gaming series such as Mario Kart. In terms of what we have seen so far, those characters or iconic references such as the moves of each character in the Smash games represent the video gaming culture and play through Nintendo’s previous published and distributed games. They represent what Goffman would probably call the unchangeable in-game props for players. In terms of Goffman’s The presentation of Everyday life (1959), these are necessary to the performance of any players and they contribute to the player’s enjoyment because of already known cultural gaming Nintendo references. I could bring my argument further into arguing that in the case of Smash play, they change depending on the type of players (characters switches, 1 2 Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mario_franchise_characters SOCI 498X – Bart Simon Final Paper Robin Psaila 27246269 gameplay styles) such as the casual or competitive player whether they are in-game props of the gameplay or out-game props (outside of the play) of cultural or social values. For example: A casual player is generally portrayed in his home playing the game against other casual players as it is presented to him (meaning as Nintendo want it to be designed for them and that’s what argues Taelman) so usually without extra rules (operational or implicit rules) or out-game props that can be present to influence the way you play or ‘should play’ even though ‘home rules’ may exist among casual players. Those are essential to competitive smash play and it represent more props which can be either out-game social rules or in-game changeable props (extra rules to alter gameplay balance) which I will not explain the main components as I did in my presentation with the explanations of the nature of technical Smash skill (also known as tech skill) in relation with Smash mind skill (also known as mind games, smaller games inside the game). Therefore what I want to argue is that, casual players do not add props inside their gameplay, they take the one already made for them and do not question their nature or goals just for what competitive gamers would categorize as “nebulously-defined fun (which often means winning)”3. Whereas the competitive players take the one already made and bring it to another level with a shared socio-cultural common conscience through an understanding of those levels (they have been casual players before). In order to achieve the best smash plays (they came to understand the best of what can be humanly achieved of the game) even though the rivalries they might face against each other do not give rise to the pursuit of wealth, prestige and fame (maybe not for top players?). Since they respect and are constantly reminded of the importance of this collective conscience (socio-cultural creation from players => Durkheim?) through play and those in-game unchangeable props of the hardcoded inside the game. 3 Todd Harper, The Culture of Digital Fighting Games: Performance and Practice (Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture, 2013) 1st Edition, p137 SOCI 498X – Bart Simon Final Paper Robin Psaila 27246269 When myself or Todd Harper interviewed those players, they see or enter in the play of those fighting games “as a primarily social activity”4 and when they described ‘their play experience’. It is framed in terms of competition against other people and just staying next to the console against a competitive player by solely watching him could create a social interaction through the challenge of skill and minds. “Being a good sport and a gracious winner, rather than a sore loser, is also part of the package, and it has both social and gameplay ties.”5 Just by speaking (surveying and interviewing), seeing and for me playing with players, Harper and I could indicate that “a person [critical aspect’s of the fight] is not winning or losing, but the challenge; losing to someone more skilled is a chance to improve one’s own game and, in the process, improve the play of future opponents as well (therefore improves play through socio-cultural interactions and improve the smash culture overall). It is almost as if winning or losing is incidental, a consequence of the game code: A winner must be determined, but the gaming process itself is more important”6 because “to the serious player, the source of fun is determining the better player matching skills and giving your opponent a good match”7 through a strong gracious play is better than by winning itself. Therefore, achievements where you beat a top player, being part of the top 8 or even top 50 players in major tournaments or just finding a new technic (improvements of tech skills) are really important results of the use of such props and gather considerable attention within the Smash community, bringing recognition of levels of play and skills between players. The introduction to competition and competitive play is therefore the most important and interesting aspect of such transitions between casual and competitive play. When you introduce 4 Harper, The Culture of Digital Fighting Games, 136 Harper, The Culture of Digital Fighting Games, 136 6 Harper, The Culture of Digital Fighting Games, 137 7 Harper, The Culture of Digital Fighting Games, 137 5 SOCI 498X – Bart Simon Final Paper Robin Psaila 27246269 someone to Smash competitive play: how can you represent such play and games to make him comprehend a whole culture and social processes in a way that he/she doesn’t underlines or categorizes through such sentences like ‘Oh, well it is just geeks.’ or ‘This is hardcore…’ or ‘why would competition or playing videogames matter anyway?’ Or even how do you prevent conflicts within the gaming community? “The Smash Brothers”8 documentary is an example as a non-profit kick started project even though you still have to think that they are interests behind it. Joeri Taelman’s master thesis is another and my paper tries to be one example also. The most important aspect of competition, those projects and being the best at smash is that for example as competitive smash players or as anything in life Armada (pseudo of one of the best smash player of all times) simply explains us: “If you want to be good at something, you need to understand what you are doing wrong and what you should do instead.”9 The beauty of competition is when everyone agrees on its best moments, especially how to define who is the best and how to become one of them. Even though one may always argue on whether one player places 1st or not within the overall smash community, tournaments will always be the physical place (out-game prop) where we could see the results of those fights with actual footage. For me Melee offers the best ranking system because no one can totally relate on one victory, the mastering of this game doesn’t exist, it is like saying mastering football or any physical sport could be possible. Frame perfects moves are only momentums/reactions and cannot be humanly possible all the time. Therefore, players, in respect to other players, will always recognized their respective abilities which are represented in the play experience/challenges through skill or mind. Whether they have been playing the game for 5 months or 10 years because of the cultural, game and play and social 8 9 Interview of Adam "Armada" Lindgren by Christopher “Wife” Fabiszak at the Smash Summit Tournament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edPsg0ix4_0 SOCI 498X – Bart Simon Final Paper Robin Psaila 27246269 recognition around a common gaming intelligence. The challenge of the challenge of competition is to come to understand it until you no longer compete for its values but rather for its potentials and its players. That’s what I think smashers and smash communities and organizations are trying to achieve around the globe by bringing insights on the game itself (the hardcoded) but also its players’ rankings, their plays and the sharing of this collective consciousness formed by cultural and social values. As you can see Smash games didn’t come out as a new culture but rather used other gaming universes and subcultures to make one that would comprehend and use a number of them to create the Smash gaming culture. Therefore, the marketing and cultural use of those gaming universes and cultures created the Super Smash Brothers series and others. Today, Game and Watch is still part of the Super Smash Bros Bros. series in the new game that just came out Super Smash Bros for Wii U and 3DS even though the last game who came out on the Game and Watch universe was about 10 years ago. Although, Game and Watch character’s existence persisted through the Super Smash Bros. Series with Brawl and Melee. The success of the first Super Smash Bros game was incredible especially in Japan and also the United States where all those gaming universes and cultures had been implemented into peoples lives with Nintendo and its games. Also you have to know that Nintendo was part of the Japanese’s’ game consumption and conception since the beginning of the 19th century. Nintendo was created in 1889 and started as a game and toys company. As they probably saw the potential to take on the video game industry around the 1970s, they decided to make what they wanted off this industry by making all those universes and gaming cultures in which people could identify by solely playing them. SOCI 498X – Bart Simon Final Paper Robin Psaila 27246269 As you can see the Smash culture emerges from a lot of things. All those games and the basis to the creation of other games such the smash games were already there whether in Nintendo’s marketing strategies or people’s consumption of game and play in Japan, the United States and Europe. The rare critics of the Smash games called for the laziness out of Nintendo’s marketing and creative ambitions around videogames because the company reused already made video games characters. However, this argument isn’t relevant because the creation of the Super Smash Bros games needed a new game design and mechanics to create a new game. Therefore, people could identify it with because of its potential for great fun and play, either casual or competitive, through the importance of the presence of those characters to relate to people’s play styles or videogame personal cultures. Therefore, a new and more social Nintendo gaming culture was created out of it. Even though they did have already the previous gaming universes because the characters where there with those basic games. They also used them because they probably knew that people who played with them could identify with them and go on buying this new game to continue their videogame playing experience. To go further into this analysis, you can even see inside the Smash games mechanics references to other game mechanics from other games of those same characters. For example, in Super Mario Bros 2, “the player could choose between Mario, Luigi, Toad, or Princess Peach. Each character possesses unique abilities (Luigi has stronger jumping ability, Toad can dig the fastest, and Peach can float), with Mario being the most well-rounded.”10 In Super Smash Bros. Melee or even the previous sequel, the developers (HAL laboratory) had the wonderful idea of incorporating previous games’ abilities (from Nintendo’s games) of the characters inside the game mechanics of the Super Smash Bros. series. 