Difficult Equation Draws Near!

Hello, gentle reader. As you may have noticed, I prefer to spend my time playing games rather than writing about games. This brings me to all sorts of odds with the rest of the staff of the Injun*, most of whom* spend far more time writing as many words as possible on the subject with little to no actual research**. Eventually, they* start asking questions as to why their* glorious leader and the founder of this great thing hasn’t written anything in, like, three decades.

Bastards.

So, I figured I’d take some time out of my busy schedule*** and answer a question posited by a curious individual*.

Why do people play RPGs?

Or rather,

Why do people play JRPGs?

I guess that one needed clarification. Everyone knows why people still play pen-and-paper RPGs, they’re awesome. And western-style RPGs, for the most part, riff off of that, and have since way back when, making them occasionally awesome.

But JRPGs… man. Just thinking about them brings up my horrible, tormented childhood****, a magical time when I could still believe in grand adventures and the triumph of good over evil. Eventually I became horribly jaded, and though I still have a shelf full of RPGs of all sorts, I occasionally find myself wondering why*****.

Believe me when I say that I am the best man for the job (of answering Kilroy’s stupid question).

Back in the day, there weren’t too many ways to depict a group of four people bashing on a horde of goblins and taking all their money. The best solution at the time, it seemed, was to put everything into a menu, and task the player with hitting the Attack button for all the characters and watch them beat down the goblins and take their money. And the best way to show exactly how hard you were beating the goblins, or how hard the goblins were beating you, was to use numbers.

Health measured in Hit Points. Magic measured in Magic Points. Your experience noted by how many Experience Points you’ve amassed by damaging monsters’ Hit Points with your Magic Points. Levels and so on. A lot of these things are really just throwbacks to pen-and-paper RPGs which, as I’ve mentioned before, are awesome******.

But in a pen-and-paper RPG, you end up with significant rewards******* beyond the numbers, things like entire kingdoms and magic rings that let your turn opponents into sandwiches. All JRPGs usually do is give you more numbers. Then you use those numbers to fight enemies with bigger numbers, and repeat until the game is over, the bestiary is complete, all the minigames are done, and you’ve beaten that superboss that takes seventeen hours of horrifying grind to even get close to harming.

But, uh, I guess that’s its own form of achievement? People seem to like making their numbers go up********. Some people, driven mad with numberlust, will do anything they can to make those numbers go up higher, and will play the absolute worst games in order to sate that feeling*********. Horrible, brutish creatures, in my opinion.

But eh. This all reminded me of one of the reasons I don’t enjoy MMOs that much. I’m gonna go ahead and put this one to bed and play some Final Fantasy IV. Ciao**********!

* Kilroy.
** In games at least. He does a ton of research on other stuff.
*** Busy playing Final Fantasy Tactics, mostly.
**** It actually wasn’t all that horrible or tormented at all.
***** Nostalgia, mostly?
****** Infinity Injun: Completely Impartial To Everything.
******* Well, if your GM is actually good at his job.
******** Deets, make sure to thank Kevin for having such an accurate description of RPGs handy.
********* I’ve got a lot of them on my shelf.
********** Probably doesn’t mean what I think it means.

Classic Pump: I dunno?

Well I promised you bastards an article, and I’ll be damned if I don’t make at least some semblance of an effort to deliver.  I just got back from a tournament in The South, specifically North Carolina and Virginia.  I had previously acquainted myself with Raleigh during other traveled.  Virginia was new to me.  If there is ever a state that could be accidentally mistaken for a golf course, Virginia fits the bill.  Other than that there isn’t much I can say.  I flew 6 hours to Raleigh, and then hitched a ride with a local furry chap for the 4 hour drive to the location.  Immediately after we crossed the border we were severely accosted by local authorities.  Ostensibly for excessive speed and driving in the median, but such a pretense is ridiculous.  This was quite plainly an instance of fursecution, and also clearly of athletic intolerance, as speeding is the name of the game for Pump players.  (cue worlds faintest rimshot.  Seriously, wikipedia will be necessary to understand the humour of the last sentence fragment.)

Anyways, this tournament was supposed to be a shot across the bow for all the bastards of the classic pump community.  I have been involved in a number of high profile quarrels in the past, both over my tournament record and over my involvement with Pro.  It started with the pretty dramatic botching of the MMSD pump tournament way back in the summer of 2007, in Omaha.  To explain further it will be necessary for me to deliver some context.

