• I bought Nick Brawl 2 on sale. It’s about time I got back in the saddle…
• I am asking you once again to read my opinions on network effects
• Playing to win is for losers.

I bought Nick Brawl 2. It’s -40% on Steam, an absolute steal. I was hesitant at first, but kept seeing my friends play it, so I psyched myself up to buy it. I’ve learned so much in my two-year Smash sabbatical – it’s about time I stepped back into the ring to fight the all-or-nothing mentality that haunted me.

In truth, I’m anxious about this. It’s that anxiety you get when you wait in line for a theme park ride. When you get shown to your seat, the wait is an eternity in a bottle. But start it does, as anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops. When it ends, the anxiety temporarily fizzles out, and you say to yourself, all giddy: “Let’s do that again.”

I suck at fighting games. I’m dyspraxic, which disables me in two key areas: motor function, and planning. I can have excellent theory knowledge, but struggle to adapt after getting hit by the same things fifty times; I know the inputs to that finishing combo, but when it’s time to actually do the thing, it’s like there’s some buffer between my brain and my hands, and I fumble the bag.

I’ve burnt my fingers way too many times pathologically grinding Smash Ultimate. When I left it to focus on my last year at Uni, I didn’t come back. It just wasn’t fun to me. The harder I got knocked down, the more I kept feeling like no matter what I did, everyone around me was getting better whilst I was going nowhere. Everyone improves at an equal rate. But some people’s improvements are more equal than others. I’ve been to maybe one or two locals this year – I competed in neither of them.

In Smash – any competition, in general – it’s an unavoidable fact that the number of losers is several orders of magnitude greater than the number of winners. For every top dog who’s made it, regardless of their background, there lies a thousand untold tales of those who didn’t. Playing to win, or to generally ‘get better,’ for most players who have ever competed, is a precarious and ultimately untenable source of motivation.

Fighting game players love to geek out about sports psychology. The pursuit of getting better is often discussed as an individual one. And why wouldn’t it be? The only person who can win or lose the game is you. The only person who can learn how to lose better is you.

Sorry, folks, but The Inner Game of Tennis is just not all that interesting. While we may be all individuals, there’s this gloopy, messy web that ensnares us all. It’s called society. Wanna know what happens when you multiply psychology by society? You get sociology. And that, frankly, is much more interesting, because no-one competes in a vacuum.

Having read Cory Doctorow’s The Internet Con (EDIT 23/01/24: It’s here), thinking about the network effects, switching costs, and collective action problems of social media made me realise there’s a similar thing going on with video games – with some distinctions, of course.

Games are social tools. We play to take pleasure at being the cause of something. When we play games with other humans, we are essentially trying to exercise power over each other in a safe environment. When we stop playing, that pretend power dissipates. You may not feel like this, but having taken such a long sabbatical has reminded me that it takes a hell of a lot to compete. Playing online against a total stranger for the first time is like answering a phone number you don’t recognise.

The social value of a game increases the more people who have access to it. That is, how much value¹ you derive from it depends on how many players there are. If you have only one other person playing your game, you’ve only got the one link between you, and not much variety in skill levels.

This changes as the number of connections you could have rises with the number of new players. Over time, some players will have much denser connections than others. These are the people who will cluster to form tight-knit groups in your game’s community. Network scientists might try to statistically determine who’s who using Louvain’s algorithm:

https://towardsdatascience.com/louvain-algorithm-93fde589f58c

For us Jane Publics, we’ve got a much simpler heuristic. The Smash community does what I think most large communities do in this post-forum, post-blog era – take ephemeral conversations to X, where theoretically anyone can get involved, and form identity-based communities using Discord guilds.

If you play Smash, chances are that you’ve joined at least one character guild, and you’ve definitely joined the guilds for your local, or state. Smash Scotland, to my knowledge (I haven’t been in their guilds for ages), has separate guilds for Dundee, Edinburgh, Inverness, Aberdeen, and Glasgow, all run by separate people, and then there’s the mothership where everyone gathers, that I’ve been calling ‘Suscord’ for years.

As Sam Huber points out, a game with network effects isn’t the same thing as a game gone viral. He cites Farmville as an example of a viral game: you can invite others to the game, but the playing experience is a solo venture beyond that. New players do not add much value to the experience of veteran players:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/game-companys-greatest-weapon-network-effects-samuel-huber

Increasing network effects are one reason why Smash Ultimate’s DLC cycles were so successful for the game’s growth. Each DLC character tapped into the network effects of their original IPs. This is especially so for the third party additions – Joker, Terry, Kazuya, Sephiroth, Sora, and Steve, who, if you remember, broke the internet:

https://www.ign.com/articles/the-internet-thinks-minecraft-in-smash-bros-crashed-twitter

Some people who’ve played Tekken for years would’ve undoubtedly pricked their ears upon hearing Kazuya was in Smash. Likewise, could you imagine playing Nick Brawl 2 without being able to play as Spongebob? I really wanted Mr. Krabs to be playable in the original – when I heard he was coming to the sequel as DLC, that got me interested.

Some might find their main based on what they like in a fighting game character. You might play Fox because you like to have a lot of opportunities to get in your opponent’s face, play evasive mindgames, and vortex them to oblivion. But what attracts many, many more people to Smash is the fact that they can play as their favourite Star Fox character and beat six shades of shit out of motherfucking Sephiroth.

