Expression
It's not a scalding hot take for me to say that expressing one's creativity, the way they think about things and the way they react to certain stimuli is a good practice for pretty much everyone. It's also not a scalding hot take for me to suggest that everybody should express themselves through different forms of media based on where their interests lie, and that most people do so in that sense. Me? I like music, fighting & shooting games, programming, writing. You'll have a different set, and that's a good thing.
I'd like to zoom in, as always, on how this manifests in fighting games, since I've thought the most about expression within this particular context, but a good chunk (but not all) of this applies, since who the hell cares about Super Smash Bros. Melee, to any other form of 1-on-1 competition, like, say, Chess (and my Chess experience is very limited, so feel free to call me out if I make any misconceptions). High-level Chess with short timers has a few really nice parallels to Melee, where you start of in a neutral state, and you flip-flop between being in advantageous and disadvantageous positions, based on a whole bunch of things - how each player opens, how each player applies pressure, how they react to the pressure with defensive or counter options, the reading and coverage of those very options, and how people choose to punish an opening based off an opponent's habits - these are all elements that go into both Chess and Melee.
I think it's fairly safe to say that everybody, in however they choose to express themselves, wants that form of expression to be a reflection of an aspect of who they are as a person. In a game, do you go for risky options which may reap a higher reward, or a safer one? When effecting your dynamics to convey, say, sadness in a song, do you ramp up your volume to represent the intensity of the emotion or play quietly, as if you're barely able to squeeze out the notes? There's a whole host of choices that you're able to make in any sort of medium that I personally believe tend to be rooted in the way somebody thinks in general.
A very obvious example of this is character choice in a fighting game. Do you pick a character that benefits from putting the enemy in a corner and reading their options, or maybe one that plays keep away and punishes bad approaches? Similarly, in football, where are your strengths: in passing, dribbling, defending, goalkeeping, shooting, hold-up play,positioning, set pieces, and in what combination? A very rewarding feeling for a fan of any sort of competition - or any expressive medium - is being able to identify the author by their work after being stripped away of that information in a direct sense. If a football match had players in wireframes, a football fan would probably be able to tell which teams are playing and likely even who plays in certain positions, similarly in tennis, Counter-Strike or the arts, and this is increasingly true the better and more accomplished someone is.
This is absolutely fascinating to me. The idea that within the vacuum of a certain game, or art form, that people are so unique in how they choose to express themselves that you're able to tell who's responsible for what you're seeing or hearing, well, that's the whole reason we do it right?
The Smash Bros. commentator Toph tweeted once that he's able to tell if his opponent is impatient (but, well, he calls it toxic) by how they react to a certain stimulus, in this case being in the hard knockdown state, due to it being the fastest option, although easily punishable. The examples I've pointed out so far are very low-level in the sense that it would obviously be naïve to suggest that this would always be the case. I'd like to think, though, about how this manifestation may come to be.
Improvement
I play Sheik in Melee - depending on the matchup and situation, I have a set of options I can choose because of what is offered by my character. If a Fox player is pressuring my shield, I can use a defensive option (stay in shield, spotdodge, roll in or away, wavedash back), or an offensive option (aerial out of shield, shield grab, wavedash forward). Just as well, my opponent is able to read what that option will be - or at times, react to it - and punish me for that, but if I know how they may choose to do so, I can punish that accordingly - and so on. To bring things back, how different is that to how we think about Chess?
To abstract away a little bit, the parallel does draw further, as in Melee you're making these decisions at a fraction of a second, and these decisions have to be made almost every second. Being able to decide how you're going to react to a certain stimulus takes a certain amount of experience, whether it comes from your own playing of matches, asking better players what to do in a situation, reviewing your own previous matches or labbing out scenarios.
In Chess, where you often don't have much time to think about how to react to an opponents move, you study openings through textbooks, review previous matches and lab out scenarios via puzzles. Sound familiar?
The analyst in you does these to different amounts, and when asking the question "why did I lose that game?", has a different set of answers. There's a billion different videos on this in fighting games which are all worth watching, but the general gist is that we all have different views on:
- How a game should be played (more abstractly, what idea should be expressed), and,
- How we actually go about doing so (how to actually express that idea).
This is where I think improvement, and the development of one's skillset, comes into play. You want to express a certain idea, whether it's as small as you knowing what your opponent will do at any given moment, or as grand as the feeling of having your heart broken, and the better you are at expression, the more clearly that comes into fruition. And I think that the ways in which you choose to develop yourself are in large part what is responsible for, on top of having a clear and fleshed-out vision of this, how your idiosyncracies come about.
This sounds so unsurprising when written down, but your influences, who you were a fan of prior to entering a medium, play a huge part in how you end up thinking about a game, or art. Ezra Koenig was influenced by Paul Simon and James Murphy by Bowie and Byrne just like how Mang0 was influenced by NEO. Your influence's philosophy and creative choices strongly affect your own, and it's good to acknowledge that. I have no reservations about how much I try to emulate Plup's Sheik as much as I can since he's my favourite player to watch, or the way I try to develop my own voice has been greatly in response to being a fan of Koenig and Bowie's singing.
I LOVE thinking about this stuff, because I love fighting games, and fighting games players love this stuff. But I think there's an application here for everyone. The more you think about how you think, the better you're able to improve your strengths and mitigate your weaknesses, and the better you're able to more clearly realise your ideas in whichever medium you choose. Are you a Timmy, Johnny or a Spike? Have a think about it.
Having thought about this, it's a little ironic that this entry is such a mess, but hey, you don't get better by not doing things, do you?