Music games other than guitar hero and rock band have something called a timing window.  This differentiates between different levels of accuracy when hitting a note, as opposed to simple hit and miss.  In classic pump, it is extremely easy to hit notes with the highest level of accuracy.  However, there is also something in dance games called machine score.  For the longest time I thought it operated through some sort of voodoo magic, and to a certain extent I still think that plays a role.  In pump, the machine calculates score something like this:

Perfect = +200

Great = +100

Good = 0

Bad = -100 and combo break

Miss = -200 and combo break

In addition, everything good or better increases combo and every combo over 50 adds something like +200 per note.  A combo break resets this, essentially making a bad worth as much as -11,000 and a miss worth as much as -12,000 (from optimum score, being an FPC or full perfect combo.)

In contrast, music games like DDR, ITG, and more recently Pump Pro have not included combo in their machine scoring mechanisms.  Tournament organizers have also made no effort to stress combo play.  They have, however, made efforts to remove it from pump.  This is what happened at MMSD.  It happened badly.

Let me elaborate.  A system where minus points are delivered for certain levels of innacuracy is absolutely necessary to PA (perfect attack) play.  This was not done at MMSD.  Instead, 1 point was awarded per perfect, no other factors were considered.  This makes a miss of exactly as much consequence as a great.  This means a player such as myself could literally ignore the more technical parts of songs, focus on getting perfects on the easy parts, and win.  The technical patterns in question are what classic pump players center most of their training around learning how to hit.  They determine who the winner is in any sort of high level play, and rightfully so.

There were other sins committed as well, but none of them quite so egregious.  Anyways, way back in the day I took second (of 6) at the tournament in question.  A list of winners of the tournament went up.  My name was omitted.  About a year later I revisited the topic and complained.  Apparently this was taken as a sign of an ego problem, triggering a drama cascade which continues until this day.

So there’s a whole load of rather specific context.  More broadly, classic pump players tend to hate PA based systems and prefer combo based systems.  Why?  I can’t be sure.  As far as I have been able to discern, combo play only makes accuracy less important to the extent that sliding is easier than turning.  This is profoundly ironic given the stated emphasis classic pump players place on turning.  The real epiphany for me came when playing a song called Love is a Danger Zone, which is filled with rather complex turns.  I had learned them all, and in the process I had raised my score on Pro to a 96%, which I’m told is in roughly the top 6 recorded scores in the world.  I had 5 misses.  Asking Jboy if this was a competitive miss count for classic pump, he flat out told me no.  Then he showed me how it was customary to play it.  He comboed the most technical section without turning, finishing with a dramatically low percent score.

PA based pump play incorporates turning, and it incorporates comboing by necessity except in very specific cases, those ironically being difficult turns which can be better comboed by sliding or double stepping than by turning.  That much I have learned, and am confident of.  Hence from experience I have concluded that the classic pump purists do not actually understand the game.  Their issue can only be the lack of applicability of combo-based strategy to PA systems; It is my firm impression that PA-based strategy has greater applicability to combo-based gameplay than vice versa.  Certainly more than the purists would care to admit.

This tournament was supposed to be a test case.  Instead, it ended up being pretty close to Omaha all over again.  About 18 people were supposed to show up.  It ended up being 5.  I took first, but I can’t even begin to claim any sort of consequence to it.  I did not even perform to my own satisfaction, picking up misses on songs I am accustomed to FPC-ing consistently.  In the entire tournament, I believe there was only one song I lost.  It was Bemera CZ, and as far as I know I only lost because I gave up halfway through the (5 minutes of 200 BPM drills of the) song.

I wanted to consider the importance of strategy on PA vs combo systems, as opposed to simple skill.  I cannot really evaluate that at present.  My hypothesis was that it would be harder to consistently combo a song than to play it for accuracy, and that this would lead to players being strong on certain songs and weak on others, hence making information about other players more important.  I suspected this because of some of the more eccentric pump charts, and the techniques they required for comboing.  I realize now that to the largest extent, PA techniques translate to comboing techniques, and there are not enough eccentric charts to lessen the importance of simple skill.  The tested skill set just broadens to incorporate sloppy techniques like sliding.

