I Love Super Smash Bros Melee, I Should Stop Playing Super Smash Bros Melee

For more than half of my life, I’ve been engaging with a video game that I think I would consider the best of all time - Super Smash Bros. Melee. It’s a game that has a tremendous amount of depth and intricacy, it’s been described as a “sandbox fighting game”. My friends and I have all kind of universally picked it up again this past year, probably partially due to it getting more publicity in the fighting game scene. None of us are particularly good, the game is almost like Tennis in that it has numerous plateaus and levels of play: the best players completely crush the others in the top 10, who crush the top 100 and so on. We’re still at the ~struggle to beat casual players with annoying strategies~ stage.

                There is something about Melee that makes it really easy to become incredibly emotionally invested. The game is set up so that there are these little moments of hitstun where you know you kicked someone’s ass, and other moments where you know you screwed up, or got outplayed. Skill is a big part of the game, but it is also cerebral and your mindset when you are playing can change everything.  All these things combine to make it kind of a troubling thing to have at the center of a friend group’s interactions.

                There’s all manner of ways that Melee causes social issues. Simply the fact that you are seeing people a few times a week and really trying to BEAT them, makes it not the kindest situation. If you can get somebody upset, chances are they’ll play worse, and you’ll be more able to win. So it’s pretty common to throw out trash talk, or gloat when you do something cool. The satisfying play of the game also makes you feel really awesome when you win, and I am certainly guilty of some pretty douchey whoops and hollers. The game also has just enough little things that affect it that you can usually make up some excuse when you lose (the community calls this a “John”). It’s easy to look at the game in terms of what you are doing right or wrong, and so when people get beaten, there’s usually less of a congratulation than there is an excuse. Over the course of the night, these factors can compound to a decent amount of sore feelings.

                The other problem is that it’s so addictive. This means that the people I hang out with who don’t give a shit about melee kind of get pushed to the sideline. Again, the enormous skill cap means that it’s totally worth spending time doing, you notice measurable improvements in your own play, and that feels very satisfying. But it is not very fun to be at a party where half the people are playing video games when you aren’t.

                There’s also a bit of an arms race mentality to it for me. I feel like if I could be sure that I was worse than my friends, then I could just kind of accept that and move on to other things. But I have this feeling that if I just put in that liiittle bit of work, I could become the best in my group, and that would feel cool.

                Which leaves me at my current state. Technically, I have given it up, but I also have my controller in my backpack on my bus to New York. Who knows what that means.