I am officially a sidekick for the best gaming blog ever, watch out blogosphere

I am pleased to announce that I have secured a writing position here at the Infinity Injun. Hopefully time, craftiness, and luck, and the general social chaos that tends to surround our writers will work together to yield a bright future for this publication.

As my close friend, associate, and eternally destitute friend Mazo has already stated, I have struck upon an idea, in a haphazard and energetic way which can only be described perfectly in keeping with the spirit of this blog. I intend to become good at zero sum gaming; specifically, in the form of short term stock trading. Now, this is hardly something novel in itself. However I should hope that my perspective will entertain, for I am a gamer in the pure, like all of our current writers. So approaching my newest task as a gamer, I intend to use the tools I have as such to penetrate and understand my newest undertaking, and if possible to become skilled at it. I will be documenting this project periodically, although you can expect other articles from me as they come.

This is predominately a gaming blog. However gaming extends far beyond the simple learning of rules and execution of patterns. There is a world of peripheral things, which although unrelated to gaming itself come to be culturally significant. Enough with the abstraction, let me explain to you the background of how I arrived to this point.

It was recently my great pleasure to attend the US ITG OPEN in San Diego. For those of you not in the know, which should fairly reasonably be considered all of you, this was the most elitist dancing game tournament ever constructed. Which of course also means it was the best. Now, I will assume that if you are reading this blog, you at the very least know of DDR; Dance Dance Revolution, if you are a non-acronym using Philistine. However there is a perspective I have gotten from playing these games that is difficult to articulate, because it comes purely from substantive experience and not from something as cheap as words. Nevertheless, I will attempt to explain it here, and hopefully despite the fact it stems almost purely from aforementioned elitism, you will understand and appreciate it.

In the world of dance games, like all games, there are effective strategies and there are ineffective ones. One of the things that helps distinguish winners from losers is watching to see who makes excuses, because the people that do are generally trying to find some sort of abstract, poetic justification for holding on to their ineffective strategies. In DDR and ITG, use of the bar is the dominant strategy, and economy of motion is the principle force guiding and refining competitive technique. Now, if you have some understanding of this as it is, then great, however it is not crucially important that you understand this in depth.

This tournament featured most of the best players in the world. The technique on display was every bit what I was lead to expect, in terms of its sophistication. However, outside of what I learned from watching the final 4, I gained a bit of perspective from somewhere unexpected; from the people I thought of as intentional losers, the people who sacrifice victory for poetry. What I learned was exactly this. The internal order and consistency of even an ineffective method of doing things can be worth learning, and can even be perfected, despite the fact that it isn’t something that will hold up in comparison to something else.

In addition to the people playing by the books, using proper technique (and of course reaping the rewards as such), there were two players who surprised me not by their competitive performance, but by the discipline they showed at their nonstandard styles of play. Here were two people who had made up their own rules, different from the conventional ones, and inferior in competitive terms, yet the energy, the internal sensibility, the pure vitality with which they followed them was inspiring. It almost stopped mattering that they weren’t competitive, it was clear that they were both playing a different game; their own game. And both of them knew exactly what they were doing.

Flash back for a moment. Let me explain why these nonstandard forms of play are, statistically speaking, inferior to modern minimalist technique. Now, bar use dominates over barless play not so much because it increases the ability of a player to score, although it can and frequently does, but rather because it increases the consistency with which a player can achieve a certain score. Taking the uncertainty out of a game is always a good way to play it, unless the determinate outcome is always less than the indeterminate one. What I saw from these two, however, was something else. It was an acceptance of indeterminacy, and an invention of rules for navigating it. Clearly from results alone, it would be better to remove it. What I saw here though was two players gambling at something I had only ever thought to play by the numbers, and what’s more, they were still getting results. Not optimal results, but results governed by a sort of reason I hadn’t thought existed until I saw it with my own eyes.

So flash forward again. I am sharing a hotel room with Jboy, one of my aforementioned inspirations. Somehow it comes out that he makes his living playing poker. Epiphany. This is where it came together. Clearly not every zero sum game is as self negating as a coin toss is. What I had glimpsed at that tournament were rules for playing a game I wasn’t familiar with. A way of navigating uncertainty and still coming out on top. And since I had seen it with my own eyes, it became important for me to conquer it, and harness it, even if there are better games to play in the world.

That’s what brings me here. It’s a strange type of obstinacy and perhaps even a step down from the games I know, even and especially given that all this stemmed entirely from a perspective gained from playing a dancing game. Here I am though. I want to play the dirtier game. Not because I think it is better, but just because I want to understand some of that genius and discipline that I never understood could lurk in places I thought below me, until now.

-cheers,

kilroy