Foot alternation does not change in utility.  Hand use does not change in utility.  Turning decreases in utility.  That is the only discernable difference I have so far encountered.  The only other issue I could possibly consider is which style of play requires greater consistency.  It seems to me that combo based play might, and that this would stress the importance of stamina more than usual.  Given the higher priority of sliding techniques, and the lack of sufficient evidence to examine, it is hard to rule either way.  My intuition tells me that stamina and consistency are marginally more important in classic pump than in pro.  It also tells me the difference isn’t enough to actually make a difference for a high level player.

I lost my opportunity to shut them up this time, but I have a renewed sense of dedication to that purpose now.  Classic pump, by all measures I can yet see, is an inferior game for an inferior player.  Also, all I won for my troubles was a copy of Fallout 3.  They didn’t even give out door prizes as promised.  So yeah, now I have a $400 dollar copy of Fallout 3.  Maybe I’ll review that sometime.

- Kilroy

Battle not with monsters

Longtime readers of this blog will be familiar with my more closely held beliefs; beliefs in objective truth, falsificationism, freedom, and justice, overtly expressed in every inch of my writing. These beliefs have colored my tenure here at the Injun, from my reviews straight through to the adventures which Mazo and I have reported. I believed in these things because they were told to me by people I respected and admired. I am now at a crossroads. It started with a routine argument on a forum, as much of my education has. In this case the RE5 thread on SelectButton.  Nothing I know will ever be the same; actually, I am not even sure knowledge is possible now.

I brought up Popper, and Tarski; they countered with Wittgenstein and Godel.  Their arguments were passionate and well reasoned.  I… oh god, what have I been doing with my life?  There was a time when everything made sense to me.  Now I realize that time was a lie.  It was impossible, in fact.  How could I have been so mistaken?  In my arrogance, I read books thinking they contained knowledge, but what claim does any one man have to knowledge?  And supposing he knows, what good are his words when their meaning can only ever be debated over endlessly by his readers and critics?  I was the grandest sort of fool.  I am remembering now my Xenophanes.  I thought I knew what his words meant then, but now I am not sure.  I present them to you for your own judgement, but perhaps they stand instead as a judgement of me.

The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black

While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.

Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw

And could sculpture like men, then the horses would draw their gods

Like horses, and cattle like cattle, and each would then shape

Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of its own.

The gods did not reveal, from the beginning,

But as for certain truth, no man has known it,

nor will he know it; neither of the gods,

Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.

And even if by chance he were to utter

The final truth, he would himself not know it;

For all is but a woven web of guesses.

Loyal readers, this is the end of business as usual for me.  A new beginning, of sorts, getting over my old foolishness.  It was easy enough to see with my Mother 3 article.  I went in with preconceived notions of objectivity, and in the end, when all was said and done, only the last paragraph held any meaning.  From now on I will give and see meaning wherever it suits me, and I will be better for it.  The world will be better for it.  I am done with arrogance.

Dance Dance Revolution DVD Game: A Video Review

“AMUSEMENT GAMING” Professionals are Officially Morons

The news in brief, once again secondarily reported from excerpts of The Stinger Report.

At the recent ATEI gaming trade show in London, two new dance games were displayed:  DDRX and Pump it Up: Absolute.  While reading through the report, these two excerpts caught my eye:

“During the show, the machine was overrun by the leading Dancing Stage fan players from across the internet. ATEI’09 had worked with Stinger Report owners KWP to come up with a comprehensive plan to deal with the Non-Trade problem at the show. Though it is impossible to hold back the tsunami of fan players interested in the latest BeMani titles, a need to manage the needs to promote the game and to sell the game (without a hoard of sweating players) proved an interesting challenge.”

“On the UDC booth the company had the highly anticipated ‘Pump It Up!: NX Absolute’ (PC Hardware) – the game was mobbed by fans of the dancing stage title during the show.”

Let me be the first, and perhaps only person to say: WTF.  Two things catch my attention here.  First, a horde of sweaty players?  That’s awesome.  A special Infinity Injun shoutout to S34n, who was among those sweaty players, and who I can only assume was one of the first people to have to deal with the retarded cultural logistics programme these morons apparently decided to implement.

Second of all, is the entire industry collectively retarded?  If you operate an arcade, of all the factors you could possibly know about a game, which is more important:  that it uses a USB memory stick to store player data, that it has a 37 inch screen or, oh yeah, that “it is impossible to hold back the tsunami of fan players”?

One of these things is not like the other.  Maybe the only reason arcades are dying is because operators don’t actually know how to run a business.

