Why I oppose smash game separation (wow 2882 words wow)

This isn't so much an essay as it is a collection of thoughts.



I am adamantly opposed to the idea that smash communities ought to be separated. Separate events, separate communities, overlap is bad, yadda yadda yadda. I've noticed that people who like to say "there's no such thing as one smash community" sound a lot more like they're trying to convince themselves than anyone else.



Let me start off by saying that Nintendo brand identity is a real thing that is alive and well with adults mostly under the age of 30. People who had Nintendo consoles like to proudly state what console they grew up with, like it's as much a part of who they are as their hometown, their ancestry, or their family's goofy holiday traditions are. SNES vs Genesis is still a touchy topic for people who were born in the late 80s. People born in the early-mid 90s still love to rave about how their first console, the Nintendo 64, was the greatest console of all time. And i still feel like an old lady when their younger siblings happily bask in nostalgia as they describe the Gamecube as their childhood. When I worked in a retro game store, the happiest customers I saw were adults being reunited specifically with Nintendo cartridges from their early years. And this is no coincidence, Nintendo knows exactly what they're doing. They've captivated the family market ever since the release of the NES, and still hold it to this day. Their IPs are memorable and recognizable, their AAA titles in the 80s and 90s are selling nowadays for sometimes as much as they were on launch. For as much as new-gen gamers like to scream "rehash", Nintendo succeeded as families purchased console after console for their kids who wanted nothing more than to play the newest Mario adventure during the winter holidays. This is something that's reflected in my current line of work as I'm most often looking to Nintendo in finding family-friendly titles, it's a market that they continue to hold a major monopoly on that Sony and Microsoft are not tapping into as much. Today's kids will probably be asking for the next major Nintendo console as #1 on their Christmas lists when it comes out. Is that to say that Nintendo makes the best games? Absolutely not. But they have the advantage of appealing to you and your parents in your formative years.



Super Smash Bros is no exception to this. While some of us grew up playing Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat as kids on the SNES, that demographic is a markedly smaller subsection of people who came from "Nintendo families" due to those series' generally more restrictive ESRB ratings. Meanwhile, Smash captured a market that we, and our parents making media decisions on our behalf, probably didn't even realize we fit: people who wanted a family-friendly fighting game. And what better way than to feature the Nintendo stars we'd already grown to know and love from our other favourite titles? Add the "sandbox" style gameplay that unfortunately earned Smash its pejorative and dismissive "party game" nickname, and you had a fighter that was quite unlike anything else on the market. Thing is, "party games" turn out to be just as fun as the name implies, and Smash sales back that up pretty well. Nintendo's brand identity played no small part in helping millions of gamers get hyped for the next installment of the series over the course of the last 16 years.



And that "sandbox" style is very important in not only distinguishing Smash as a series, but also connecting its installments. Each Smash game shares the same objective outside of special modes introduced in Melee: knock your opponent off the stage. Increase their damage to send them further. Accomplish these objectives by playing as Nintendo superstars. Why would Mario ever fight Pikachu? It makes no sense, but that goofiness was part of the appeal before we got into it competitively. Whether separatists want to accept it or not, Smash titles are closer to each other gameplay and objective wise than they are to any other game in existence. And it was that basic gameplay and objective that distinguished these games to us as we were introduced to them as kids who didn't know what "Z-cancelling" was, when these games were establishing themselves as staples of our formative years.



Things are different now for those of us in the competitive smash community. While each smash game shares the same basic objective, how we go about accomplishing it in each installment is incredibly different. Smash 64's hitstun emphasizes the importance of spacing, DI reading, and combo creativity. Melee's open movement options allow for seemingly endless mixups and creative ways of gaining match control. Brawl's relative lack of hitstun and shield stun puts on a lot of pressure to get inside your opponent's head for every last one of your button presses. Project M's relatively balanced roster and inclusion of countless advanced techniques creates an extremely diverse metagame. Smash 4's completely new edge mechanics open up the entire offstage part of the map as a battleground. Each game has its own nuances that shape their respective metagames. As someone who uses the same character across all the games, I know that I can't simply press the same buttons in each game and expect it to get me just as far. From these differences stem everyone's preferences. Some competitors enjoy the diversity of metagames the series offers and will play whatever's available to them, some competitors enjoy each games on a scale of most to least, and others enjoy one or two titles while not enjoying the others at all. And all of those are totally fine positions to take.



