Memories of Mike Valley, Meditation, and Ruminations on the Competitive Ego

Starting this back up again. Writing is what I want to do with my life, so I might as well write, right? I never finished that piece about yomi I promised at the end of two blogposts ago, since I think David Sirlin said it better than I could hope to. I felt embarrassed enough about not updating that I embarrassingly stopped trying altogether even though it was pulling decent STATS for a blog. I almost failed stats a few years back, and motivation has been tight nowadays too. Writing seems nonviable. Do we still read? Are virtual reading and writing even worthwhile? If you want to help answer these questions by encouraging this kind of content creation and have money to spare, please consider donating a little of it to me. I have student debt to pay off and rent to pay, and though I continue applying to various journalism, editing, and content creation jobs, and continue working for DoorDash in the meantime, money is very tight right now. But I want to produce rather than just consume. The blog is just a start, pure writing, but I plan on making videos too. I don’t know if they’ll purely be about Smash, granted, but I need to do something creative or this quarantine will drive me completely insane. I’ve been plugging away at a book, too, but everyone knows that getting published is pretty difficult, let alone having a significant number of people actually buy the book, let alone read it all the way through. It’s not a novel, but rather a collection of short stories, poems, and essays loosely centered on… reconnecting with Nature, let’s say. Writing brings me fulfillment, but it doesn’t pay the bills, for now – and it won’t without support. Stay tuned for more updates about the book.

Anyway, because the grass is always greener somewhere else and nostalgia easily lets us slip into memory, COVID-19 as me reflecting on my favorite in-person Melee tournaments. One of these was Penn State’s Mike Valley, which took place in September of 2019.

The night before the tournament, I got roughly three hours of sleep. I woke up at just about quarter to 6 AM after going to bed around 2, having tossed and turned for a while before finally drifting off. I made the mistake of hitting a nicotine vape for the first time before our local Pittsburgh weekly, which took place the night before the tournament in question. The owner of said vape was sick, but I’m choosing to blame the sickness which followed on the nicotine and plan on staying away from that particular drug for the rest of my life. At any rate, I woke up way too early and was way too sick.

I considered skipping Mike Valley that morning. I’m very glad that I didn’t.

Part of my motivation for still going was not wanting to let my teammate, Sp1nda, down. That part didn’t end up mattering.

We got a flat tire about twenty minutes away from the venue and were disqualified from doubles. That’s probably the reason I did so well in singles. Well, not necessarily just missing doubles, though that did help me avoid burning out. The flat tire gave me time to meditate in the grass on the side of the road as my friends changed the tire together.

“Meditation” is a bit of a tricky word, as in my experience it means a kind of inner wordlessness – a way of letting my internal dialogue give way to an acute awareness of the senses. So how to explain what is unexplainable in words? It’s steeped in mysticism and is slowly being co-opted by companies that push meditation as a way of INCREASING YOUR PRODUCTIVITY or some such nonsense. But in the words of philosopher Alan Watts, “if you meditate for an ulterior motive – that is to say, to improve your mind, to improve your character, to be more efficient in life – you've got your eye on the future and you are not meditating.”

True meditation is pure presence in the present, the only real time. When it was “the past,” it was now then. When tomorrow arrives, that will be today, will also be right now, just as it always will be, though century continues to follow century. And once you realize that the past and future don’t exist and never will exist, you can have a blast remembering the past and planning for the future – this just comes with renewed understanding that it always has been and always will be right now. Even if you reminisce on the past or plan for the future, you’re doing that in the present. There’s no escaping the present, but acceptance of it and total presence in it brings comfort and inner peace.

I was able to find that pure presence here and now back then, on the side of the road, while Luke & Laurel changed the tire. I just listened to the cars go by. I just watched the trees wave to me in the wind. I let the chattering voices inside my skull take a backseat to what was seen, what was heard, what was felt, like the pinpoint of skin touching skin where forefinger brushed against thumb and the comfortable clothes covering this body. In this state, I could just be – no more, no less, fully here and now.

I don’t know how long it took to change the tire. But when we were moving again, I felt wide awake.

When we arrived, I had a bit of trouble finding friendlies. See, I still prefer to use vanilla inputs, and only some of the setups at Mike Valley had the Slippi port-toggle mod for UCF that lets players opt out. I think that should’ve been an option from the very first release of UCF, since it’s pretty obviously the best compromise between vanilla and UCF, but whatever. I eventually played a few games with a Falco on the Slippi setup I’d brought and was feeling good about my movement & combo game.

That’s the best thing to get hype about, in my opinion – not wins and losses. Results in Melee can only emerge from individual interactions. As much as people talk up the consistency of the game – that is, where the “better player” will usually win – no one is safe from losing individual interactions, and these can build up into stocks and therefore entire games. Even if you get demolished, there are (usually) things you did right, things to keep in the gameplan, and there are always things that can be improved, at least until we sacrifice ourselves to the machine gods and all become TASBot incarnate.