-Kilroy Del Dancefighter Economist the First

When White People Attack: NPR, Academia, and Vidcons

Let’s just start with this: monoculture is a stupid word.  A lot of words are stupid words.  Not of their own accord or anything, just by merit of their most frequent users not really having anything important to say with them.  This isn’t to say that not-saying-things is some sort of crime.  If anything one of the redeeming aspects of vidcons is their frequent lack of forceful meaning.  Basically what it boils down to is this age-old truth.  The harder you try, the more likely you are to fuck up.  Formalized academic endeavors are quite frequently perpetrated by people so eager to outrun the competition that they can’t keep up with their own feet.  But enough about my past.  Let’s move on to vivisect others.

The article I linked to in “monoculture” offends my sensibilities.  First of all, it presents the concept of treating video games as a “medium for artistic experimentation and collaboration“.  Second of all, it treats this concept as new; semantically coherent, for that matter.  We’ll get back to this in a minute, but realize that much of what follows, leads here.

Cutting aside all the text and gibberish in the article, there are maybe two things that show up.  There’s the discussion about minimalist games vs. “the typical PlayStation 3 games, which include titles like “Killzone 2, Street Fighter IV and Resident Evil 5.” Then there’s the standard goings-on about illegitimate semantic quibbles, based on several thousand years of bad philosophy.  An expected occurrence from academia.

What is the difference between the artistic game and the standard vidcon?  Art is semantically open to the point that any quabble over definition seems absurd.  Roger Ebert, in one of his timeless anti-medium tirades, contemplated the possibility of an Andy Warhol vidcon.  In his vision, it rested on a pedestal in a glass case, still shrinkwrapped in original packaging.  A debate over the nature of art is equivalent to a debate over which language has the most legitimate words.

Quote:

Santiago adds that she and Chen think of a video game as a version of a poem: “By that we mean that it presents ideas to the player, but it also asks players to bring their own experiences to the table as well.”

Response:

Shut up.  This wordliness could be summed up much more succinctly.  I should know, because I make a habit of converting everything from shorthand to longhand.  Here is the fixed version:  Vidcons should work as subjective experiences.

Much simpler, much more direct, raises a question much more immediately: why?

This is not a new discussion.  In fact, Select Button has been having this exact discussion since its inception.  With almost the same ridiculous tone, no less, which is quite the impressive feat.  But to all of you gaming sons-of-bitches who think that Braid or Winter Bells or Flower represent some sort of paradigm shift, you’re running in circles.  Conveying emotion through a medium is not a new idea.  Neither is minimalism.  Neither is any other thing we’ll ever see in “art”.  What we have here in the emerging tools of the medium are, at most, new instantiations of old methods; old concepts.  Why discuss the emotional impact of cutscenes vs the impact of player controlled scenarios, when you could be having an equally significant discussion over which profanity is inherently the most offensive?

Newsflash geniuses: If I want to evoke an emotion, let’s just say anger, it doesn’t specifically matter if I call your mother a whore, or even how I call your mother a whore.  Past that though, the truth is that it doesn’t matter whether I succeed in upsetting you or not.  It matters whether or not she actually is.

I don’t feel like talking about vidcons anymore.  I think I’ll go read a book.  The good kind; the kind that determines whether or not your mother is a whore.

- Kilroy del Dancefighter estaohfuckit

Infinity Injun Arcade Terrorism Advisory Alert

Greetings readers.  It is my duty to inform those of you who are still involved in the arcade scene of a pernicious, and I can only assume enduring threat:  Arcade Terrorism.  My source is the Stinger Report.  Being so named I can only assume it will post any updates on this grave security issue.  Rather than paraphrasing, I will simply quote directly:

Date: 24th November 2008	Location: Milky Way Express Arcade, Chongqing, China	Injuries: 5 Fatalities
Incident: The amusement venue was operating normally when a gang of over 20 men with knives and metal bars attacked employees of the arcade facility. At the end of the attack five individuals (four men and a woman) employees of the venue had been fatally injured at the scene; over 80 police and ambulances then rushed to the scene.
Suspected Cause: A police investigation suggested the incident started when a local gang leader approached the venue owner and then called assailants; the woman murdered was the venue owner’s wife and worked in the cashbox, in this Rider Misadventure incident.

NOTE – The number of organized gang-related attacks on amusement and attraction venues has soared – this latest mafia style attack in China is becoming a common problem, with corruption and protection money a factor of operational life in this country. Many countries are extremely secretive regarding the level of the problem, with a number of arcade venues in the UK recently seeing organized gang attacks for the ready money they carry.