It might seem mundane, but there’s something exhilarating about going to a local and knowing that everyone in that building, love ’em or hate ’em, are there for the same reason. You’re there because they’re there. They’re there because you’re there. The more people that get brought in through network effects, the more valuable Smash is: new talent to play against, and new connections to make.

Network effects are what keep people playing Smash. But there’s an ancillary force to network effects, something that locks us in: switching costs. This is where games radically differ from social media platforms. Chiefly, they’re not free, and you likely need to own the console that game’s available on if you want to play regularly.

For fifteen years, Smash was the only platfighter in town. The only competition it faced was with itself, and to this day, one part of the community has stuck with Melee, and the other part has moved onto each new installment.

Since Smash 4, we’ve seen an increasing number of platfighters from different publishers: Rivals of Aether (and its forthcoming sequel), Nick Brawl, Icons: Legacy, Brawlhalla, Slap City, Multiversus, and Fraymakers. With the exception of Icons, all of these platfighters are, or are going to be, available on the Switch. Hell, even HewDraw Remix, thanks to a little adversarial interop, is available to the avid tinkerer:

https://github.com/HDR-Development/HewDraw-Remix

In my time on Twitter, I noticed that every time a new platform fighter hit the scene, my feed would be full of people talking about leaving Ultimate for the new game. Folks have had grievances with Ultimate’s clunky accessibility features and the Switch’s hardware limitations since day -14. (Ultimate leaked two weeks early, and I surreptitiously smuggled the game into my Dundee local cos Nintendo wouldn’t bring the demo up north. h/t Yackabean: “Goodbye Smash 4, fuck you!”)

I’ve written about these switching costs before – the more followers who declare their exit from Smash to Twitter, the greater their social influence on you. Depending on how tight-knit your connections are, and how many connections you have, persuading your friends to move can be a no-brainer or a bloody nightmare:

https://brologue.net/2023/11/15/i-want-my-twitter-friends-back/

https://brologue.net/2023/12/14/wash-that-x-site-outta-our-hair/

Getting enough of your friends to shift is a collective action problem. If you’ve ever traveled with a group to an unfamiliar city, you’ve probably had to organise where everyone’s gonna get food. If you all know each other well, maybe you’ve all got a favourite eatery. Easy. But if you don’t know each other very well, or there are lots of great places, or someone has dietary needs, and none of you are very picky anyways, everyone starts negotiating to reach a consensus.

The amount of time you’ve put into one game also makes for high switching costs. You’re going from one game to another, one that’s going to feel a bit off until you find your groove, and most of all, you don’t know how that game’s going to feel until you’ve sunk a good twenty hours into it. If your friends and followers aren’t on board, it’s just not going to be the same.

Some dedicated folks will brave the plunge, take their friends with them, and stay. But you know how this story ends: a greater number of people end up dropping the “Smash killer” after a couple of weeks, and come back to Ultimate. After all, that’s where the most players are. Folks focus on the initial surge of new users, then the expected downtrend, and assume that the game is a dud.

This narrative is really, really baffling, because you can observe this trend in all the platfighters I mentioned previously, and find that the net number of new players bounces back soon enough. What’s more, the players who stick around are going to be highly active. Maybe there are other names for this type of growth, but Cory Doctorow, in a blog post about Mastodon’s numbers, calls it scalloped growth:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/of-course-mastodon-lost-users/

Good things are said about an upcoming game, and this triggers a high number of initial players; many of these players leave, perhaps hearing a story about numbers dropping, but the ones who stick around are active; it’s these active players who, when the next hype surge comes, and there will likely be future surges, help to grow the game.

Honestly, I don’t like competing, but I do like collaboration. I like talking about the social phenomena of fighting games beyond what’s going on in one’s head. I like labbing, trying out different ideas, and developing theories that could help others. All the stuff we fighting game enjoyers produce together? I’m all over that.

I don’t want to feel like a temporarily embarrassed PR player anymore. Besides which, I work a full time 9 to 5, run a blog, have a tech video I still need to finish, and look after this little bean:

Thinking about network effects keeps me grounded in what’s important. The players make the game, not the other way round. My goal is not to compete to be the best, but to stand apart, as Jenny Odell put it in How to Do Nothing: Participate in the odd tournament here and there, but focus on the community that makes it happen, and what that community could be:

https://brologue.net/2023/12/17/that-old-back-catalogue-part-iii-how-to-do-nothing/

I’m going to conclude this post by doing something really cheesy – I’d like to paraphrase Anton Ego, the critic character from Pixar’s Ratatouille: Not everyone can become a great player. Likewise, a great player can come from anywhere. But not everyone should become a great player. It takes all kinds of players to make fighting games what they are: the dreamers; the streamers; the scrappers; the labbers; the ragers; the inner tennis players; and, most especially, the jobbers.²

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1. Here is where I really ought to open a dialogue about what this nebulous concept of “value” really is. We seem to get more of it when there are more people to play with. It’s something I think deserves its own post. ↩︎
2. Get it? Someone who has a job, and jobs because they have a job? Ah, I’m here all week… ↩︎