This drive to improve has been the case with the beatings that Ganondorf (a Pittsburgh Fox player with an absolutely horrible gamertag) has dished out to my Ice Climbers. He plays the matchup so efficiently that the final match of my pool, against Zealot, a solid Fox from Colorado, wasn’t as out-of-reach as I had assumed it was – Ganondorf had left me well-prepared. In an admittedly sloppy set on both sides, I was able to clutch out games 1 and 3 with some well-timed grabs and solid use of my shield and out-of-shield options against Zealot’s pressure. Immediately after the set, I went back and fist-bumped Ganondorf, thanking him for all the Fox practice.

I remember a few of my social interactions that day. One involved sitting outside of a local Sheetz with Shnack Wrapz in hand, shooting the shit with Luke and Laurel. Another involved talking with Polish about his set with JJM. Polish won but played very sloppy, leaving the set too close for comfort. I tried to communicate what I wrote above and will write below about meditation, about focusing purely on the actions and interactions at hand. My voice was close to gone by that point, but I like to think my reminders that all we can control in Melee are the individual interactions that go into settling games were well-received, since Polish seemed to greatly clean up his play for the rest of the day. As an aside, watching him get better has been a joy that culminated in assuring him that his nerves and somewhat-below-his-potential play against Nintendude at Smashcon 2019 were good enough to get top 6 at a national, which is impressive in its own right.

Anyway, back to ME. After getting past a player named Greasy as my first match in bracket, my next test came in the form of Panos, a good Falcon player from New Jersey. The set came down to my solo Popo against his last stock. The set wasn’t recorded, unfortunately, but the final game was on Dreamland, and ended with a tech-chase into a downsmash that left him offstage, just far enough away that I was able to secure the set with a simple roll edgehog. I pumped my fist and bumped his.

Having already far exceeded my expectations of myself, I was perfectly fine with losing to Juicebox’s Sheik. He played the matchup well, switching between platform-hopping and efficient Nana-killing. Normally, after a loss, I get all huffy and puffy and blow off steam outside the venue, but on that day, I just accepted the loss and started getting ready for my losers’ bracket matches. This is the way I’ve been striving to lose since then. It’s hard to control the salt, sometimes, especially if an opponent seems less interested in interactive gameplay than they are in perfecting the “optimal” flowchart. But it helps no one to get upset about a loss, least of all yourself.

My first match in losers’ was against Nagy, a Marth who got fairly salty after the set about all the wobbling that came his way. As I said, I understand. Getting hit by an infinite is never fun, but at any rate, I moved on and he did not. He later apologized for the salt, demonstrating more maturity than I have at various points in my Melee career.

My favorite set of the day came in the next round, losers’ octofinals, against JJM, a fellow Ice Climbers main. The first game was hilarious in that it had the maximum possible amount of wobbles that could happen in a single game of one-on-one Melee – seven in a row, leaving only one stock un-wobbled, and that happened to be me. We shared a chuckle after I turned to him and said that I was pretty sure every stock ended with a wobble. There were less infinites in the games that followed, and even that game was extremely engaging and interactive, at least in the realm of the neutral game.

See, I’ve always had a little trouble with the ICs ditto – the general neutral game mixups are generally as follows: wavedash in and smash attack to get them to shield, wavedash in and grab (ICs backthrow is probably the best throw in the game at splitting up their fellow climbers since it has a hitbox well-suited to doing so and will often trigger the invisible ceiling glitch to boot, which will lead to a guaranteed knockdown if the backup climber is grabbed) to beat the shield, stay back and throw ice, or fair over their desyncs. There’s a bit of rock-paper-scissors to those options, complemented by the yomi level 0, defined here as waiting to anti-air the fair approaches or to jump over their wavedash in. But the scramble situations are where the matchup becomes extremely difficult. In-close, it can be hard to adapt on the fly, to pick the right option at the right time.

This particular set was back-and-forth until the very end, where my solo Popo went up against his pair of climbers. I was able to break out of his final grab attempt since his backup climber dashed past us. I then quickly dispatched his backup with a well-timed spotdodge, grab, anti-air upsmash, and landing punish, leaving me with a percent lead going into our last one-on-one fight. A frantic scramble of spotdodges and smash attacks took place, which I ended by waiting out the last one and grabbing JJM. He broke out of my grab, we scrambled again, and I ended the set with one last spotdodge into downsmash followed up by an easy edgeguard to seal the set.

I said, “Great set!” while pounding my opponent’s fist. Even had I lost, I like to think I’d have set the same thing, or at least something similar. Polish is my inspiration here – it seems that whenever he wins, like he did against Nintendude, he feels like he played terrible, and when he loses, he feels like he played the best Melee of his life. Though I won, my set with JJM was certainly some of the best Melee I’ve ever played – back and forth, near equal skill, hype scrambles, entertaining situations, and well-executed gameplans, all leading to an exciting finish.

