Competitive Theory

[cityscapes]

So do all the lessons of winning at games apply to real life? No, they do not. But only a fool would walk away from competitive games without learning a wealth of life lessons.
-David Sirlin​

Hey, apologies if this isn't the right place for this topic, I know this subforum isn't really for Pokemon discussion (mods can move it if they like). My idea with posting it here was that it doesn't pertain to any particular meta (so not sure what competitive subforum I'd post it in) and can also cover games outside of Pokemon. Anyway, let's get started.

Smogon's current approach to competitive discussion involves discussing the intricacies of specific metagames, which certainly fosters productive discussion but in my opinion can miss the forest for the trees and fails to address several important topics. This thread aims to adequately cover these topics, which include metagame-agnostic ones such as competitive mindset and game analysis as well as "meta-metagame" topics such as thinking about a metagame in the greater context of all of competitive Pokemon. Here are a few questions I had to start off with:

• What is the meaning of Pokemon as a competitive game (in the context of other competitive games)?
• Within this game metagames change and even dissolve (making way for the next gen) within a short space of time. One issue players can face is "sidegrading" themselves or merely adapting to a new metagame instead of truly becoming better. How can this issue be overcome?
• Is there anything to be learned from defunct metagames or old tournaments, or is it mostly the same story of individual players' interactions with the metagame?
• Through tiering we aim to create the best possible metagame. What would happen if we went in the other direction? Assuming you don't do something stupid like no items haxorus v haxorus and whoever wins the speed tie wins, what interesting things can we see in "metagame hell"?
• What is the best way to collaborate with other players if one is looking to improve at a metagame? On this site we have the tutoring program and team tournaments as options, but whenever I've used them I have felt like I could be getting more out of them.
• Chess has a variety of "puzzles" in which the player is presented with a game position and asked to find the only winning move. Can Pokemon make use of similar puzzles? How can they be constructed? Similarly, what is the best way to create these complex, hard-to-calculate positions within a game?
• An often repeated claim in Pokemon is that there is no "perfect" or "best" team. Is this true? If not, what makes it so difficult for people to find them?
• Obviously, people don't always show up to tournaments with good teams. Is it possible to "misplay" or "choke" in the teambuilder? Are these terms not really applicable to the process of building a team?

Here are my own thoughts on these, though my perspective is very limited so I would really appreciate alternative viewpoints.

The meaning of Pokemon isn't a very easy question for me, because it's definitely my "main" game and it can be hard to distinguish between it and the general ideas of competitive games. That said, the meaning I find in this game ties in pretty closely to the uniqueness of Smogon as a relevant internet forum in the year 2021. It serves as a pretty interesting medium, especially for a game that notably suffers from a lack of IRL events or connection outside of VGC. This lens is pretty helpful for interpreting it from my perspective. The other meaningful thing about Pokemon is the building vs playing aspect, which I find incredibly interesting; no other competitive game I've seen has a preparation phase so deep.

Personally I don't have issues learning new game mechanics and how they interact, but the hard part is that the metagame is really big. Pokemon has a lot of moving parts especially when you consider teambuilding, and it's never fun to prepare for X on your team only to lose to X+Y. 2-mon and 3-mon cores can be immensely hard to calculate, so this can take up the majority of my time when preparing for a big game. I think that the best way to cover this is to have more discussion on the apparent "mysticism" of the best of the best players. Pokemon is often seen as an easy game, yet there are some players who make it look incredibly difficult when you're facing them. In light of this, spending time only discussing how the metagame works is, in my opinion, reason for criticism.

I think that old tournaments are usually the best samples of an old metagame, because they're a collaborative effort between many players and typically aren't oversaturated by people who don't really know what they're doing. That said, I do question what the use for them is outside of examining the history of individual players and how they played/built in the past. The other use I had in mind was noting the difference between old metagames and modern ones assuming they had the same rulesets (so examining why current staples were absent and vice versa, etc).