However, while Melee spiraled into its platinum age, tensions began to rise between the titles' competitive bases. Brawl players saw very little support on their quest to get back into MLG after having come together to support Melee's addition to EVO only a year prior. Melee players scoffed at Project M's similar playstyle with more forgiving technical execution windows, and Brawl players resented Project M for taking its players away. Smash 64 continued to be pushed to the side at the few major events it was featured at, and had little sympathy for any other games seeing a decline in numbers. Droves of people who previously were ambivalent toward (or even liked) Brawl jumped on the anti-Brawl bandwagon out of a desperate need to belong to something, in some cases acting as if Melee's decline in 2008 affected them half a decade before they ever heard about competitive Smash. Melee and Smash 4 continue to put down each other's metagames in their clash for the big spotlight. Project M resented Brawl and 64 for having smaller player bases and still being featured at Apex, and resented Smash 4 for being the harbinger of Nintendo's sponsorship putting Project M support on the chopping block. Brawl resented 64 for having one stream block at Apex while Brawl got none, while Brawl had just come out of a 5 year period of being the most supported Smash game, a privilege 64 never had. These tensions, along with Melee's rapidly expanding fanbase making it difficult to run other games beside, seemed to provide a pretty good argument to let each Smash game go their own way, have their own events, and basically have very little to do with each other. People who prefer only to play one or two games tend to add that the games' fundamentally different base mechanics support this divide.



On the surface, they would seem to be right. Why keep everyone under the same roof who can't seem to get along? It's when you dig deeper that it starts to make more sense.



The truth is, nobody really likes infighting between Smash games. KirbyKid conducted an open survey to the Smash community, where one question in particular received an overwhelming number of responses stating that infighting is the biggest detriment to the community, both from a productive standpoint to insiders and an image standpoint to outsiders. And they're right.



Why did I bring up all that stuff about Nintendo brand identity earlier? Think of all the people who go to their first tournament, and excitedly state to others "I had no idea this game I played as a kid even had all these tournaments!" This happens for Smash 64, Melee, and Brawl alike. They're happy to be there getting good at a game that was a major staple of their childhood. They don't know that the games don't get along, and are rarely happy to hear that that's the case. Introducing new players to an environment where infighting is par for the course only serves to pressure them to choose a camp and fuel the fire, when that's clearly not what the current smash community even wants to happen.



To outsiders who know Smash as the mascot sandbox fighter series rather than as completely distinct fighting games distinguished by their hitstun frame counts and AT windows, these games are all extremely similar and interchangeable. Brawl has the highest rating of all the smash games on Metacritic, a statistic which would likely make many competitive Smash players see red with fury. While we on the inside of the competitive community know that the games are not at all interchangeable, the way they have been worked into our lives pre-tournament era suggests that none of the games will ever be emancipated from the rest in the public eye. Apex had over 1,000 people enter Melee, and it was the biggest tournament of all time. How awesome is that? That's a huge milestone and is not by any means to be understated. But, compare it now to the 5 million people who bought Smash 64, 7 million people who bought Melee, 12 million people who bought Brawl, and the 9 million and counting people who have bought Smash 4. I'm willing to wager that a huge majority of these sales were repeat customers who came in from the previous iteration, just hungry for more Smash content and action. Think about how FGC players dismissed the Smash series as "party games" for years -- I'm willing to bet most of these guys a decade ago didn't even have one specific Smash title in mind when they made such statements. To the overwhelming majority of the rest of the world, Smash is a series of connected and similar games, not a random set of unrelated games, and the people who voice the latter opinion are quite simply never going to overpower the outsiders' public dialogue that enforces the former. And that overwhelming majority is either unimpressed or simply uninterested in infighting or the reasons behind that infighting. But these are the people that are most likely to be attracted to the competitive scene, and we shouldn't be drawing them in only to pit them in a tense war that we don't even want for ourselves.