That’s right, arcade terrorism.  Not yet in America thankfully, but elsewhere; to an extent we cannot be sure of no less, thanks no doubt to bureaucrats more interested in national image than the actual safety of their citizens.  So for those of you gamers who travel or live in any non-American country, look out for yourselves.  I’m wishing best of luck to S34n and Rosie in particular, since you’re both active in the UK and Chinese competitive dance game scenes, respectively.  May you both avoid any Rider Misadventure.

American gamers!  You are not without risk of your own!  Again, to quote directly:

- Guest Problems

[...]

It was reported in the Wall Street Journal that law-enforcement agencies across numerous States of the USA had seen an alarming number of serious disorderly conduct calls to what they called ‘Pizzacades’ – this term referring in the majority to some of the 540 ‘Chuck E. Cheese’ venues. This situation mirrors park riots at Six Flag venues in California and a riot of guests at a LotteWorld in Soul South Korea

The law-enforcement offices in the WSJ interview stated that it was a mixture of high tensions over children’s parties, crowded conditions and the mixture of alcohol that caused many of these incidents – in some cases arriving at mass riots between children and adults throwing chairs. This bad publicity of the CEC chain was countered by a statement that the sites were instigating measures to address these incidents. The list included the removal of alcohol from the menu (only 70 per cent of the chains sites have it on their menu), hiring of security staff, screening of weapons on site, and the addressing of gang colors and signs on clothing. Guest-on-Guest and Guest-on-Staff violence rose in intensity during the year, a number of near riots and fatal shootings taking place on park property or at FEC venues.

One example of the severity of the incidents for the ‘Eater-Tainment’ scene was revealed recently with the winding down of the METREON entertainment location in San Francisco – it was revealed that four individuals had been shot (three fatally) at the site. A number of venues have become gang turf with the incidents that engenders – though facility operators are keen to play down the association.

So for those of you playing games on American soil, be wary that you are not patronizing a gangland arcade.  It is my belief that riots instigated by debauchery are fairly readily predicted and hence reasonably avoided even without warning.  The issues of gang violence and terrorism are less so, however.  It is my hope that this article encourages gamers to pay attention and stay on their toes, and avoid any grievious physical injury or death.

The Heart in the Middle of Nowhere

I remember I was first introduced to the small town of Lyons, Colorado several years ago in a most incidental fashion.  A post on DDRfreak said “Lyons Classic Pinball x/x” (wherein the x’s represent dates).  Pinball was not intensely familiar to me at the time, something which remains more or less true.  In addition it suffers from a lack of being ITG.  Nonetheless I found myself going, and I ended up being fascinated by what I saw.  It also turned out that the reason I was supposed to be there was because it was someones birthday party, but now that every DDR player in the Southwest region hates me I don’t have to feel guilty about not getting him anything.

With that nostalgia and fascination still inside me, I decided to make an adventure to Lyons again, and even to bring Mazo.  I do not regret it.  The city has maintained every ounce of its character and beauty.  In fact it might even have gained some.  When Mazo and I first rolled into town, this is what we were greeted by:

Uncle Sam is as ornery as always

The details of the seizure of; wait, subway!?

Yes, it seems that a Subway Sandwhich shop was closed down due to tax evasion, the noblest of all human pursuits.  If one wants to measure the love a man has of his country and for freedom, he need only count the number of dollars he refused his government.  In this case, $10,048.47.  Thoreau would be proud, I am certain.

Shortly after this, Mazo and I both partook of food and drink, and there was great merriment.

This is actually his 7th beer

Thereafter, we were fully prepared for our journalistic duties.  In this case, principally taking random pictures while terrorizing the locals.  Our first branch of investigation placed us conveniently close to the bathrooms.  We adventured deep into the walkout basement of Oskar Wilde’s Blues, and proceeded to examine their arcade.  It is a very nice arcade, filled to the brim with classic games including Donkey Kong, Paperboy, and Missile Command.

You don’t have to just take my word for it here though.  You can take it in video form instead.

At last being more or less done at the restaurant, we headed off to what was arguably the point of our going to this town in the first place, if such a point could indeed be said to exist.  This involved walking, unfortunately, but thankfully it was only for a very brief number of feet.

It strikes me that more of this article is picture than is text.  However the experience is so visceral I feel pictures do it a sort of justice even my standard level of verbosity cannot match.  We arrived at last, after countless seconds of walking, at Lyons Classic Pinball.  It was beautiful.