In my opinion you can have a lot of fun creating intentionally bad metagames. We have seen how unmoderated formats like Anything Goes and Pure Hackmons can still have thriving competitive scenes despite centralization, which makes me think you need to go a bit further than "no rules" to create something truly bad. I think it's cooler if instead of stripping away complexity from the game, you add complexity in so far as to make the metagame unplayable, such as a 24v24 format or some way to make every Pokemon viable. While these do fall short of the Haxorus example in the uncompetitiveness department, I still think they would be really bad games.

Collaboration isn't easy, especially if you aren't good friends with the other person (I don't want to get put on a team with someone who doesn't understand what I mean when I say Steel-types are unviable). That said, I do think there's more to it than just personal relationships. I feel like communicating your current understanding of the metagame, what you aren't sure about, and what you can be helped with is definitely a skill that one can improve at. The hard part is having a decent understanding of the concept of concrete improvement, what it looks like, and how you can strive for it. ("Concrete improvement" can sound like an ethereal and hard-to-define idea, but really all of us are familiar with the idea of learning a new metagame; the harder part is truly getting better at mons. I think anyone reasonably skilled at communication can do a decent job at transferring general Pokemon skill to specific metagame knowledge through a good conversation with a player of that metagame.) Also of note is game analysis with other players, which is at least 10 times better than ladder.

I've tried to make "Pokemon puzzles" and similar things work in the past. Personally I've had quite a bit of difficulty in bringing them to fruition because for nearly all building ideas, there are several ways of executing them. Also, it takes a great deal of critical thinking to analyze even tournament games beyond surface-level analysis of what's going on (what are the players thinking? which complex objectives are they going for?) which is why I struggled to find examples of competitive concepts for my BH version of Playing to Win (though I might do things differently if I started it now instead of a few years ago). That said, assuming puzzles do get cracked open and people figure out how to make them, there's a ton of ways to take the concept. Here are a few executions that I've had fun with in the past:

• Guessing unrevealed sets/moves during or even before a game. This is obviously already a big part of the game, and there's already been a lot written on how to use unrevealed sets to your advantage, so I won't explain it here.
• Starting with the purpose of a creative set (what it beats/loses to) and trying to guess the moves/item of the set. I think this one is pretty cool, the idea is to help people get better at making their own creative sets and venturing into set types they'd otherwise be unfamiliar with.
• The classic puzzle setup, starting from a game position and asking which sequence of moves will win the game. These are obviously everywhere (whenever I lose a game I look at which potential wins I missed, including those in the builder) but constructing them from scratch really isn't easy. Rarely do you encounter a situation where you have a single guaranteed win that can't be stopped by any move your opponent makes. Still, though, I feel that the idea has potential.

My view on "perfect" or "best" teams is pretty simple-- in a rapidly changing metagame, looking for perfect teams is obviously a fool's errand, but in metas that aren't constantly changing you can have some fun with it. One of the main issues with creating these teams is the idea of remaining "honest", as in maintaining a massive advantage against weaker teams while still being advantageous against stronger ones. I think finding different ways to make "honest" teams is a very helpful skill to have here. Anyway, defining the perfect team as "always has an advantage with perfect play" also assumes you'll play perfectly and in practice means the team tends to be quite brittle when faced with hax or other unexpected events. In this way you have to balance powerful ideas with passivity and resilience. Perfect teams are actually really hard to build as a result of this, but I think looking for them is a great way of improving at the game.

I like to say "misplaying in the builder" because building and playing come from the same competitive mindset, so it makes sense to consider a competitive player's poor team choice or anti-synergistic set idea as a misplay or a choke. Obviously the environments are different because in the builder it's much harder to pinpoint exactly where a team went wrong: the builder started with an idea or variation that could have been correct or misguided, then did the best they could to support it (were there objectively better options? does the idea have to be taken in a different direction?), then ended up with something stupid. For sure, building theory has to come a long way.

Finally, I wanted to include some of my favorite competitive resources for this thread. Share your own!

