The Spirit of the Game
Ho,
This is Mike Loniewski, my handle is Fly Molo and I’m officially a contributor to Dark Future Games. Thanks to Chris for getting me involved, I truly appreciate the chance to help out. I’ll try to keep up with fresh posts from my perspective and I hope you readers enjoy them.
I need you (the reader) to help me out here. We’re going to use our imaginations for a moment. I’m going to give you a scenario. When you’re reading it, I want you to stop at the end of each little section (each will be separated by a few lines) and ponder what it said. I mean, really ponder it. Think about the words. Think about what you would *feel* like if this was really happening to you. Think about how this scenario might really play out. Draw upon actual past experiences and think about how you felt then. Thank you for doing this by the way.
This is Mike Loniewski, my handle is Fly Molo and I’m officially a contributor to Dark Future Games. Thanks to Chris for getting me involved, I truly appreciate the chance to help out. I’ll try to keep up with fresh posts from my perspective and I hope you readers enjoy them.
I need you (the reader) to help me out here. We’re going to use our imaginations for a moment. I’m going to give you a scenario. When you’re reading it, I want you to stop at the end of each little section (each will be separated by a few lines) and ponder what it said. I mean, really ponder it. Think about the words. Think about what you would *feel* like if this was really happening to you. Think about how this scenario might really play out. Draw upon actual past experiences and think about how you felt then. Thank you for doing this by the way.
You’ve just suffered a tough loss.
Today was the big event. This was your first actual tournament. Most of the games you’ve played in your life have involved your basement and your buddies. In fact, you’ve been waiting to play in this for weeks and have been feverishly painting and changing out weapons on your guys to make sure your army was up to snuff. It was a lot of hard work and effort.
And this was a tough loss in the first round. The first game and a bad loss.
To make matters worse, you believe you’ve lost that game because of a mistake that you’ve made while playing. And looking back, it sure seemed like a foolish mistake.
Your drop pod of Space Wolves Wolf Guard landed behind enemy lines and you chose to unload on a scoring unit near an objective, instead of making sure you took out that Vindicator with rear armor melta shots. The mistake was that you figured you had the Vindicator dead, you have two Long Fang squads with side armor shots at it AND you can assault it with some krak/melta bomb wielding Grey Hunters this turn if that doesn’t do it. Alas, even though you killed the scoring unit, your Long Fangs and Hunters epically failed, leaving the Vindicator with not so much as a scratch on it. You had mistakenly already fired the Wolf Guard, which with as much combi-melta that you were packing, would have easily made up for the bad luck of the rest of the army.
The Vindicator promptly turned around and vaporized an independent character, your Wolf Guard and a Drop Pod in one shot, and all but crushed your chances at winning that game.
And you lost.
You packed up your tray after the game, shook your opponent’s hand and walked over to your area you and your buddies had claimed at the start of the event. When you got there, you noticed you forgot a template and turned back to go get it.
Your opponent is still there and he’s talking to his pals and doesn’t see you approach.
“… no, he sucked. He was making some goofy moves. His list was okay, but seriously, who the fuck does that? You should have seen him, he looked like I killed his puppy! It was just clean up after that.” He’s smirking and his buddies are chuckling. He still hasn’t noticed you.
How did you feel when reading that? Have you ever had anything similar to that happen to you? How did it make you feel when it actually happened? What if you have never went up to the table after the game? Would it have changed how you felt?
Have you ever been the guy doing the talking? Have you ever felt that way when playing against an opponent?
Man, I sure am employing the rhetorical question today.
Over Memorial Day weekend, I won “Best Sportsman” out of a large field of 18 at our local game store, so naturally, I consider myself an expert in the subject. Naturally. I won the accolade without actually winning a game, I went 0-2-1. I tried to figure out why I won and came up instead with a series of observations that might be able to shed some light on the matter.
1. Despite there not being a “Best General” prize or even a title, everyone was still very concerned with who won and who lost in each game.
2. There were arguments (albeit small ones) about rules.
3. I noticed multiple times folks say “this is a friendly event,” while allowing their opponents to correct errors.
4. I still noticed people getting into conflicts about things that affected the outcome of the game.
5. The winners generally felt better about the game than the losers did.
6. Everyone I played would become the eventual winner (or at least ‘not loser’) of our game.
7. All of my opponents seemed to genuinely appreciate that I wanted them to have a good time playing our game.
8. Nobody at the event ever seemed angry.
One thing happened that I want to take a special note of because they happened in my game.
9. My opponent in my first game was using a Forge World list, Eldar Corsairs. I was very unfamiliar with the rules of each unit but managed to get the basics while playing. During the game, my opponent moved up a squad of badly undermanned guys in an attempt to get a few more kills out of them against a squad of Plague Marines. They still had a heavy weapon so they *could* take down a model, but it would be unlikely. The Eldar squad started at ten, but was down to 3. A few bolter rounds and stiff breeze would take them out next turn. And of course, it was Purge the Alien. Right when he completed his move, I asked him -
“What’s the plan with those guys?”
He said he thought he’d try to get a few more points out of them before they died. I told him I thought it might be a better idea to not jump quite so far, then shoot, then jump out of line-of-sight to save a victory point.
He thought that was a swell idea, moved them back, fired off some ineffectual shots then saved his kill point. It worked out well for him.
“What’s the plan with those guys?”
He said he thought he’d try to get a few more points out of them before they died. I told him I thought it might be a better idea to not jump quite so far, then shoot, then jump out of line-of-sight to save a victory point.
He thought that was a swell idea, moved them back, fired off some ineffectual shots then saved his kill point. It worked out well for him.
What are we playing this game for? I know what I play for, I play to see my hard work on the table top. As a bonus, I get to exercise my brain-meat for a few hours and attempt to effectively use what I have on the field of battle. Sometimes it works out and my soldiers march on triumphantly. Other times, it doesn’t work out and my soldiers die horrible deaths. That old adage “Can’t win ‘em all” is true. You can’t.
I use this game as an escape. I get to be something that I never get to be in real life. I almost universally play the “bad guy” in games because I never get to be the “bad guy” in real life. I have a Traitor Guard army, Death Guard army, Nurgle Daemons army and a Necron army. Note that I don’t worship a dead emperor.
And more importantly, I don’t want my hobby to stress me out.
I use this game as an escape. I get to be something that I never get to be in real life. I almost universally play the “bad guy” in games because I never get to be the “bad guy” in real life. I have a Traitor Guard army, Death Guard army, Nurgle Daemons army and a Necron army. Note that I don’t worship a dead emperor.
And more importantly, I don’t want my hobby to stress me out.
Think about the last time you played a game and won a hard fought victory. How did your opponent react throughout the game? If it was truly ‘hard-fought,’ he probably had his ups and downs. Ups when he was winning or doing well, and downs when he wasn’t. We are all susceptible to this. We are all human (I think).
em·pa·thy
/ˈempəTHē/
Noun
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