10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario SOCI 498X – Bart Simon Final Paper Robin Psaila 27246269 In this case it wouldn’t surprise me if the float Peach possesses in Super Mario 2 is the reason to why Peach also possesses a float in Super Smash Bros. Melee. This reinforces again the importance of the Nintendo’s’ games cultural legacy inside this new game. For me, this was the Golden age of Nintendo, a lot of (almost all of them) the Super Smash Bros. Series characters originate from the creation of previous video games and permitted then to include other characters of the gaming universe in the aftermath of the success of Super Smash Bros series and especially Super Smash Bros. Melee. For example, the characters of Sonic the Hedgehog (Sony), Solid Snake (Konami) were incorporated in Super Smash Bros Brawl through probably a partnership between developers and publishers to emphasize video game culture through those specific characters and their cultural gaming representation. The recent release of Cloud in Super Smash Bros for Wii U and 3DS once again highlight those cultural gaming importances. (Square, now Square Enix). Cloud is the main character of the Final Fantasy VII game which is the most popular of the Final Fantasy Series because it is the highest-selling game in the series and also credited as “the game that sold the Playstation.”11 An interesting comparison could be made with Melee and FFVII on the subject of their selling and gaming success because of cultural gaming values which translate in monetary values for the companies involved. After proving the origins of the Super Smash Bros series characters and what constitute the untouchable cultural aspect of this video game culture, we could take a look closely to what players created out of this very specific fighting game which is Super Smash Bros. Melee. 11 Wikipedia: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VII SOCI 498X – Bart Simon Final Paper Robin Psaila 27246269 Super Smash Bros. Melee came out in 2001 in US and Japan and 2002 in Europe, it is the most successful game on the GameCube console with over 7 million copies sold. The GameCube and the game saw their production discontinued in 2007. The point or goal of the game can be resumed as follow: “Unlike ordinary fighting games like Capcom’s 2D games and Namco’s 3D games, the goal of Super Melee is to knock your opponent off the stage. A percentage meter at the bottom of the screen displays the amount of damage a character has received. The higher the damage, the more susceptible the character becomes to receiving a knockout.“12 However, when looking at the mechanics of the game and how players’ make sense out of them, we can identify a set of rules which translates the theory of props I associated between Goffman and Smash games. Game designers Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman talk of how “players interact with the inner essence of the game, the rules of the game, known as ‘game play.’”13 They tell us about “transformative play” which Taelman explains as how the player (because of the emergent culture) plays it in a way other than it was intended by the designer. The smasher, Smash Community and the Smash culture surrounds how props and its rules but also game and play and socio-cultural consequences permitted transformative play. In their analysis, they identified three levels of game rules which translates my three levels of props taken out from Goffman’s thinking: “constitutive rules, operational rules and implicit rules”. However, with my analysis, I think those rules are nothing else but props due to the videogames’ existence. Constitutive rules refer to the hardcoded, the unchangeable on the player’s part, operational rules refer to the “written down”14 12 Player review of Melee by an internaut: http://www.gamefaqs.com/gamecube/516492-super-smash-brosmelee/reviews/37273 13 Joeri Taelman, Playing with the script: Super Smash Bros. Melee, from a casual to a competitive game, 2015 (master thesis, Utrecht University), p19 and Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of play: Game design fundamentals.Cambridge: MIT press, 2004, p299. 14 Taelman, Playing with the script p20 SOCI 498X – Bart Simon Final Paper Robin Psaila 27246269 meaning the socio-cultural establishing of the common need for such rules to achieve a certain kind of play whether casual (not operational or chosen randomly resulting from thinking abstractly of the game mechanics in terms of rules and not props) or competitive or random as in Michael Jakobsson analysis of the ‘random smash tournament’ in a videogame club in Sweden. The implicit rules are therefore the social rules or the “unwritten down” what I call out-game props. When the game came out, the creators implemented it inside gaming culture as a party casual game. They wanted people to enjoy ‘quick fun’, as Jesper Juul describes, and they especially wanted a game which could be sold efficiently for the company’s future. However, quickly after its release, Super Smash Bros. Melee saw its play taken to another level, one that Nintendo would have never have imagined but maybe HAL laboratory did. In 2002, tournaments started and some players saw in the game an opportunity much more interesting and rewarding than solely playing for ‘fun’, they saw another kind of fun and maybe a better one. Although do not be mistaken, those players from what I’ve seen, understand that ‘Smash’ or The Super Smash Bros Series could comprehend a lot more than a casual experience and gave rise to a different play form, the competitive smash play. In what we have analyzed with Fahran Malick and from our survey results we notice that those players clearly were not satisfied by Nintendo’s casual experience. In the 1999 IGN review, Peer Sheinder writes : “let's start off by saying that Super Smash Bros. is not really a fighting game.”15 His argument was wrong and today the Super Smash Bros Series is considered one of the greatest fighting game series of all times and especially Super Smash Bros. Melee through its unique plays and community. He justified it by “Smash Bros. does 15 Peer Schneider, Super Smash Bros. Review IGN (27th April, 1999) http://www.ign.com/articles/1999/04/28/super-smash-bros SOCI 498X – Bart Simon Final Paper Robin