Week 03 - *Competitive Games*

As I read through this week's content from Macklin and Sharp,  I noticed that the first example of competitive play in chapter 3 was a game called Nighogg. This caught my attention because I used to play this with my cousin as a kid, and because of that experience, I was able to easily grasp 'yomi', which is "the Japanese concept for knowing the mind of your opponent." The video game is essentially a local (not online) 1v1 sword battle, and when I played it with my cousin, I would be cautious and on defense as he was always on the offense. Trying to learn his moves and tricks in order to beat him was always pretty hard, but I knew him and his personality and knew he would attack as soon as he could every round. 

My experience with competitive games does not end there though, as I currently still play them, and am even on the TTU Overwatch team. The concept of yomi can also apply to a fast-paced, online competitive game such as Overwatch, as you must quickly adapt and improvise when facing another team. Macklin & Sharp's ideas support the idea of Overwatch teams exhibiting yomi, as "it can also be found in sports, where one team analyzes the other team’s past play to predict future actions, all in service of gaining strategic advantage." Overwatch differs from traditional sports but is just as, if not more complex because different teams have different hero compositions, strategies, and playstyles, so it's never the same experience twice. You must quickly learn how the opposing team performs, and then also quickly find a way to counter their compositions, strategies, and playstyles. 

Even though chapter 3 of the book has tons of different types of play, my favorite topic to cover is competitive play, which can nearly be implemented into any game. Taking the game that we played in class,  Up the River, the game's concept was to be faster than other players in moving your pieces to one side of the board and had aspects of sabotage, luck, and a bit of strategy (choosing which pieces to move when). You're competing with the other players to see who can get the most points,  but it mostly comes down to luck, so I think this game could be categorized as symmetrical competition. Macklin and Sharp define this as a game where "the players have shared actions with which they compete with one another in pursuit of a common goal." 

Overall, nearly any game can be altered in some way to make it competitive, and naturally competitive games are very interesting to both play and spectate. They can be complex or simple, easy to play or based on skill, etc. I think there's even more to competitive games than what I've mentioned, but regardless they are a very interesting subject to learn about.