Do you want to know what is one of the most insulting things you could say to a pro gamer? “I have better things to do than learn to be good at video games.” We also would have accepted “I could be that good I practiced as much as he did” and any other variation of “my time is better spent doing something else.”

Why is this insulting? Well first of all, you are saying that the pro-gamer doesn’t have better things to do. You are making this assumption that since your opponent is good, he obviously is a lifeless loser who spends every waking hour in his mother’s basement studying frame data and figuring out new combos while the rest of us are actually out there enjoying life. However, that simply isn’t true and when you think about it, it is quite condescending. I know plenty of pro gamers who have families, friends, and personal lives outside the realm of gaming. Hell, I know pro gamers who are actors in New York, businessmen in Chicago, and bartenders in Hoboken. I know pro gamers who have put together a car from scratch, who perform standup comedy, and who make a very lucrative living as a professional chef. Doesn’t seem like they could do any of this if all their time was spent in their mother’s basement playing video-games does it?

Now, I’m not going to claim that pro gamers play games less than casual gamers. This is obviously not the case. However, any pro gamer can tell you that you can only get so good playing against computer opponents. Sure, if you are looking to master a new fighting game, you can spend a night committing all the important special move commands and combos to muscle memory, but that doesn’t teach you how to use them effectively in combat. You can only really get better by playing other people (and that means losing to other people … a lot) and, get this, playing with other people is a social experience. Not only that, but it is a social experience that casual gamers routinely seek to deprive their pro gamer friends of. Every time a friend asks you if you want to play a video game and you say no because you are afraid you are going to lose, chances are he isn’t going to say “fuck you” and play the game single player. Once again it’s not the game that is important, it is the competition.

Pro gamers, contrary to popular belief, are very social people. They don’t actually spend their entire lives slaving over a PS3. In fact, half of the time pro gamers only seem anti-social, because they are ostracized from social groups. Yes, sometimes pro gamers choose a game over a social group that doesn’t want to play said game, but honestly it’s quite unfair to have them make that choice in the first place. Pro gamers only get better at games when they play against other people. So why is it that pro gamers end up splitting from casual gamers? If it isn’t a matter of time, then shouldn’t both gamers increase in skill at the same speed? Pro and casual gamers generally start out playing games against each other after all.

When all is said and done, it is actually a matter of attitude. Over the course of my non-scientific study of how casual and pro gamers react to each other, I introduced BlazBlue to my playgroup. As stated in my last article we all started out at the same level with no info and mostly button mashing. Then, slowly I saw play styles change. I saw the pro gamer group start to play with trial and error. If a particular tactic wasn’t working for them, they switched up tactics and tried to find one that worked. They focused and tried to figure out just what buttons performed which moves, and which situations those moves would be good in. They lost, a lot, in their quest to find effective counter strategies, but when everything was said and done, they became much better players because of it.

The clinical definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly in the same circumstances and expecting a different outcome. When I looked at the casual gaming group, I could only describe their actions as “insane.” The casual gamers would find one or two good moves, and use them in all circumstances. They won quite a bit in the beginning but as time went on and counter strategies were developed, they, for some reason, continued to use these same one or two good moves. They started to believe that there was something wrong with the controller, or perhaps that the characters their opponents were playing were broken and unbalanced. They never once thought that, maybe the problem was that they weren’t trying to learn … at least not until they were losing 9 times out of 10.

It turns out that your individual attitude toward every match you play seriously effects how good you become. When all was said and done, both the casual gamer sand the pro gamers in my playgroup had played the same amount of matches over a several months and the pro gamers still ended up better than the casual gamers. One casual gamer described his experience, as “it’s just a matter of who can press buttons quicker, it’s no fun, there is no strategy to it.” On the other hand, a pro gamer said “sometimes you just have to lose 20 times in a row to finally get the timing down.” In short, the pro gamers were using every match to try and figure out more about the game. Each match was an opportunity to learn, while the casual gamers were looking for the shortest path to victory.

I don’t want to throw the words “bad sportsmanship” around again … buuuuut …

I’m sure talent also factors into the equation. You wouldn’t go up to Peyton Manning and say “Psssh, I could play football as good as you if I spent as much time on it as you do, but I have better things to do.” No. Peyton Manning took time to hone is craft, and although he may have started on the high-school football field, he got better and better till he became a pro. Peyton Manning also has a life, outside of football, and I am sure people didn’t criticize him for doing nothing but throwing the football to himself in his mother’s back yard when he was a kid.

I guess my point is, if you aren’t looking to get better when you play video-games, then maybe you aren’t a gamer. No one is going to hold it against you just don’t like to play video-games. But, it’s not the pro gamer’s fault for beating you all the time. It just isn’t. You just simply aren’t trying hard enough. If you don’t want to spend the effort to get better at a game, that is fine too, but expect to lose, or stop playing the game. Playing a game happily as long as there is no one better than you in the room, and then quitting before they get a game in, well, that’s just mean.

Of course, it would be a lot easier to avoid these situations if pro gamers simply had a place to hang out with other pro gamers. So tune in next time for Part 3: The Death of the Arcade.