Smashing friends in Slidell: Tech skill (Part 3)

For many people who don’t play video games or the like often ask why people get so fired up about a game. To the people who play and follow it, it’s so much more than just a game. It’s a close knit community who look out for each other, but will also be the first one to tease one of their own. Players often trash talk such as, “Get good kid” or, “Your character is trash.” Other players make boasts that lead to money matches— games broadcasted over the internet outside of tournament that have a bet placed on them by the players to settle who is better. Winning means so much more than the money on the line. It leads to bragging rights and a reputation. Much like any other community, the proficiency a member has at doing a task builds a positive reputation, and with it, more opportunities to earn more prestige.

Vincent: How do you keep the interest in a game that is almost 20 years old?

Mike: Usually through word of mouth. Players tell their friends about it and they play together. Then it gets competitive between friends, and people start learning advanced techniques. For new players, techniques like “wave-dashing” and “L-canceling” sound tricky, and need to be practiced a lot before someone can get good at them. Soon they want to challenge people who they don’t know to see how
good they are, so they try to find a tournament around them. For new players playing against veterans
they can get disheartened if they loose badly. The best advice is that everyone sucks when they start but you just have to keep on playing.

The lingo of the Melee community can be intimidating to the uninitiated. It is the first thing a new melee player has to learn to fit-in before they are accepted as a part of the community. Advanced techniques such as “Wave Dashing,” “Pivoting,” or “No Johns” are thrown around frequently and sound like another language. Never intended to be in the game by the developers, they greatly help players who learn to use them well.

Wave dashing: Performed by air-dodging, or temporarily becoming invincible in the air (with the cost of being made completely vulnerable and unable to move afterward) until one touches the ground again and “sliding” in a neutral stance. While sliding may initially seem pretty useless when one can just walk or run, it becomes incredibly crucial at high levels of play because one is much less vulnerable and more evasive when sliding in a standing stance, and thus able to use the full range of their character’s attacks, as compared to running, in which options are more
limited and predictable.

L-canceling: I believe the developers intentionally placed the technique in the game, but, nonetheless, is incredibly important in upper level play. When a character performs an aerial attack and hits the ground before their attack has finished, they suffer “ending lag”: Their character seems to catch themselves for a moment and is unable to do anything. If one presses the shield button (L or R) a few frames before hitting the ground, their ending lag-time will be cut in half. Most ending lag is less than a second long, but if one becomes proficient enough at L-Canceling, that player can string together combos that players not as proficient could never perform and thus have a huge
advantage over those other player.

Directional influence: The ability to control, to a slight degree, how far you fly when hit by an attack and desynching the two characters from Ice Climber (who compose a fighting duo) to set up unique opportunities and combos. Most characters in the game have many minor glitches that they can utilize in combat, and over time, the players that master these perform the best in tournaments.

Learning to perform these moves is usually the next step most players take which separates them from the casual players into the next “level.” Once a player feels they are experienced enough, they will enter themselves into a local tournament, even though a lot of them are not really ready. Usually the confidence required to join a local comes from beating one’s friends over and over again, which leads to thinking they are better than they really are. Once they get to the local and play against players who have been playing the game a lot longer and at a higher level than they have, they lose.

At this point, the player realizes it’s going require a lot of time in the “lab,” a place where you can practice your moves and skill in the form of the techniques you perform to move faster and do more things than your opponent. The amount of practice it takes can be daunting for new players and is often the thing that scares people away from playing the game. A lot of groups spend hours just playing practice games with friends. There are some nights where we spend six or more hours just practicing to get better at things like wave dashing so when the time comes we can use it in actual games. It helps the player on an individual level and the group as a whole though. As the players in the group get better, they can help the other players get better.

Mike: After awhile, we started gaining new players who heard about the tournaments by word of mouth and ended up with a net-gain of players for the game.

Vincent: What happened from there?

