Team sports require individuals to come together and use their unique strengths to achieve victory. Each person has a specific job to do, and the team’s ultimate success is based on players doing their respective tasks well enough.

Sometimes one person shines while the team still losses, or the star has an off night but the squad still manages to pull out a win. That’s the thing with team sports: individual performances are of course critical, but each individual’s fate remains tied to the efforts of their teammates. Even if a single athlete is able to seemingly will and drag their team to a win, somewhere along the line fellow team members contributed to the victory, and success would have been impossible without that assistance.

Splatoon, though not allowing the type of athletic achievement that actual sports do, requires its players to similarly work together. Gamers are matched together on teams of four, doing battle in a number of modes which all share the basic tenet of team sports: in order to win individuals must work together in pursuit of a specific goal.

Splatoon adds the caveat that, generally speaking, players are put together with random people and are disallowed any manner of nuanced verbal communication. The only type of semi-spoken interactions—the form of communication that is widely accepted as necessary for this type of competitive gaming—are two simple phrases: “C’mon,” a call to follow or come to a certain area, and the celebratory/complimentary “Booyah.”

In terms of working out strategy, this is extremely limiting. But it in no way makes true teamwork impossible.

As someone who has put nearly 200 hours into Splatoon, the majority of which have been spent in the intense and challenging Ranked modes, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how effective teamwork, well, works in the game. In pondering this I have thought of the ways that certain aspects of real-life team sports can be applied to Splatoon, and have also gained some perspective on certain aspects of those athletic events.

Since we’ve already begun getting into the topic of communication, we can begin there.

Sports teams use non-verbal cues in a myriad of ways, from hand-gesture signs to subtle eye contact. There often isn’t enough time to verbally express an idea, making unspoken conveyances the most practical way to offer a quick plan.

Again, though, Splatoon only offers two terms enabling direct communication, and only one of those—“C’mon”—is a valid way to offer quick, precise strategy. What Splatoon does offer, however, is a type of passive communication, which is both intentional and inadvertent.

We make use of this anytime we do anything in-game; our actions, and the actions of our teammates, are signals to each other as to what we should each be doing. Our deliberate decision to, say, ink a path down the right side carries with it the coincidental sign given to team members to lay down an alternate path of their own, or find an advantageous use of the route at the right time.

In the mode Tower Control—the objective is to move a column to a spot in the other team’s base; the tower is advanced by having one or more players from a team on top of it—a player could go ahead of the tower’s route, signaling to his teammates that he will attempt to keep the area clear while they ride the block.

A common source of frustration for Splooners are teammates who don’t, in fact, get on the tower, as the plan would have ideally unfolded. Instead, time is wasted, the other team is able to advance themselves, and the lack of straightforward verbiage is bemoaned.

This is a valid take, as a simpler way to convey one’s strategy to fellow players—neverminding the possible language barrier, which is likely one of the reasons for the exclusion of voice chat—could make such situations less irritating.

But, this is the design of the game, and so we must make do with what we have. In the end, the most we can do is what we think is best and trust in our teammates to carry through on their part.

The New England Patriots had a simple motto for last season: “Do Your Job.” The idea was that if each individual player did their particular task to the best of their ability, the ultimate job of championship success would be filled. This mindset did, of course, lead to a Super Bowl win (even if Seattle’s ostensible botching of its endgame play-calling had something to do with it).

In focusing solely on their own job, the singular player was tasked with trusting and believing in their teammates to do their jobs just as well. We see this in baseball, too, when a pitcher is dominant and must rely on his team’s hitters to do their part in securing victory, or in subsequent relief pitchers to hold the lead.

We can only do so much in Splatoon, and if we worry too much about what our teammates are doing we will lose sight of what we are trying to do ourselves. Even if this break in concentration is momentary, it may be enough for a player on the other team to gain the upper hand on us. Our most prudent path is to perform the act which we think is best at a given time while trusting and believing in our teammates to follow our lead and do what they need to do; we also need to pay attention to their actions, playing off of them as necessary.

This may require a bit of improvisation and shifting of our original strategies. To use the earlier example, if I wanted to take the right side, but my teammate went ahead and got there before me, rather than stubbornly sticking to my plan and following her down that route, perhaps I should forge a path down the middle, or create a lane on the map’s left side. I see what she is doing, responding accordingly to ensure current and future success in the match.

Speaking on the spontaneous nature of basketball, legendary coach Phil Jackson once said, “Basketball, unlike football with its prescribed routes, is an improvisational game, similar to jazz. If someone drops a note, someone else must step into the vacuum and drive the beat that sustains the team.”

I like this quote as an analogy for Splatoon. Just as a basketball player adapts on the fly to what his teammates and opponents are presenting him, so should us gamers take to approaching Nintendo’s ink-spewing adventure.

