• Anyone can lab: Just don’t let anyone tell you that you need good results to be taken seriously;
• The myth of ‘talent vs. hard work:’ what that argument’s really all about, and why we shouldn’t entertain it;
• Scratching the surface: The joy we experience in the first few weeks of a new competitive game? We can carry it on through the game’s entire lifespan. Labbing, as an activity, may hold the key…

At the moment, I’m writing a piece on the enshittification of Discord, writing a review on the final book in my Backlog, making a new YTP to get back into the groove for 10TT, and, when I have the time, playing NASB2. Needless to say, I keep myself deliriously busy.

Those who know me of my time in the Olimar Discord (even before I had a YouTube channel!) may remember that I was a dyed-in-the-wool labber. To those new to the trade, labbing in a fighting game – any video game, really – is basically the act of experimenting with your character’s moves for the sake of experimentation itself.

https://glossary.infil.net/?t=Lab

Anyone can lab. It’s not Eighth Level wizardry. Olimar was a very rewarding and satisfying character to lab, if not for making the best of a buggy character, then developing different strategies for managing his Pikmin.

Easily the best development I made in my time labbing Smash Ultimate was ‘The Art of Olimar’s Down Air.’ Any move that sends directly downward in Smash is a ‘spike,’ and they can be devastating blows if your opponent has used up all of their recovery resources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7twM4BAsN0

Someone at Bamco thought it was perfectly balanced to give Olimar a Dair that not only spikes, not only hits every low recovery if spaced well, not only lets you ledgetrump on reaction if you miss, it’s also incredibly spammable. Five years after Ultimate’s release, the move remains unchanged.

There’s no mystery about how I discovered all these things. I mucked about, I found out, and I thought what I found was worth telling someone. People heard what I had to say, and thought it was worth spreading. The other Olimar labbers, I imagine, were influenced by the same impetus. To further our collective understanding of our character, and or the game itself – that is the labber’s telos.

A collection of labbers is essentially an affinity group:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_group

We are groups of people who voluntarily come together for a common purpose, but lack a chain of command. Anyone can join and leave the group at any time. I know most of the character guilds have a dedicated role for labbers, that might allow them to access exclusive channels, but honestly, this is really arbitrary and reflects more on the hierarchy of the guild than the act of labbing itself.

My description above draws upon the penultimate section of David Graeber’s Utopia of Rules, where there’s a very interesting passage on the anarchism of D&D sessions:

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-the-utopia-of-rules#toc10

Unlike classic war games where one commands armies, we have… a band of individuals cooperating with a common purpose (a quest, or simply the desire to accumulate treasure and experience), with complementary abilities (fighter, cleric, magic-user, thief …), but no explicit chain of command.

On the other hand, if you’ve played D&D before, you’ve no doubt had experiences with the ‘grimoires’ that Graeber goes on to discuss. The Monster Manual, for example, a cornerstone of any DM’s bookshelf, once you strip away all the killer art, is really just a run-on set of statistics. It is what Graeber describes as “the ultimate bureaucratization of antibureaucratic fantasy.” As a genre, sci-fi and fantasy have always had an antibureaucratic streak. Video games are no exception.

Labbing, as an activity, is anarchistic. Results and skill level absolutely do not matter – anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is bullshitting. I ought to know – my best Ultimate result came in its first week, and I spent the best part of three years getting my ass kicked by some of Scotland’s best players. If labbing was meritocratic, I would’ve been told to drop dead ages ago.

I think this distinction is important because labbing is the only multi-person activity in a fighting game where I feel the competitive, hierarchical nature of competition does not take hold. Sure, when we lab, we can dedicate all of our focus to, say, finding optimal combos. That might be analogous to what Graeber is writing about. Documenting frame data, knockback, hit advantage, etc., is really just collecting numbers for future aggregation – bureaucratising an antibureaucratic process.

Discovering a new combo, killconfirm or tech does not necessarily mean that labbing begets more results for those who implement our findings. What I’ve observed is very much a take-it-or-leave-it affair. I put a lot of work into theorycrafting attack cancelling. Scherzo, who’s been stuck in the lab since Sm4sh, wrote the book on obscure Olimar tech and glitches, as well as pioneering WPD. Do players use these? Do they win more as a result? It’s not easy to quantify.