• The Melee Library is great as a collection of competitive knowledge collected by the Super Smash Bros. Melee community. When I played Melee I was stunned by how much they talked about this stuff and felt I had to bring it over to this community somehow. In general, trying out the framework of a different competitive game is super cool, but even if that isn't your thing there's helpful mindset-related stuff in here.
• Playing to Win basically covers everything one might expect from competitive games, as a sort of primer. Some of it might not be very useful to the experienced competitive player, but there are some nuggets of wisdom for everyone.
• Ping Pong (I recommend the anime Ping Pong The Animation) concerns the competitive journeys of several different players and their experiences with success and failure. It's good for seeing competitive games in a broader scope and their relationship with the rest of one's personal life.
• Borat's GSC guide is incredibly helpful regardless of which format you play. Its framework is around an incredibly developed metagame so it does a good job at getting to the "meat and potatoes" part of how to actually win games and explaining why decent-but-not-great players lose.
• Secrets of Competitive Pokemon and How to Fix Your Mindset by Jamvad are pretty good at explaining basic Pokemon concepts, though I do think they can be a bit too surface-level at times. I know Jamvad also wrote a book on competitive Pokemon but I haven't read it.
• The Inner Game of Tennis (book, I recommend getting it from your local library) details the subconscious process of improvement at a task. The book shares several anecdotes of the author's tutees that might sound familiar to competitive players. This book helped me stop focusing on the unimportant parts of improving (that is to say, improvement itself) and more on creating the environment for allowing it to happen.

That should be everything! I feel like I barely scratched the surface of exploration about this game, so I hope this thread stays alive and we get to cover the many topics I missed.

 

[Eo Ut Mortus]

Within this game metagames change and even dissolve (making way for the next gen) within a short space of time. One issue players can face is "sidegrading" themselves or merely adapting to a new metagame instead of truly becoming better. How can this issue be overcome?

I think this phenomenon is pretty universal. When learning chess, there's often an interest and focus in developing a wide repertoire of openings; if you watched the PogChamps tournaments this past year that featured streamers/media personalities picking up the game seriously for the first time, you could tell from the commentary there was a high emphasis on memorizing and prepping specific opening lines. Learning five different openings sounds more enticing than studying one of them over and over until you start recognizing its main lines and how to play them. It isn't the quickest way to improve, though; if you stick to one opening, then your improvement will impact a larger percentage of your games and enable you to move onto other things much quicker. Nonetheless, it lacks the allure of the former simply because you can't as easily observe or articulate your improvement. This is the same with Pokemon; at a point, you will hit a plateau and run out of things to do that don't just simply make your fundamentals more consistent. You will get to know a metagame so intimately (or so you think) that you will get tired of it and want to apply your skills to something fresh. One thing you can do is to stop treating different metagames as different areas of skill expression and start applying that logic to a single metagame. Don't think of OU mastery as a monolith; think of it as mastering stall, offense, et. al, and from there, mastering stall with Toxapex, mastering stall without Toxapex, etc. Set achievable and measurable goals so you can identify improvement and not just progress aimlessly without a way to see how far you've come or how much more you have to do. This is probably verging into the realm of generic life/motivational advice because at the end of the day, competitive Pokemon a discipline like anything else, and the same principles that dictate improvement in any field apply just as much.

All that said, I can't name a top player who hasn't dabbled in other tiers at some point, if not consistently. We're here to do whatever we enjoy first and foremost, after all. Just recognize that doing this serves to sustain motivation rather than directly improve yourself, and if you find yourself doing this often when you have aspirations for self-improvement, you might consider that you're giving up too easily whenever you hit a plateau.

An often repeated claim in Pokemon is that there is no "perfect" or "best" team. Is this true? If not, what makes it so difficult for people to find them?

