[stavros_]

I choose to play fighting games, and I get my current fix from Dark Souls - an asymmetric fighting game. I enjoy winning, and I structure my play around intentional practice so that I can improve.

But I don't want to win. This is an important nuance.

Do you know what winning means? It means the game is over. It means there's no more challenge, no more adversary. It means boredom and purposelessness.

Rather than winning, what I want is to fight. Focusing on the outcome of the fight is missing the forest for the trees - the fun is in the conflict, in the struggle with your opponent(s), in the instinctive collaboration with your occassional teammate.

In the glory of the defeat, as well as victory. Unless you've got firsthand experience of this, you won't believe how wonderful it feels to get your ass handed to you by a truly superior player.

To put the gaming analogy aside, life will always have its ups and downs. Life will always take you somewhere unexpected. Fixating on outcomes will blind you to opportunities and invite needless suffering into your life.

[Noos]

It really doesn't feel wonderful in fighting games.

A superior player can easily trap you in a corner and take your life down to half or more with a single combo string. It's like playing chess against someone entirely more skilled; everything you try to do gets responded to at a level far above you. There really isn't any "wonderful" about it; you could end up watching a video and getting the same result, for all you could do in the match.

There is no "glory" in this. A lot of the "play to improve" mindset is a result of needing to make a stupid level of effort to win games, with players going on long loss series due to low population and over-skilled players in the brackets they are in. This is why the fighting game genre struggles to get new players in the game at all-you have to work so much to get to where the fun is or to feel good about your efforts.

[stavros_]

So game and metagame are important here.

Overall, I agree with your point. This is the reason I don't play those games, or in those ultra-competitive brackets.

I don't think we're necessarily contradicting eachother. I choose to play fighting games for the fight, rather than the victory, and thus tailor my choices within that genre to suit me.

To offer a couple of 'parallel' examples to your own:

Player A is at a significantly higher level than player B, and 'stifles' player B through consistent reads and conditioning. Nothing player B tries works, everything player B does seems to play exactly into player As hands.

This is almost a restatement of your example, except it was a highly rewarding experience for me. In the language of cognitive psychology, it brought about a powerful flow state.

The two key differences: 1.) that the skill imbalance was not too great - just great enough - and 2.) that the nature of the game's design and the players' choices in tactics/playstyles ommitted the more obnoxious elements of combat.

My second parallel example is simply my first, reversed: I am player A, and my opponent is player B.

Everything plays out the same. Interesting, that.

Because implicit in player A's skill is that they are in control of the fight - they can, usually, make things fairly unpleasant and dirty for the opponent. It doesn't take much to push someone past the mental edge, to knock them off balance and keep them there; to destroy their flow state.

Why is player A so restrained? He didn't want to win, he wanted to fight.

Players motivations in games are often what makes the difference between a positive and a negative experience. So we nicely return to the beginning: if you're focused on winning, you're not going to have a good time and neither are the people playing with you.

[chevill]

>It really doesn't feel wonderful in fighting games.

It depends on the person. You're right that games that cater to the lowest common denominator and allow casual players occasional wins are way more popular. But for most multiplayer genres there are people that derive most of the satisfaction they get from gaming from playing competitive stuff with a super high skill cap.

I like Arena FPS games like Quake. Most people don't. Some like going for world first raid boss kills in MMOs, most MMO players just want to kill some of the bosses eventually or get some shiny loot without much effort.

I've made peace with the fact that most popular online games cater to casuals. I'm getting older so its hard to justify spending as much time as I used to anyways. I still love intense competition. I'm nowhere near the best in the world and I never could have been, but the pursuit of self improvement is still fun.

[Hammershaft]

This is to some degree also why real time strategy genre is in a coma and the arena shooter genre is practically dead. Small differences in knowledge and skill manifest in consistent crushing wins that demoralize new players.

It takes a particular personality to enjoy learning these punishing titles and from my personal experience it seems that the way people respond to this form of learning through loss is transferable to other domains outside of games.

[biren34]

In video games--and life--the only rewards for success are a transient celebration and a harder level.

[ZephyrBlu]

> Fixating on outcomes will blind you to opportunities and invite needless suffering into your life

I think having an outcome in mind is important as your north star and/or driving force, but I agree about fixating on it.