Mike: A lot of things. Firstly we started having players from out of state coming to our weekly tournaments. This was a big culture shock at first. Some of these guys were really good and beat a lot of our players. It opened our eyes to the outside world of Melee. As a group, we always watched people play from other states but now we were finally getting to play against them. It was daunting, but at the same time it made us want to get better and travel.

A group of Smash enthusiasts on the road. Photo by Vincent Delucca.

Vincent: Did you end up getting to travel?

Mike: Yeah, a group of us close friends go together and made a travel group and during weekends we would go to out of state tournaments.

Vincent: When you travel for Smash who did you go with?

Mike: Some of my close friends. People like you, Jasper, Nicky, and Bobby. There were always more than that, but we had to take more than one car.

Once we started traveling, we started meeting more and more people who, like us, loved the game and everything is stands for. Like us, many other players traveled multiple hours to get to these tournaments often cramped in a car. Cigarette smoke, energy drinks, and the smell of the open rode kept us going, and stops were few and far between. We would try to keep the conversation going for the driver’s sake, but after a few hours we’d realize there
was only so much we could say.

Mike: We always stayed in motel rooms.

We’d split it between the group to save on money because none of us had a lot. There was always a promise though, if a person from our group won, they’d be the one to buy the first round of drinks when we went to party that evening.

Mike: Someone always had to sleep on the floor.

One time we decided we were going to go to a Chicago tournament. We decided to pool our money for a rental car because none of us trusted our cars to make the trip. It took 13 hours. We were dead tired. We got to our hotel room, which was admittedly much nicer than what we were used to, but it didn’t have enough beds for the amount of people we brought. Two of us had to sleep on the floor. We almost missed the tournament the next day because of oversleeping. The only reason we made it was because the the floor was so uncomfortable we woke up when one of the guys went to the bathroom. We looked at our phones and realize we only had 30 minutes before the tournament started. There was a lot of yelling and a mad rush to the bathroom as six guys hurried to get ready for the day.

Though we always had big dreams, winning one of these out of state tournaments was difficult. Besides sleep being hard to come by when traveling, food could be a problem. The venues usually have little concession stands where you could purchase things like pizza and hot dogs, but they are always over-priced and many of the players we traveled with did not have enough money to spend on expensive food, especially low-quality expensive food, so we would have to find a fast food restaurant nearby or go without for the tournament. As you can imagine, there was a home town advantage.

Mike: As a group, we never really placed too highly on the ladder but it was fun making friends and going to parties with these guys who loved the same game we did.

In Chiacago, none of us won that tournament, but I got farther than I ever have since then: third place after a day of eight sets of games in bracket and then three more rounds in Top Eight. After I lost in Top Four, I was sad but my friends said how well I did. We went to get some Chicago deep-dish pizza and alcohol. We went back to the hotel where other Smash players were still hanging around in the venue and drank with them and played some more. We aren’t the best, and we only represent the players in Slidell, but we got the reputation as “the party guys from Louisiana.” It seemed most people from outside the state don’t know the difference between Slidell and New Orleans.

Once a player has won their state, they move onto to regional level. These usually represent themselves as tournaments called “Major Tournaments,” or “Majors” for short. When a player wins enough of these tournaments, they are usually considered very good by the other players in the community and are fighting for a spot in the top 50 players in the world. Twice a year, a National Tournament is held to crown the current best player. These tournaments are called Apex and Evo. Apex is the a tournament held only for Super Smash Brothers and Evo is the crown jewel of all fighting games. They are the two most important events in the Super Smash Brothers community and just being in the crowd is considered an achievement for many players.

Part 4: A Good Cause

Editor’s Note: This story is one of a series reprinted from the book A Guide to South Louisiana: Stories of Uncommon Culture. Each author was a student in Rachel Breunlin’s “Storytelling and Culture” course for the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Orleans in the Spring of 2017. The Neighborhood Story Project sponsored the project as part of its mission to publish collaborative ethnography in high quality books in which the authors receive royalties for their creative labor.