D&D is really at its best when the DM knows to use books as loose guidelines, and follows the ‘rule of cool.’ Likewise, some of my best insights have come from labbing without a goal in mind. That same energy went into the videos I made documenting my discoveries. My editing style was born in YTP, moulded by it, and as such inherits its anarchy. None of the tech videos I’ve made were scripted, nor storyboarded. I made it all up as I went along.

Perhaps my warmest memory of labbing during COVID was when Steve dropped. Like many players who had nothing better to do, I was part of a Wi-fi crew on Discord. I can’t remember the exact number, but I think we had about 30 or so members on rotation. I’d become familiar with a fellow crew member by the tag of Royling. He was cheeky and impish – I’d be lying if I said everyone found his temperament endearing – but he was also a Good Player™ and didn’t give a single fuck.

Could I beat Royling? Could I hell. He played me like a single-player game. And he really, really did not give a flying fuck about most things, least of all Ultimate. Case in point: He holds the world record in Rhythm Tengoku speedrunning. Most of the strategy involved in speedrunning that game is pressing A with TAS levels of perfection. And I watched him do it!

Most of us stayed up late for the Steve patch. A few of us joined VC, and promptly left (it was late). Me and Royling, however, not being forced to act otherwise, in any way at all, stayed in VC, labbing Steve just to see what he was all about. Then we labbed some more. We just kept going. The next time I’d checked the clock, it was 5am, and at that point we called it quits.

That was so cool.

These attitudes towards labbing show that there is nothing about the other ways in which the game enters our daily lives that we cannot change – interacting with community members, playing friendlies, competing in tournaments, and so on. There is, I think, a tacit assumption that all players are equal before the gamepad. No-one is better, nor has power over, anyone else. That is, of course, until we start making tier lists, focusing on results, overevaluate the opinions of top players…

A debate that routinely makes the rounds in our communities is whether the best players made their way to the top through ‘hard work,’ or by simply being ‘talented.’ Tweets are exchanged back and forth from folks in either camp – some, naturally, sit on the fence, or say “Well, both are equally important.”

The ‘talent vs. hard work’ dichotomy is a red herring. By urging us to pick one, it distracts us from the real argument being proposed, which is that the belief that some of us are intrinsically better than others from birth can be justified, and therefore, we should be rewarded in equal measure for our feats.

The irony of the situation is that most players likely agree that video games are a form of escapism. We’d rather not talk about all that Shit™ Out There™ if we can afford it.

“Pull up a chair and play some friendlies.”

It’s not just that when we think we escape, Shit Out There marches on – we take some of that Shit with us. I’m referring, of course, to politics. We start out with nice beliefs of equality and egalitarianism that quickly give way to microcosms of hierarchy.

This is meritocracy in action. The appeal of stories about top players who went from a nobody to a somebody are strong, but they don’t really help anyone. They are, in essence, an archetype of the rags-to-riches bootstrap-pulling tales popularised by Horatio Alger in the 19th century.

None of the schoolboys in Alger’s stories made their fortunes through simple hard graft. None of them even seemed to experience the true extent of the grinding poverty that the poorest Americans faced (then, as well as now). Sure, you can be smarter than the smarties, and tougher than the toughies, but the secret ingredient that predominantly influences individual success is pure luck:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068

Think on this the next time you enter bracket: For every top player who’s ‘made it,’ there are a thousand untold tales of players who didn’t that will never be told.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t deepen our understanding of the games we play and improve our play. What I am saying is that we shouldn’t see ourselves as temporarily embarrassed PR players. Most of the contemporaneous attitudes we have towards competing that keep us up at night we shouldn’t worry about so much; they’re in no way inevitable, and can change at any time if we collectively choose to not engage it.

The best time to be a fighting game player is in the beginning. For about a fortnight after the release of a game, the entire playerbase is effectively one giant affinity group. Most of us, I think, agree to cast aside any skill-related prejudices because hey, the game’s new. We do this not because we think we’re going to one-up a top player from the previous game, but because the game is so new that you can’t not figure things out. Everyone gets to experience the pleasure at being the cause of a new discovery, telling others about it, and deepening our understanding.

For that brief moment of time, everyone is a labber. Anyone can lab. That’s cool. The question is how we carry on that attitude once the dust settles. I’ve only scratched the surface here. There’s more ideas I could develop, but hopefully this is kindling enough to stoke the fires of discussion. I burnt my fingers too many times pathologically grinding Ultimate, and I’m not prepared to be subjected to that again.

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