Anyone who has played basketball, or watched for an extended period of time, is likely familiar with the concept of a ball hog: a player who takes it upon his or herself to do all the work. This is generally due to a, in some cases rightful, belief in oneself as superior to one’s teammates. Essentially it is caused by a lack of trust in the players surrounding an individual.

Such a way of playing is almost universally derided, as it breaks apart the very essence of team sports. Although, Splatoon’s newest mode, Rainmaker, has given me a new appreciation for how and why a player might fall into the trap of being a ball hog, or in some way being selfish.

Rainmaker involves a device—termed the rainmaker—laid in the middle of the battlefield. The objective is for one team to carry it to a pedestal located in the opponent’s end of the field. The first team to carry the rainmaker to the goal wins, and if neither team is able to do so before time runs out the victor is decided by who was able to get closest.

The mode allows for, what at least feels like, the most direct control a single player can have in determining the outcome. One person could conceivably grab the rainmaker, splat all members of the opposing team with its firing mechanism and carry it to the goal. This is simply not possible in other modes. One person taking on four in Turf Wars—where the total amount of ground covered by one team’s ink determines a winner—is simply impossible; Splat Zones (in which specific sections of the map are marked and team-ink control of these areas ticks down a 100-count timer) doesn’t allow for an individual player to take and control a zone for the duration of a match; a solitary person could not ride Tower Control’s monument to victory.

Support is mandatory in these modes in a way that can seem less obvious in Rainmaker.

For this reason, there is always the temptation, particularly when one’s team is having difficulty advancing the device, to proclaim, “Just give me the freaking thing!” and set out to win the match on one’s own. This line of thought, though theoretically possible, just isn’t the most sensible way to go about things.

Knowing this, though, doesn’t make it any easier to avoid sometimes adopting that attitude.

Playing Rainmaker has made me appreciate much more why someone like Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant would be reluctant to evenly distribute the ball among their teammates. And they knew they were better than everyone else; I’m just some guy from Vermont who believes myself to be pretty good at Rainmaker. Really, it’s remarkable that a player the level of LeBron James tries to be, and generally is, such an unselfish team player.

What can be most frustrating about other modes is the feeling that no matter what we do, we can’t overcome the deficiencies of our teammates. We may be like wide receivers saddled with gun-shy quarterbacks, screaming, “Just throw me the damn ball!!!” When we come into Rainmaker, there is suddenly a feeling of significantly more agency, a firmer hold on our fate.

Of course, this feeling exists largely in the abstract. In practice, we need our teammates. Even if we are skilled with the rainmaker we need help in keeping the opposing team at bay, and sometimes it’s best to let someone else have a go with it, like when our special meter is full and we can unleash some type of offensive to clear a path for the carrier. That player might even find a better way to go than what we had planned.

Really, that’s the thing about Splatoon’s team play in general. We all think we know what’s best; the supreme strategy, the most effective route. When we’re off doing our thing, and if we happen to be losing, wondering what the hell our teammates are doing, we have to understand that they likely have the same mindset as us, believing what they are particularly doing to be decisive in leading to glory.

We’re all doing whatever it is we’re doing for the same reasons.

And, trust me, I’ve felt the frustration. The times I’ve splatted three of my opponents before being taken out by the fourth, upset but thinking that it’s now three versus one in our favor so surely we’ll make a strong play, only to see that no progress is made. The zone isn’t taken, the tower isn’t ridden, the ‘maker isn’t carried forward. Now, the opponent has regrouped and our best shot at securing an advantage has passed.

The rage…we’ve all been there.

However, even if my strong play ends in a loss, it is just one match in a string of countless entries. In actuality, there were probably still things I could have done better, and this is one of the strongest lessons that can be taken from sports: personal responsibility.

Perhaps I was hampered by inefficient squad mates, but what could I have done better? How could I have helped cover their weaknesses? Was there a point in which I did not effectively play off of one of their moves?

Splatoon is a global, online, multiplayer game, but with its removal of direct, detailed communication, it has some functional vibes of a single-player experience. No one is there to hold our hands and tell us exactly what to do. Even if we listen to someone’s “C’mon,” we still have to figure out what we’re supposed to do once we get to that spot.

We have to read and react to our teammates’ and opponents’ actions, just as we would respond to, say, a boss’ pattern in Bloodborne, or find the best way to sneak around in Dishonored, based on the movements of our enemies. In the game Ico, we have to work with a non-controllable character to solve puzzles and advance the plot; we have to understand what she can and cannot do, what our own abilities are and how we are to use this combination to complete the game.

Splatoon, I think, is best taken in this light. Since it is a team game, we are able to look toward other team-based activities for insight on what sound approaches to working with others look like. Since it is a video game, we can use our general gaming sense to see how these procedures are applicable.