There should a "best" team by any metric you can define as "best". I think an uncontroversial definition (that encompasses the definition you offered) would be "The team that gives a player the highest odds of winning"; the problem is, this is highly contextual and will provide you different answers depending on the environment (the ladder vs. a particular tournament), the player, their opponent, and even other external conditions (playing a stall team that regularly invites 500+ turn matches at 1 PM versus 11 PM). For simplicity, let's narrow the context to Player A's best team versus Player B in some tournament at a reasonable time in the day. There are still three best teams: the best team for Player A (the comfort team), the best team to bring against Player B (the counter team), and the best team within the current tournament metagame (independent of who's using it against whom). The last of these is probably what you're asking about, and it's probably the least likely to be used of the three options I laid out, just because the other two factors (familiarity and meta-teaming) play larger parts in determining success. If the "best team factor" ever outweighed the other two, it would be obvious, because a lot of people would use the team, and either the metagame would adapt around it until its win rate regressed (Rain SM) or one of its components would be banned (the infamous "SPL stall" featuring Dugtrio and Mega-Sableye). In short, by design, it is unlikely for there to be a universal "best team" for any significant period of time, or if there is, it's by a small enough margin that it doesn't really matter.

That said, there is still the intermediary period during which "best teams" exist and have been identified by players as such, so why aren't they used more? Or what if we adjust the definition to the best team, but just for a given player? The threat of counterteaming is the most obvious answer, but there are a few other factors to consider. You could reduce poker to a game of percentages as well and fold every hand that doesn't meet a given percentage threshold of winning, but if that were all there was to it, then there wouldn't be a competitive scene for it. Poker involves keeping track of how players manage risk while concealing or manipulating as much of the information you expose to others; a similar dynamic exists in team selection wherein a player will opt for a team that's worse / less comfortable in order to avoid establishing a repertoire that might be exploited, or doing the opposite and reusing teams so they can later switch it up once a pattern has been established. Similarly, in chess, there has to be an opening with the highest percentage to win/draw, but grandmaster play involves developing a larger repertoire of openings to use based on specific opponents, including computers. Just as masters will sometimes use an unsound opening to exploit an opponent's lack of familiarity with it, so will a Pokemon player use unorthodox teams (mostly hyper offense) and acquire an advantage against opponents who lack experience facing those types of teams.

If there is a place where the concept of the "universal best team" is relevant, it's the ladder, where relative anonymity (in theory, anyway) eliminates the concept of meta-teaming, and the volume of games required to climb ladder means that the team most conducive to succeess is one that wins against the majority of teams, even if it always loses to a single team. But the top of the ladder is small enough that there is no true anonymity, and the same concepts described above can apply just as much, especially during OLT.

Obviously, people don't always show up to tournaments with good teams. Is it possible to "misplay" or "choke" in the teambuilder? Are these terms not really applicable to the process of building a team?

Every time you hear someone complain about matchup, they got outplayed in the builder in the same way that people who complain about falling for a "bad play" got outplayed in-game. This ties into what I explained above, where team selection is not just a matter of optimizing probability, but a decision game between two people. It's more than just using a bad Pokemon; it's also making incorrect assumptions about your opponent or failing to properly assess their own decision-making. All that said, this aspect of the game can be as relevant as you want to make it; you can always opt out of it by amassing a set of teams and randomly selecting one for a given matchup.

My take on the "mysticism" you reference: I believe discussion is often centered too much on building and not enough on gameplay, both on a fundamental level and a metagame-specific level, which makes it hard to discern the common factor shared by successful players. Fundamental gameplay includes things like "double switching" and "conditioning" aka terms we've developed to describe common play patterns. Metagame-specific concepts would be like "What do people typically do in Landorus vs. Greninja lead in SM" or "How do I switch my Trick Clefable in without losing its item?" I would say most top players are intuitively familiar with these things; it's just never really articulated beyond the basics. This is the biggest barrier to improvement, because good players distinguish themselves through their ability to win bad matchups or play themselves out of bad situations more than they do through building the best teams. That said, old gen communities (including old gen low tiers, even) have written a surprising amount about this; due to the higher meta stability and increased overcentralization the farther you go back (due to the lower number of Pokemon), there's only so much you can write about building, and resources for playing are likelier to remain relevant as time passes. Borat's guide is the obvious one, but there are also a lot of great in-depth posts on RBY gameplay that I've found engaging despite only ever playing the tier once a year. I think it'd be great if similar resources were as available for newer gens, and I think we may eventually reach that point as posters / content creators search for new material to cover.

