Wednesday, November 17, 2004
The Suttner Theory
First, a link to the inspiration of this column. That will take you to a 3 year old column written by my favorite writer of all time, Bill Simmons. If you don't know who that is I have to say I'm very disappointed with you. Not angry, just disappointed. Why am I linking to a sports column in the midst of all this video game chatter? That column, labeled The Ewing Theory, is one of the greatest ideas ever proposed by man. Last night, for the first time in my life, I have finally been able to connect it, however loosely, to my favorite pastime.
Before I talk about my experiences from last night, I should explain exactly what The Ewing Theory is about. As far as athletes are concerned, there are two types of great players - those that make their teammates better and those that merely fill up the stat sheets while their teams never have any success. The media does not differentiate between these two, very different, types of athletes. They somehow dish out the same amount of hype to the truly elite players and those who just seem great to the untrained eye.
When one of these pretend greats gets hurt, the media immediately writes off the team as a whole. This is when the players rally, play to their own strengths instead of relying on one player, and start to win. The media is, of course, surprised by this sudden surge. Obviously, anyone who knows about The Ewing Theory is not.
I wouldn't have had to go through all that if you had just clicked on the convenient link I provided at the beginning of the column.
Anyway, now that the theory is finally explained, I can relate this to my experiences in video games. If you think this has anything to do with sports games, though, you are sorely mistaken. I was once again knee deep in Halo 2 last night, I've logged close to 50 hours on it already, when I realized that The Ewing Theory can work in other facets of life as well. I was playing some clan matches with Nick and various other people from my Cheapassgamer clan. For some reason, even though I'm good and Nick is the best Halo 2 player I've competed with, we were on the losing end in most battles.
In fact, as I did a little research for this column, I noticed that, in Clan matches that feature both Nick and I, we are a combined 5-9. That's a mere 35% winning percentage. A 35% success rate might work if you're a major league batter or a neuro surgeon, but in video games it just does not cut it. I may not be the most competitive guy around but I do enjoy tasting victory more often than defeat, and sadly, even having Nick on my team didn't allow me to accomplish that task.
After losing a few more rounds yesterday, Nick announced to the disheartened group that he was leaving us for a bit. He promised, when he finished his meal, he would rejoin the group. But until that time, we were on our own. As we didn't want to move on to another mode, we simply recruited another member from our clan and continued to fight the world at large.
Now, you may think that, since we were losing with Nick, clearly we would have no shot at all without him. I mean, everyone knows he's the best player among us. He's the one keeping us in line the whole time. The one shouting "Be aggressive! Everyone stay on offense!" He's the one constantly reminding us to "Stay in the Base! No one take a vehicle unless they get the flag!" Surely, without his constant ordering we wouldn't know what to do and would fall apart at the seams. Surely, we couldn't survive without him.
Well, Shirley was wrong because we did survive. In fact, in the two games Nick was gone, we went 2-0. That's a 100% winning percentage. We were on fire. It's hard to say exactly what changed things for us, but I think we were just having more fun as a whole. No more roles and duties, we just kind of did what we wanted to do. We ran around the map securing a sword and some Ghosts to help us on defense. We coordinated our attacks so we were always outnumbering our opponent. We risked death to grab the flag for seconds at a time to make sure it didn't respawn at their base.
The funny thing is, as soon as Nick was done eating he rejoined our group. Fresh off our two game win streak, we thought we might be able to string a few more wins together with our best player back. Sadly, that was not the case. We once again found ourselves on the losing end, wondering if we would ever reach the promised land of victory again.
Before I talk about my experiences from last night, I should explain exactly what The Ewing Theory is about. As far as athletes are concerned, there are two types of great players - those that make their teammates better and those that merely fill up the stat sheets while their teams never have any success. The media does not differentiate between these two, very different, types of athletes. They somehow dish out the same amount of hype to the truly elite players and those who just seem great to the untrained eye.
When one of these pretend greats gets hurt, the media immediately writes off the team as a whole. This is when the players rally, play to their own strengths instead of relying on one player, and start to win. The media is, of course, surprised by this sudden surge. Obviously, anyone who knows about The Ewing Theory is not.
I wouldn't have had to go through all that if you had just clicked on the convenient link I provided at the beginning of the column.
Anyway, now that the theory is finally explained, I can relate this to my experiences in video games. If you think this has anything to do with sports games, though, you are sorely mistaken. I was once again knee deep in Halo 2 last night, I've logged close to 50 hours on it already, when I realized that The Ewing Theory can work in other facets of life as well. I was playing some clan matches with Nick and various other people from my Cheapassgamer clan. For some reason, even though I'm good and Nick is the best Halo 2 player I've competed with, we were on the losing end in most battles.
In fact, as I did a little research for this column, I noticed that, in Clan matches that feature both Nick and I, we are a combined 5-9. That's a mere 35% winning percentage. A 35% success rate might work if you're a major league batter or a neuro surgeon, but in video games it just does not cut it. I may not be the most competitive guy around but I do enjoy tasting victory more often than defeat, and sadly, even having Nick on my team didn't allow me to accomplish that task.
After losing a few more rounds yesterday, Nick announced to the disheartened group that he was leaving us for a bit. He promised, when he finished his meal, he would rejoin the group. But until that time, we were on our own. As we didn't want to move on to another mode, we simply recruited another member from our clan and continued to fight the world at large.
Now, you may think that, since we were losing with Nick, clearly we would have no shot at all without him. I mean, everyone knows he's the best player among us. He's the one keeping us in line the whole time. The one shouting "Be aggressive! Everyone stay on offense!" He's the one constantly reminding us to "Stay in the Base! No one take a vehicle unless they get the flag!" Surely, without his constant ordering we wouldn't know what to do and would fall apart at the seams. Surely, we couldn't survive without him.
Well, Shirley was wrong because we did survive. In fact, in the two games Nick was gone, we went 2-0. That's a 100% winning percentage. We were on fire. It's hard to say exactly what changed things for us, but I think we were just having more fun as a whole. No more roles and duties, we just kind of did what we wanted to do. We ran around the map securing a sword and some Ghosts to help us on defense. We coordinated our attacks so we were always outnumbering our opponent. We risked death to grab the flag for seconds at a time to make sure it didn't respawn at their base.
The funny thing is, as soon as Nick was done eating he rejoined our group. Fresh off our two game win streak, we thought we might be able to string a few more wins together with our best player back. Sadly, that was not the case. We once again found ourselves on the losing end, wondering if we would ever reach the promised land of victory again.
// posted by Tom @ 7:39 AM 
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