To embrace irony and talk purely about results, I was able to pull through in the end, and my reward was a set against Peach player Wally – and that matchup is notoriously terrible for our character. I kept that set respectable, managing to bring game five to a last-stock situation, but in technicality only since my Nana was already gone. Oh well – out at fifth. I’m far from a pro, but I look back on my play that day with fondness.

The main point I want to draw from these experiences is the way that one’s ego can interfere with playing one’s best. My ego was quiet that day, since it had low expectations going in. Normally, I place far too much thought into what it would be like to win or lose, on how my friends, opponents, and naysayers would react to the result. In the heat of the moment, this can be devastating for one’s play. The ego and the linguistic part of our minds are not particularly helpful during competition. At least, that’s the way it is for me. I’m sure there are people who can have effective internal dialogues (“They use X option in Y situation, so next time I’ll use Z to counter that”) but that’s not the way my brain usually works. For example, in my hazy, tired state, part of what was going through my head during my Zealot set was a particular lyric from Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam” … for some reason. I had been listening to it often for the week or two before the tournament, and so, over and over, “I'm tryna keep my faith / But I'm looking for more / Somewhere I can feel safe / And end my holy war” repeated in my mind, but I was able to mostly ignore this in favor of pulling my consciousness back to what my hands needed to do.

These kinds of internal distractions can be extremely annoying, and so we return to meditation. “Meditation,” in the history of our language, has meant at certain points in time “to ponder a particular thing” – to meditate on something. Anyone who actually practices meditation would find this rather confusing – we don’t meditate on anything; we just meditate. The “flow state” is another word for this kind of meditation, though that term mostly comes up in the context of competition. To flow in this way is to simply execute one’s strategies to the best of one’s ability, to not get bogged down in internal conversations, to simply allow thoughts to flow away, consciousness coming back to what needs doing – focus purely on the actions. If you think about not-thinking, that’ll only make it worse. To aid in this discipline, I recommend breathing exercises. Just watch the breath, gently pulling conscious attention back to the rhythm of breathing in… holding it… and letting it go. Thoughts will pop up; that’s perfectly okay. Just bring it back to the breath each time this happens. Over time, it will be easier and easier to let thought take a backseat to the meditative focus, whether that’s breath or Melee or whatever’s on your plate.

To quote one of my favorite figures from “real” sports, Pittsburgh Steelers legend Troy Polamalu, with the word “football” omitted twice, “I think there comes a point in a game where you’re not really cognitively thinking… you just kinda see the way that everything develops… and the more and more you play the game, the more and more you have this sensitivity [to] the rhythm of the game.”

This, I think, is applicable to just about every competition. I think that getting gradually better at reading the rhythm of the game is something which happens in everything from football to hockey to Counter-Strike to fighting games. Melee is perhaps the most rhythmic of all one-on-one competitive games. It’s a complex dance as much as it is a fight, with the players’ inputs and subsequent characters’ sounds often matching the rhythms of the songs in the background. For example, watch this combo against Taki, then just listen to it with your eyes closed, and then watch it again, hopefully seeing and (more importantly) hearing what I mean:

Side note: that's the craziest combo I've ever done. Main note: once you start hearing matching character-music rhythms like this, you'll notice them all over competitive Melee.

To flow in Melee is to feel this rhythm, to tap into it, to delay one’s attacks long enough to be unexpected, to dashdance and wavedash and perform combinations of moves as well as one has practiced. Or, really, oftentimes, to flow in Melee is to play like it’s a friendly. Every tournament player knows tournament nerves, the inexplicable shift in one’s actions that comes with knowing that pride and money are on the line.

The best players don’t get bogged down by this. They’ve played in enough tournaments, have been exposed to those nerves enough times that their execution is not hampered significantly… at least until it’s game five, last stock, high percent. No one is immune to these nerves, but there are ways around it. For me, at Mike Valley, the way was getting sick thanks to hitting a friend’s vape and not getting any sleep and meditating while my friends changed a flat tire. During the tournament, my ego was mostly silent and my characters were able to dance as if all my matches were friendly.

Maybe all it takes is remembering that nothing’s really on the line other than your entry fee. “It’s just a game,” after all. We are small parts of eternity, each one of us.

This is our divinity and our mortality, our reason to play our best and to be unconcerned with the ultimate outcome. Countless years preceded us; countless years will follow us. But we are lucky enough to be in a now which features Super Smash Bros. Melee for the Nintendo GameCube. Talk to your friends afterward all you like about your sets, but humble that pride, even if you just won a major. It’s just a silly party game made for children in 2001, after all. But in this silly party game is the potential for a complex dance of characters, strategies, defense, offense, and nearly-infinite situations. What it takes to get to the next level is simply playing your best in all of the situations you can, not letting a few nagging neurons get in the way of what must be done onscreen, onstage, in-character.