 

[MMII]

Chess has a variety of "puzzles" in which the player is presented with a game position and asked to find the only winning move. Can Pokemon make use of similar puzzles? How can they be constructed? Similarly, what is the best way to create these complex, hard-to-calculate positions within a game?

https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/set-piece-battles-new-spb.3475831/

Pokemon obviously has a big rps element but I think these sort of exercises are cool to lay a foundation. Being able to discern when you have a (mostly) surefire line of play is an important skill in itself. Having an understanding of more simple and rigid lines of play also serves as a good foundation to focalise more complex situations where it becomes necessary to weigh risk/reward.

Is there anything to be learned from defunct metagames or old tournaments, or is it mostly the same story of individual players' interactions with the metagame?

I know (if my memory is correct) blim recently went through all the old bw upl games from upl2(?) to present as part of his prep for this year. I don't want to speak for him about that but, from personal anecdote, I find old games can be valuable to develop present day strats. In part because meta trends can often be cyclical so things can go good > bad > good. Other times, old ideas are still valid if reworked for a modern context or were just simply forgotten as past meta fads displaced it from being one of the more visible strategies. A lot of folks tend to plateau on strategies that brought them a lot of success and will overlook the older stuff (many times cause it predates their experiences within the meta).

Through tiering we aim to create the best possible metagame. What would happen if we went in the other direction? Assuming you don't do something stupid like no items haxorus v haxorus and whoever wins the speed tie wins, what interesting things can we see in "metagame hell"?

Like AG or something? This probably isn't a direct response to this but a lot of AG talent tends to translate very well to Ubers. Obviously this is because of how adjacent the two metas usually are. I also suspect, however, that dealing with bullshit teaches AG players how to play and abuse the numbers game which is an important skillset to have. Tangent to this, I think of a few anecdotes of strong players who are willing to explore and optimize cheese strats are also open-minded and innovative in how they find new ways to abuse overlooked tools as well as adapt to new powerful meta trends. Maybe there's no real connection between the two but I doubt that is the case. Taking the tangent even further, there's a lot of contempt that comes up for "fake" strategies/gimmicks but I believe adhering too strictly to what is supposed to work or what is the "right" way to play/build will often prevent players from growing overall. They also tend to be the sort of folks most prone to being bamboozled despite their best efforts.

What is the best way to collaborate with other players if one is looking to improve at a metagame? On this site we have the tutoring program and team tournaments as options, but whenever I've used them I have felt like I could be getting more out of them.

A lot of this is honestly just luck. There's a lot of variance in how strong a potential tutor is at the game itself. Even outside of that, regardless of whatever knowledge or understanding a tutor might have, transferring that expertise to another player depends on how well that tutor happens to communicate that wisdom to the wisdom. Some folks just click better with eachother than with others. Fledgling players also need some preexisting skills if they want to actually benefit from most of the educational material that we have. Of course, despite being "Smogon University", we don't have the rigorous structure and coursework designed to teach new folks how to be good at Pokemon in a way that's comparable to typical academics.

Additionally, there's cases where one is better at teaching a stronger player than they are at applying what they know themselves. There's a bunch of different skillsets that go into these games. You can excel in certain skills but not be able to translate that into results because of shortcomings in other areas. By the same token, you don't need to have an absolute mastery of every relevant skill to see a lot of success.

random shit

smashers jerk that ping pong anime real hard but, imo, it's mostly bullshit as far as the way they portray competition., mostly in regards to "talent". It's been a long time since I've seen it so maybe my memory is not giving it as much credit as it deserves. I think the story is cute if you watch it with an appropriate grain of salt.

cool video on the subject that I like

rather than "talent", I do believe there is a very large luck factor when it comes to improvement. time, location, encounters/connections, education, money, past experiences, etc. are all very large factors that can often be outside of our control and set (new) players on uneven footing. So yeah, imo, support your communities, reach out to folks, share what you know, yada yada.

some of sirlin's articles n shit are nice (hit or miss overall imo) but then there's also shit like this (viewer discretion advised, seriously)

if you want to git gud; play a lot, have fun, talk with other people who play a lot and have fun. don't waste your time on shit you don't enjoy.