Psaila 27246269 not rely on complex button combinations or a ton of moves to bring the game to life.”16 True, Smash games were unlike any other fighting games ever made before but its easiness of pick up and its aim as a casual party game formed the irrational force of its competitive social and cultural power. Even though Nintendo never recognized the competitive scene of its own games, it still participated in the development of the smash competitive play although not the way competitive players want it to be done. For example, the first Smash tournament ever took place in Japan in 200017. This tournament signed the start of the competitive scene because it showed the potential of Super Smash Bros. as a competitive game and culture even though the rules of how the game ought to be played competitively did not yet exist and it was just a matter of time before players made this work done through social and cultural processes. Joeri Taelman makes a great analysis of how Nintendo censored or didn’t approve of the “playing of the ‘script’ (concept)” of Super Smash Bros Melee by its players’ through the interaction of developers and gamers to the game. However, he doesn’t concern himself in explaining the reasons and nature of those interactions. I hope this try to account for the ‘why’ such interactions occurred and especially why does Super Smash Bros. Melee offers both a great understanding of competitiveness and its values through the different play forms, social and cultural processes which formed the Smash socio-cultural community-based culture through a competitive spectrum. The misunderstanding of the competitive smash play by Nintendo and the various media representations and criticisms and even some scholars of it highlight: how only players and especially competitive players understand the complexity of such high level competitive play as 16 Scheinder, Review Footage, 1999, first smash tournament ever by Nintendo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwWYupAcCf8&feature 17 SOCI 498X – Bart Simon Final Paper Robin Psaila 27246269 well as the social processes and ‘hype’ involved in it. It took me half a year to achieve some smash tech skill-based competitive Smash play and since then I have personally put myself in active participation within this gaming community because I have come to like competitiveness because of it which is something I have never liked before and couldn’t really understand or comprehend before playing and experiencing competitiveness through the Smash games. I interviewed about 10 of the top 100 players of Melee and other smash games as well as participated into over 20 tournaments across Montreal mostly and France as well. I have conducted a survey to try to study and come up with a ‘smasher theory’ which could encompass the smash players into one big table. I’m also planning on going on March 5th and 6th to attend one of the biggest tournament of the 2016 year in New Jersey to actually see and understand the complexity of the best players’ high level competitive play and their importance in terms of social interactions to other players and to the games themselves. So what is the difference between ‘smash casual play’ and ‘smash competitive play’? From Nintendo’s perspective, it is clear. Smash games aren’t supposed to be about strict competitiveness and they didn’t intend on it on it to be a competitive game but if they had look closely to competitive smash play they would have seen that it is not all about competition and if it was, then it was a really good one. However, as Taelman and myself came to comprehend, it did couldn’t work that way for some players, it is as if the game told them that they had to play it this way. Taelman got it wrong when he said that this game had no combos though and if he needs justification on game mechanics, I might be able to offer some detailed insight on the game mechanics involved in competitive play. Certain trophies inside the game also prone for some SOCI 498X – Bart Simon Final Paper Robin Psaila 27246269 characters such as Fox being a good one on one character meaning that developers probably know of the potential for competitive play but maybe knew also that they couldn’t make it the main feature since Nintendo didn’t agree on it and wanted a ‘kid’s game’. As I tried to demonstrate the ‘natural’ inner sense of this fighting game is most well expressed through its competitive play and even if it emerged from a hardcore and competitive player culture alongside specific social processes. All Smash players today, seem to be able to accept that “gamer culture is multi-faceted”18 because of the difference and transformation that occurred culturally and socially speaking through a videogame various plays into people’s conscience and thinking of how Smash can be played and not ought to be played or should be played. They just understand how Smash as a misunderstand competitive fighting videogame could be representing competitive play and create the best emotions with it. I could personally write hours on the subjects, there is so much to say about those videogames and I didn’t and couldn’t go in too much details around certain game mechanics or the history of smash competitive plays because I think one would need to play and understand before comprehending the complexity of such games and the competitive mindset. I tried to make one understand and prove of its sociocultural developed collective conscience which lead to a great gaming culture, community and especially extraordinary plays. N.A: If you want to learn more about it, I would recommend this video which explains and gives a basic introduction to competitive Smash play from a gamer and viewer perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2BZUooaPNs 18 Mikael Jakobsson, Playing with the Rules : Social and Cultural Aspects of Game Rules in a Console Game Club, p390