Week 2: Muscle Memory

I started playing DotA back in high school.  That was an ancient time - an time when Skeleton King's first ability was Storm Bolt, clinching him the title of Least Imaginative Hero with four cloned abilities.  When Keeper's ult was Furion-in-a-box.  When Razor had chain lightning.  When legacy keys were the only keys, and the only thing you had to threaten a leaver with was your shitty local banlist.  Despite all this, the barrier to entry for DotA was still lower than WC3, so I stuck with it.

I sucked. Hard.  Most of my games were spent flailing about mindlessly.  I'd never understood denies, last hitting, clash control, or warding.  I would spend every 5 games crying to the Internet about how much I sucked and how hard it was to get better at it.  Obviously the Internet was not usually receptive to a bawling crybaby teenager.  Eventually I heard what would be both the worst and the best advice I'd get: "Stop playing."

So I stopped.

Just like I did with soccer, football, basketball, baseball, piano, tae kwon do, and judo, I stopped playing DotA before I ever got good.  I would continue to start things up and shut them down within a short bit of training all the way through college.  This continued to feed into a loop of self-deprecation.  I would identify as a man incapable of finishing things I started.

It became my opinion that games that didn't have a smooth learning curve were poorly designed.  Games needed to have seamless tutorials and snappy interfaces: if the game did not present you a step-by-step route to victory, it was "unintuitive" and "unwelcoming."  My champion game for this time was Team Fortress 2: a well-designed breath of fresh air in first person shooters, designed to allow smart planning to defeat twitch junkies, but still gave them their competitive edge.  It was easy to pick up and play.  It coached you through defeat with its kill-cam system, allowing you to know exactly how you died.  Perhaps best of all, it was anything but Call of Duty.  It was the Anti-CoD.

I began using TF2 as my australium-standard for self-aware game design.  I raged at fighting games that rewarded drilling complex combos over mind-games.  I accused them of lacking true depth.  I raged at games that didn't properly align style and gameplay - games like Super Smash Bros. Melee, where walking was replaced with this surreal technique known as "wave-dashing" that was better than walking in almost every way, and looked clearly like a bug.  Any competitive complexity introduced by the game was irrelevant; it looked silly and did not properly put me in the shoes of the character I was playing.

Eventually I heard about Heroes of Newerth, S2 games' attempt to revive the original DotA.  I was, strangely enough, ecstatic.  Despite my disdain for "competitive" level games, I had been meaning to get better at one eventually - perhaps to see what awaited me on the other side of the barrier to entry of games of this caliber.  Perhaps bringing back an old game would keep me engaged in a way that Street Fighter could never do.  Well, it succeeded, in the biggest way possible.

I wasn't a professional by any means, but I could at least tread water in higher skill games.  Team composition began to matter to me.  I understood clash control and lane pulling.  All those skills I failed to pick up when I was younger came back to me, despite my complaints and pessimism, and I didn't stop to think too much about how remarkable it was.

Fast forward to 2013, at the Sensei Memorial Judo Tournament.

Every year, I would accompany my father, a long-time sensei at our judo club, to this large tournament.  A massive mat covered the open auditorium floor, providing 8 fighting spaces for the hundreds of judoka that would attend the tournament.  I was always fascinated by the logistics involved, and enjoyed score keeping, so every year I volunteered to help run a few tables at the tournament.  I would sit behind a ladder bracket or a scoreboard each time and watch as competitor after competitor fought for that victory, despite how many times they had fallen before.  This year, I began to really appreciate the nuances of judo: the importance of timing, balance, prediction, and taking a good fall.  Perhaps, I thought, I could give this sport another shot.  Where every previous activity had failed me in its seeming simplicity, judo might be just the thing I need.

I went to the lunch room and sat down with a pile of home-made sushi and other treats, distributed free to the volunteers.  Almost ritualistically, the sensei would tease me a little bit about when I was coming back to judo.  This time, when they did, I suggested that I might actually want to begin practicing again. I got a long pep-talk from Sensei Albert, who told me that it was worth a shot.  He asserted that, now being a mature twenty-something instead of a developing child, it would be easier to appreciate judo and properly learn all the techniques available.  I would have the patience required to drill the moves.  I would have the self respect to get up when I fell down.  He claimed that he knew many people enjoyed judo much more as an adult than they did as a child for these very reasons, and stressed that it would be worthwhile. 

It all echoed my experience with DotA.  When I was a kid, I lost every match and cried about it afterward.  Now, I'm playing Dota 2, and my favorite heroes are Meepo, Pudge, and Invoker - easily some of the hardest heroes in the game to pick up.  My short-term memory might still be lacking, but I had managed to train my fingers to memorize Invoker's Cyclone -> Sunstrike -> Chaos Meteor -> Everything Else combo, and even feel confident taking blink dagger on Meepo.  Things that appeared unreachable when I was a child were mystically resting in the palm of my hand.

The following Monday, my dad found my old grade school gym bag, and packed it with my brother's old gi and a well worn white belt - more accurately, a beige belt.  I took the bag in hand, and took my first step back into the dojo.  With a bow, I understood that this time, things would be different.

Better.

Weight: 195.4 lbs
Squat: 150 lbs
Press: 85 lbs
Bench Press: 95 lbs
Deadlift: 220lbs

Power Clean: Starting Tuesday!