 

[cityscapes]

alright lets hop in

but then there's also shit like this (viewer discretion advised, seriously)

this is fucked. im gonna leave sirlin's stuff in the op for now cause i don't really know any good replacement for it, so if you got anything to help in that regard lemme know.

what does everyone think about kids in competitive games? whenever i see people talking about them it's like "no you dont understand they can LITERALLY NEVER LOSE due to their AMAZING NEUROPLASTICITY" which i think is insufficient in many ways, even if there is some truth to the claim on its own. in my opinion this is mostly a cope to protect the ego of older players and prevent them from actually taking responsibility for their success. kids are the people who get stuck for 3 months on one video game level, adults are the people who either figure it out based on game design cues or google the solution online.

i think there are a lot of really weird differences between kids and adults generally competitively involving ideas about what the self is, what the game is, and what the opponents are, and these varying frameworks could have a much bigger effect than we might realize.

success in competitive games is not much more than heightened interest; you didn't give up, you didn't get bored, you didn't settle for a certain level when others did. with this in mind, it's easy to see that someone who for example puts all their ego into competitive games will not be very good, because they'll give up when they get frustrated, and someone who doesn't put any of their ego into games will also not be very good, because they don't really care about winning or losing.

i had this weird idea today which is the reason why i'm making this post, i wanted to share it. it goes like this:

if you wish to improve, you paradoxically cannot play too much. this is to avoid getting an overly rigid idea about not only what the game is but what you are. you end up perpetuating your own ideas about your level and the game responds to that by further reinforcing it.

i imagine it's not just games that work like this; for example, escapism through media could be argued as one example of not "playing" real life too much and loosening things up a bit. there are many cases against escapism of course and it's very difficult to quantify it all, but it's very cool to try and map it out using these tools.

as always i hope this was not too incoherent. i think it's pretty funny how kids are dehumanized socially but are hyper-humanized in competitive games and kinda missed expanding on that angle so if any smarter person wants to have a go then there you go.

 

[MMII]

this is fucked. im gonna leave sirlin's stuff in the op for now cause i don't really know any good replacement for it, so if you got anything to help in that regard lemme know.

I should but unfortunately I don't, sorry. There's a lot of cool MTG articles with great direct parallels for Pokemon since they are both casino games.
https://infinite.tcgplayer.com/article/Embracing-Losing/8b2b6e82-ebd2-4fc6-824e-1a2ba9b95d20/
https://strategy.channelfireball.co...nnelmagic-articles/results-oriented-thinking/
https://strategy.channelfireball.co...es/playing-to-win-versus-playing-not-to-lose/
These are a few cool ones but there's a LOT of good material you can find from that community. It's a shame playing MTG is so much less interesting than talking about it.

Other than that, I reckon assorted Game Design materials would cover things you might be interested in. Most of sirlin's stuff is just putting into organized writing what has floated around in communities for ages and mixing it with things you learn from Game Design academics. Core-A Gaming is also very much worth checking out. There's a lot of different videos with subjects that range from pragmatic improvement oriented analysis to ones that are basically just farting. Even in the case of the later, it still smells good so I'd say every one of his videos are worth checking out if you have the time. (I imagine you've already seen them all anyways but just in case)

what does everyone think about kids in competitive games? whenever i see people talking about them it's like "no you dont understand they can LITERALLY NEVER LOSE due to their AMAZING NEUROPLASTICITY" which i think is insufficient in many ways, even if there is some truth to the claim on its own. in my opinion this is mostly a cope to protect the ego of older players and prevent them from actually taking responsibility for their success. kids are the people who get stuck for 3 months on one video game level, adults are the people who either figure it out based on game design cues or google the solution online.

i think there are a lot of really weird differences between kids and adults generally competitively involving ideas about what the self is, what the game is, and what the opponents are, and these varying frameworks could have a much bigger effect than we might realize.