I think that pro-separation people don't really understand #oneunit. I constantly hear complaints from people criticising the idea that they should be "forced" to enjoy X smash title (forced by whom, the boogeyman?). Not only is that idea ludicrous to begin with considering there is no possible way to execute such a thing, but nobody is even making the argument that playing competitive Melee means you NEED to enjoy playing or watching competitive Smash 4, that 64 players NEED to enter Project M tournaments, or whatever such nonsense is going around these days. But this imaginary strawman seems to be stirring up a lot of buzz and rage among separatists. I'd go as far as to say that #oneunit is, and should be, about molding our community to uphold the positive expectations that non-competitive Smash fans and onlookers have before they get into our relatively tiny community. People who buy Smash games don't even play every smash game actively, but they generally don't have anything bad to say about the earlier installments, either.



When I think of #oneunit, I think of how at Apex 2015, my gamecube controller broke in the middle of a Brawl friendly, and my opponent let me borrow his controller so I could still play my upcoming Melee match. I think of how Nintendo was pushing sales for Smash 4, but provided all of the equipment used for Smash 64. I think of how Studstill, a 64 player who does not recognize any of the other titles as real Smash games, shuttled perfect strangers regardless of game preference to and from the Clarion hotel. I think of how Brawl players came out in droves to support Melee's stake in the EVO donation drive in 2013. I think of how I, a Brawl player, started running a monthly Smash 64 series, a game I didn't even play at the time, just so local 64 players would have a tournament series to go to at all. I think of how Wombat, a PM player, whose favourite game was not even included at Apex beyond a few setups in a side room, provided rides between venues at Apex 2015 for Smash 64 players. I think of how on the disastrous first day of that tournament, players from each game's communities came together to make the event go on, for all of us. In the world that separatists envision, you'd have to hear helpers asking "is this TV going to be used for Smash 4?" before deciding whether to carry it to a truck or not.



Smash has gotten a lot of good press recently for things like this. Apex was "the tournament that almost wasn't", and the smash community (read: not the 64, melee, brawl, PM, or smash 4 communities) is lauded as being able to overcome the greatest of obstacles. At Apex 2015, we did just that, as one unit. We were stronger together. Smash 64 at Apex was recently featured on Grantland, and the overwhelming response from competitive Smashers was positive and excited, instead of huffing and puffing over why the subject wasn't Melee. RedKirby recently made an effort in good faith to seek out 64 players, a normally overlooked subset of Smash players, to invite to his Roundtable podcast on Tourneylocator with players of all the other games, which was received extremely positively. In Toronto, a city known for its individual smash game communities liking each other a lot and coming together whenever possible, EvenMatchupGaming runs tournaments mainly for Melee and Smash 4, and pools the revenue made from both games to purchase more setups for both games, instead of dividing it up into "melee community revenue" and "smash 4 community revenue", a move which is supported by the majority of players from both scenes with little opposition. We are stronger together.



Chances are you've made a friend at a national who doesn't play the same smash games as you, who you're happier being acquainted with. Chances are you've had your curiosity a little piqued to try out the mysterious Smash 64, but only see it at two majors a year. Chances are you've noticed that Smash players, regardless of game preference, are just generally fun to be around -- try going out for dinner with a huge group of players from different games and NOT having a good time. I've also noticed that, while it still has a long way to go, Smash is generally the most socially progressive and accepting-of-everyone gaming community I've ever seen, and I have no shortage of examples to back this up. None of these would be possible if we each had to go our own separate ways, and I for one don't want to lose that.



What should be happening as further examples of #oneunit is to continue supporting Project M grassroots efforts. I think it's safe to say that Nintendo is not going to be sponsoring every single Smash tournament in the future, and the game can continue to be hosted at plenty of events. If you don't play Project M, at least retweet someone's stream advertisement or tell your PM fan friends about that upcoming college tournament you heard about. In fact, do that for every smash game. Even if you don't like whatever game someone is hosting, it doesn't take much effort to spread the word to those that do. (That being said, recent criticisms of #oneunit as "hypocrisy" surrounding PM's latest drop in support are somewhat dubious. Why is the current opinion that a Melee/PM tournament signifies #oneunit, but a 64/Melee/Brawl/Smash 4 tournament does not?)



And yet none of this is about "forcing" anyone to play or even like another game in the series. It's about helping each other out while still respecting our boundaries, and working together to build a good public image to live up to the somewhat benevolently misinformed one that we will never be able to escape. That's what being a community is. We're not as big as we think we are, no matter how many major breakthroughs we've had in the last few years, and we owe it to ourselves to tough it out, respect each other, stick together, and stop fighting over the figurative remote.

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