I intended to make a video tour of Lyons Pinball as well, however I accidently let myself get distracted while pondering the Godlessness of modern liberal culture, and hence it slipped my mind.  Fortunately, someone else made a video tour which is a good deal better than anything I ever could have made, perhaps even if I had technical competency, a decent camera, or a computer.  You can find it here.

Lyons Pinball is an amazing place.  It has everything a place should have: Diligent workers of character and class, an assortment of miscleaneous people who are good at things, a slightly smaller assortment of people who aren’t good at things so that you can tell the difference, and most importantly, the things it proclaims to have on a large sign outside of it.  In addition to all of this however, it has something ever more important: competitions.

Yes, fullblown double elimination tournaments with prizes a colorado gamer like myself could only dream about.  The most I’ve ever won at a tournament was $600 dollars, and that was at a once a year tournament held in Las Vegas.  The only dance game tournaments left in Colorado happen on a Stepmania machine in Colorado Springs and standardly involve pots as large as $20.  They also occur anywhere from once to twice a year.  By comparison, the pinball tournament scene is practically the PGA tour.  Just to send this home, take a look at this tournament schedule.

Even worse, that’s just the scene here in Colorado!  Just based on this sheet of paper alone it doesn’t seem farfetched at all to imagine a person could pay their way through life simply by playing pinball.  All these years I’ve been playing the wrong damn games.  I suppose it doesn’t help that there are people with 30+ years of training on me though.  This is one game that I honestly doubt I could ever become competitive at, regardless of my ambitions or level of dedication.  It makes me feel sad.  It also, however, imbues me with a new found sense of respect.  Respect for a type of gamer that I hadn’t even had the sense to give attention to before.

Just so you can see how terrible Mazo and I are at pinball, here is a video of us playing Joust.

I think it’s safe to say that making a jump into a scene like this is probably beyond either of us at the moment.  That’s ok though, I suppose I don’t have to try and become competitive at every game I ever see being played competitively.  Although in my heart there is nothing I would like more.

The size of the bracket sheets along imbues a sense of insignificance.

So that’s that.  Lyons as a town is essentially magic.  This in the sense that most of what’s there is as equally substantial as it is beyond me.  The people, based on my limited experience, are basically awesome.  There are a few hangups, like that time the book store owner sold me a defective book that got me in trouble with all of my college professors, and how the prevalence of art galleries in the town suggests people there might actually consider art a legitimate subject or pursuit.  I can ignore that though, because when it comes right down to it I am just as transfized and awed with what’s there now as I was when I first set eyes upon it, so many* years ago.

To play us out, here is a hard hitting interview I conducted with one of the employees of Lyons Classic Pinball.  In it I ask a number of highly important, significant questions, if I do say so myself.  Please enjoy with a proper degree of reverence and dignity.

-Kilroy

* two.  two years.

Also here is another video that I took that I couldn’t find a place for within the body of the article.

Kilroy’s Millions

Mazo’s journal. Kilroy called. Said he’s rich beyond mildest dreams. Could I have some? Must investigate.

Saw the Watchmen movie. Twice. Thought it was good. Now we need some burgers.

Nevermind

And thus ended my first, and likely last, Martial Arts tournament.  Oh wait, I haven’t written anything yet.

The day started off bad enough.  I had to wake up much earlier than I would have preferred.  That’s hardly a solid start.  Really though I should have known based on the previous day, which consisted of 4 hours of sitting around and a direct order to eat food.  I don’t like food.  Well, maybe when it’s free, like some of it was, but not even then really.

So the Taekwondoka thing apparently consists entirely of breaking boards, patterns, and sparring that lacks any sort of legitimate contact.  I thought that maybe this wasn’t the case, and that training was different from tournament play.  I was wrong.  I hung around the scene too long.  Bad things happened.  I broke someone’s arm, caused structural damage to someones diaphragm, and worst of all I put on muscle.  By the time the tournament came around I should have been long gone.  One of the only things that kept me there was the commitment I had made to team patterns, and I knew my team would directly suffer if I didn’t show.  Of course it’s not like things could have been much worse in that area.