Yeah, it's just cope imo. There might be some truth to younger folks having better reaction times or whatever, I'm far too stupid to know. Regardless, it's very clearly not been relevant enough to matter in terms of results, at least in a way that can be clearly attributed to their youth as the defining factor. Most (all?) competitive video games, even the most physically demanding ones, are nothing like a sport where you are directly measuring one's physical ability to another's. There's just execution benchmarks that you have to meet and I'm not aware of any that excludes older players. Taking Street Fighter as an example, most (maybe I'm exaggerating? I don't keep up) of the top players that dominate today are the exact same players that dominated 10+ years ago. They are also definitely stronger players now than they were back then. In a game like Pokemon, age doesn't have any direct impact. Older folks likely have more experience, so it's an advantage if anything lol.

Oh, speaking of longtime and very dominant SF players, Diago wrote a book called The Will to Keep Winning. I've never read so I can't tell you if it's any good or not but it might be something of interest to you.

if you wish to improve, you paradoxically cannot play too much. this is to avoid getting an overly rigid idea about not only what the game is but what you are. you end up perpetuating your own ideas about your level and the game responds to that by further reinforcing it.

I may be misinterpreting what you meant to say by this but I very much disagree with this statement. Playing the game is far and away the best means of improving at it. Far more often than not, the best solution to a plateau in progress towards mastery is to just simply play more until you start getting stronger again. There's some stipulations, of course. If you spend most/all of your time playing in autopilot mode then it will be very inefficient in terms of improvement. Even then, you are still going to get better to some degree, you just won't get as much out of it as you could otherwise. I'm being a bit broad in that I'm including discussion, research, review, and practice as part of playing the game but even those 4 things (and whatever else I'm forgetting to specify) still pales in comparison to what you get out of just playing vs others. Breaks are important, though, and learning how to place with focus, awareness, and critical thinking should also be a priority so you can be as efficient as possible with the time you invest in playing.

Also, yeah, be careful about addiction and be sure that the time you spend on the game isn't taking away from your other priorities/responsibilities /interests. Having a healthy balance in your life is the only real line you should worry about crossing when it comes to playing too much. (imo ofc)

 

[Akiak]

I've been passionate about game design my entire life. I've designed board games, card games, and video games (just for fun). I find chess to be pretty fascinating, however at the same time I don't particularly enjoy it. The over-reliance on theory, the almost "solved" nature of it. And why not, the fact that AI is significantly better than humans at it.

Pokemon, on the other hand, I've enjoyed immensely, and still do. So I think it wouldn't be heresy to compare the two, and ask ourselves: what would it take for Pokemon to be taken as seriously as chess?

For this, it's useful to look at what the differences between the two are, and what could be Pokemon's shortcomings.

The first one that springs to mind is the absence of a "fixed" metagame. To achieve chess-like status, ideally there would be a certain metagame that we can point to and say "this is basically perfect". Then players can simply focus on mastering that particular format, rather than jump around or divide the community unnecessarily. Okay, more realistically there can be, maybe a handful of "perfect" metagames.

I can give my opinion on what these could be, although I'm not sure if anyone will share my sentiment. Two that jump to mind are Nintendo Cup 1997, and Orre Colosseum (Gen 3 VGC). The reason I pick these two is not only because they are balanced and enjoyable, but also because they require no additional rules other than what Nintendo gave us. Any other Gen 1 format requires an Evasion ban at the very least (since the nerfing of Blizzard to 10% removes counterplay to it). Gen 2 needs OHKO bans, debatably. And I'm not aware of any comparable examples from later gens.

Of course I'm not against the idea of creating our own formats beyond what Nintendo gave us. But I do think it's worth pointing out the times they got it right, in my opinion.

I won't bother trying to find examples of "perfect" fan-made formats, although I'm sure they exist. The point is, I feel like this would be a good first step, to then push said formats as genuinely fun, balanced and competitive games that people can enjoy and theorize about, even if they're not into Pokemon to begin with!