- I went to a NASB2 tournament over the weekend. It was fun;
- Talking about that shirt, again;
- Yes, most of the entrants bounced to play in Ultimate, and I am still optimistic about its future.
Writing this Brologue is a real privilege, and a culmination of everything that makes this blog worth writing. Chronicling my experiences is important to me, because even if I am not entitled to an audience, writing for one keeps me in check. As a neurodiverse person, I use writing as my prosthesis:
https://brologue.net/2023/12/26/my-spines-as-stiff-as-a-prosthetic-leg/
There are so many things I wish to say to the people I meet but I never know when to say them:
https://brologue.net/2024/01/01/f-is-for-friends-who-do-stuff-together/#u-is-for-u-n-me
I wanted to write this as an appreciation for how amazing these games we play are as social phenomena (Even if I don’t like Ultimate all that much). This was my first in-person bracket in four years. It was also held at a venue I’ve never travelled to. Most importantly, this was an opportunity to see my ideas in action, which I’ve written about extensively in previous posts:
https://brologue.net/2024/01/19/uh-oh-back-to-the-lab-again/
https://brologue.net/2023/12/24/nick-brawl-2-the/
It’s quite apt the title of this tournament series is “Wyvern’s Lair.” I’ve since learned that Heriot-Watt’s eSports society sports a blue wyvern on its emblem, but I was put more in mind of how some cartographers used to mark uncharted waters with “HERE BE DRAGONS:”
This hardly looks like a dragon’s keep. They’ve learned the advantages of not being seen.
Or, perhaps they were playing poker at Zeros, the otherwise usual venue; Max, the TO running the show, had to fit 40 people into a room no bigger than my kitchen and patio. That’s a much more plausible theory.
The dragon imagery is not unfounded – Competition is a fickle, cunning, fearsome beastie, lying dormant in our imaginations. Like dragons, it won’t kill you, because it’s imaginary. But what’s your heart doing racing during a close game? Where does that passion come from with which we discuss tier lists to no end? In a word: It’s cruel. You’ve every right to fear it. But it’s also pretend.
Think of it this way: every round of friendlies, or every set you play, you’re establishing a social contract with someone you might not even know, and, for the next 15 minutes or so, you have the right to exert power over each other through the game. Once someone says ‘GGs,’ or calls off the friendlies, that contract expires. You both go back to being people at the venue for the same reason everyone else is there. You can play to win, if you want, but that’s a precarious source of motivation.
Have you ever thought how much it’s taken for granted that the reason that underpins our gathering is because everyone else is gathering? Case in point: I heard about the event from Metal_Militia on his stream, and then I saw my friend Razzle was going, because he had a day off. Like that, I had to be there.
Razzle means a lot to me. I’ve mentioned him a few times before:
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/
See this footnote? That one was for him:
He gives me life like you’ve no idea. We hadn’t seen each other in over a year, so we got lunch together, and in the most BM-Razzle conversation I think we’ve ever had, it got to the point where I tried to summarise 3 of David Graeber’s books in the span of about five minutes: Debt, Bullshit Jobs, and the first few chapters of The Dawn of Everything. All of this to explain what I did to get a certain shirt:
https://brologue.net/2023/12/23/three-amstrads-two-droll-daves-and-an-orange-on-a-black-tee/
To say that “We’re more like Kirby than any dictator” does his work a massive disservice. My point was that, as an anthropologist, Graeber was savvy to a sprawling archive of human experience which he used to turn many popular, taken-for-granted theories about human nature on their heads.
To go on a brief tangent – this passage I read from Dawn of Everything may be of interest to anyone who geeks out about autopilot in competitive games:
Philosophers tend to define human consciousness in terms of self-awareness; neuroscientists, on the other hand, tell us we spend the overwhelming majority of our time effectively on autopilot, working out habitual forms of behaviour without any sort of conscious reflection. When we are capable of self-awareness, it’s usually for very brief periods of time: the ‘window of consciousness,’ during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds.
What neuroscientists (and it must be said, most contemporary philosophers) almost never notice, however, is that the great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on end… if we’re trying to figure out something by ourselves, we imaging arguing with or explaining it to someone else. Human thought is inherently dialogic.
David Graeber, Dawn of Everything,
I think we could all do with a little more anthropology in our everyday lives.
Half the entrants DQ’d because the Ultimate bracket had to keep going. To my knowledge, this is Scotland’s first NASB2 tournament, and so a lot of people hadn’t even played the game. I placed joint 3rd. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Imagine if Godzilla fought, like, this dark, messed up version of himself (just a glimpse into his dark reality), only for the fight to be broken up as they get zerg rushed by ten billion kitchen sponges. Only it’s not Godzilla, it’s Razzle and Metal_Militia playing the Reptar ditto in grands, and it’s not ten billion sponges, it’s the five or six people who were playing Spongebob. Including me.
I’m quite optimistic about NASB2 in Scotland for one very crucial reason, among others: It’s got great (but not perfect) netcode. If in-person events were not viable to run (either because they wouldn’t attract enough numbers, or people couldn’t afford to take time off to travel, and so on), it’d be entirely feasible to run a Scotland-only bracket online. Ultimate during COVID was painful – with rollback, NASB2 will never be like that. It really is as smooth offline as it is online.
In Ultimate, I went in as a massive overachiever who played to win, and I’m not surprised if my attitude put me in bad odour with some people. Razzle and Jodgers know better than anyone else how bitter Ultimate made me feel. It’s that particularly ascorbic kind of bitterness when you treat people as things. Including yourself. I’m not about that attitude at all.
Look, I burnt my fingers way too many times pathologically grinding Ultimate. I took a two-year sabbatical from playing (started 27th January 2022 – coincidentally, the same date as this tournament – but I swore off it before that!), and in that time I’ve come to appreciate that, sure, we can get so wrapped up in competition sometimes, but it really is the players who make the game, not the other way around, and it takes all kinds of players to make these games what they are.
NASB2 Field Report – Wyvern’s Lair 7 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.