It was the first event of the day.  Understandably everyone was still tired.  I’m not sure how that excuses this shit though.  I can understand staying awake until 3am the day before a tournament; I can’t approve, but I can understand.  No, what was really ridiculous was contained squarely in how shit went down.  First off there was the 5 minutes or so of everyone in my team running over ideas while we were at attention waiting to be called up.  Then there was the little issue of a dispute over who should call the commands, which ended in two different people calling them at 3 different times.

I wasn’t innocent in all this.  I suppose, however, that I could say my crime stemmed from rashly trying to compensate for the failures of my teammates.

So that ended poorly.  There were still 2 other events though, surely they would go better!

Armed with early morning tiredness combined with bounded optimism, I prepared for the breaking tournament.  It started with one of my classmates failing to break 2 boards.  Then there was this conversation, which went on for about 10 minutes:

“Man, that’s one gnarly knot in that board.  I’m going to wait until someone else breaks that board.  Do you want to go?”

“No, I don’t want to go.  I’m going to wait until someone else breaks that board.”

“Well I don’t want to break that board.”

“I don’t want to break that board either.”

“Excuse me tournament director, can we break a different board?”

“No I am the tournament director you can only break the board I put there I am the tournament director.”

After what seemed like an eternity of that, I stepped forward and, fearing the board of doom, neglected to put up additional boards.  Then with my mighty foot of justice I smited the damned thing to the 9th circle of tree and tree product hell, allowing the breaking tournament to continue.  Did I get thanks from anyone for this dirty work?  Did anyone stop to realize that things would have been different for me under different circumstances, that by taking this task upon myself I removed myself from competition?  No, of course not.  No praise for a fallen American hero.

The only interesting part of the tournament happened in the 10 hours between this and the third event.  I was called upon to coach Talon, a fighter who even at his young age has managed to have a totally badass name.  Thanks to what I could only possibly credit as my outstanding ability to shout platitudes and contextually inappropriate advice, he rose to 2nd place in his division.  None of the other coaches were skilled enough in that department, and I maintain the only reason he didn’t take first was because of the superior size and reach advantage of the other coach.  He also happened to be a grand master but whatever.

Then I stood around for 100 hours.  In defense of the tournament organizers, the standing took place in a large number of different locations, but if I am paying to stand then I would expect the standing to be much higher quality than what was provided here.  This was hardly even well thought out standing.

When it finally came time to do what I was most looking forward to, sparring, I had been standing around for at least 1000 hours.  Other people had ruined the fun and used excessive contact to the point someone ended up going to the hospital.  There was a big lecture about it, in which the tournament organizer, my instructor, told people that TKD was not about hitting people and that they should do MMA if they wanted to hit people.  Point taken, but also hilarious.

So I got up there and was worried purely about not having a repeat of previous incidents in a highly public, official setting.  So I didn’t throw a single technique with any sort of commitment or enthusiasm, and was promptly run over by a proper Irishman doing what came naturally to him; moving directly forward and punching a lot.  This strategy proved so successful that he took first place completely without incident.  The tournament was single elimination, and there were 5 people in the bracket.  This means 3 lost in their first match.  However for whatever arbitrary reason one of them was given a bye.  Because of that, he took 3rd in the bracket.  No,  no round robin or anything, and double elimination is apparently much too tedious, but a person deserves a medal if they managed to beat the fictitious person designed to balance brackets.

I mean Bye isn’t even good.  He’s been in damn near every tournament I’ve ever been in, sometimes in multiple brackets and sometimes even in the same bracket multiple times, yet he’s never won so much as a single match.  Bye sucks.  If I had been up against him, I would certainly have won, and so would anyone else, yet for whatever reason one person was seeded against him.  So that one person took 3rd.  That person, who prepared for the tournament by staying awake until 3am.  Talk about getting blown by the brackets.

This tournament was offensive in a number of ways.  Standing around doing nothing for 10000 hours was offensive.  Patterns, team patterns, breaking, sparring, the perfect body of the EMT (minus her injured Diaphram), the lectures, the pomposity, and the sheer ratio of tourney-faggotry not perpetrated by me over actual tournament, all make me pretty confident I wasted several hundred dollars.  There wasn’t even the possibility of a money finish even, just of a trophy.  That’s basically just a shiny, physical representation of the words “good job“.

So I think I’m done with martial arts.  I liked Judo better, but I was putting on muscle doing all of this stuff and I would like to at least try and salvage something of the figure I once had, before I start transitioning in a few months.  Also this is definitely not all just an elaborate excuse to avoid the problems and difficulties that would arise from training martial arts while transitioning, shut up.