Here’s a question: What are the rules of a pickup basketball game?
If I were to answer this I’d probably start by listing some things out of the official basketball rule book: No double-dribbling, layups are worth 2 points, that kinda thing. But imagine I kept going, writing down as many rules as I could think of for as long as I could. Eventually we’d run out of these ‘official game mechanic’ sort of rules and hit a stratum of extra administrative-type ‘house rules’, e.g. how to slot our 12-20 participants into this 5v5 sport (do some folks sit out for a game? Do we make 2 teams and let people switch off as they become tired? Do we actually just play 6v6?)
Next there’s a stratum of ‘etiquette’ type rules. These might seem too soft/social to be official rules—we’re more used to thinking of them as “norms”—yet in practice they’re the most important constraints on our behavior, as they deal with the feelings players have during a match (which are quite important to enjoying a sport). These are rules like: Which fouls shall be de-facto permitted within our match versus which are truly off-limits? Are we allowed to do a spicy trash-talking celebratory thing after we score, or would that be in poor taste?
Beyond THIS there are even further subtleties, like what we’re all expected/allowed to say while chilling with teammates on the sidelines. Do we offer helpful pointers, or is that too confrontational? Do we get to speak critically about other people’s play while they’re out of earshot? To what extent are we practicing our skills versus giving a performance of those skills? (In other words: Are we permitted to DEMAND excellence from ourselves/others, as during some important tournament, or are we really here to create a forgiving positive vibe?)
At some point during the course of this exercise we’ll pass beyond the limit of ‘Official Pickup Basketball Rules!’ and into more generalized social life stuff. It’s tempting to think that the further we get from “layups -> 2 points”, the less the rules matter; yet I think these less mechanical ones are pretty crucial, and it matters a lot how many we include/exclude. It’s important for plenty of reasons (how the game will be learned and taught, how it will be documented & historicized, how it will transmit across society) but for now let’s focus on a single one: How the game will be adapted, into an ‘e-sport’ a.k.a. videogame.
Depending on how much we include within the official experience of ‘playing basketball’, we’ll wind up with a variety of extremely divergent videogame adaptations. Certain things will stay the same—there will surely be 3 point shots, and dribbling, and bouncy inflated balls—yet let’s consider subtler features, such as online matchmaking. Imagine if, as part of our design process, we stipulated players should arrange into small communities (wherein people encounter the same set of teammates/opponents every week).
This is what the pickup sports experience is like! So if I’m the lead designer on this adaptation project, I can easily claim that small cohorts are CORE to the pickup sports experience. It’s CORE to start out playing both with and against someone; to learn their tendencies, what they’re good/bad at and ultimately how best to play with them (whether on their team OR on the opposite team).
I can easily claim that in pickup sports it’s CORE to put other players’ styles in conversation with your own. You spend half these games on the bench, studying how people play and talking about that with your teammates. You learn very quickly what good players can do (and what poorer players will likely do instead). You learn to watch people’s eyes move as plays are taking shape: watch them spring into motion at the exact moment for which they’ve been hunting. You come to really KNOW when that specific person wants to break right and try getting past you. Sometimes you learn to use that same sorta move against others; & in this way, a game’s culture can start to take root.
There are many benefits to having this type of familiarity in your game. Sports become physically safer when you know how every person moves: Knowing when Person X is about to do their ‘heroic’ blind sprint down the middle allows you to avoid space conflicts + unexpected impacts (which is how the worst injuries occur). Another benefit to familiarity is that the game becomes SOCIALLY safer. You quickly figure out who it’s fun to talk trash with, versus who dislikes doing that. You figure out who’s down for competitive physical conflict, who prefers lower-speed/lower-impact, who prefers the latter until they get excited & so on.
Having fun with other people can sometimes be hard work; & in the thousands of pickup sports games I’ve played, this truth has always been acknowledged + acted upon. Now, I’m not calling it utopian; all things happen in the context of society, so problems like sexism & racism & cliquishness & bullying always barge their way in. I will claim something more limited, however: When people requested extra considerations e.g. a new safety precaution, I’ve known these communities to move a bit and at least TRY accommodating the request (a common one in my life has been KEEP YOUR FUCKIN HOCKEY STICKS DOWN).
A smaller community with stable-enough membership can be acted on over time. It can improve! We can improve it.
The coolest thing about these pickup sports games lies in the ‘pickup’ approach itself: in the house rules & social norms, the anarchistic negotiation with other players over repeat sessions. Such forms of mediation should be attractive, I think, to any game designer out there. Direct sustained human contact is like cultural broadband: Ideas about how to have fun with a game can transmit very quickly, & ‘immersion’ can happen almost as a byproduct of interacting with immersed people. It encourages the formation of strong attachments; and attachments, as game designers know, can be lucrative.
What’s interesting to me is that all these social rules I describe are never actually included within today’s e-sports products. Instead they opt for a whole different strategy: EXCLUDING familiarity & associated mechanics from the bounds of their official experience. Players in these games don’t group into cohorts or communities; instead it’s a big sea of millions of competitors, with pairings remaining largely anonymous. Everybody queues up with their 0-5 friends inside a ‘quickplay lobby’, or else for ‘ranked mode’, & they wait to get paired with random opponents/teammates they’ve never seen before, & they expect never to see those people afterward.
I should mention that the folks who make these videogames are extremely smart! The strategy they pursue is valid, & has many of its own benefits. If this were a coffee table at GDC I’d no longer even be speaking to you; some bigshot person would be loudly talking over me, explaining all about how players really value the instantaneous/effortless experience of pressing a ‘quickplay’ button to receive some reliable & consistent game experience (which it is our quasi-religious duty as gamedevs to provide, etc etc, blah blah blah). Well okay GDC person, those are all very loud & valid points.
If we weren’t at GDC and instead were on Twitter, we could all be talking about oppressive structures inherent within realworld pickup sports, & highlighting those folks whose experiences create a preference for anonymized Overwatch-style matchmaking (perhaps as a personal protective measure). I’m down for that. Those are good & valid points!
If we were on a game enthusiast podcast we could yack about how nobody should be subjected to social engagement of any kind outside their little multiplayer lobby (because everyone on the internet is basically an asshole) & so anonymized matchmaking fully achieves the separation gamers crave! I’m not going to listen to that podcast because it sounds slightly boring to me, but sure: There’s yet another valid line of argument.
I think anonymized matchmaking has its own way of forming attachments, & I think almost everybody has good reasons for preferring this present status quo to whatever alternatives exist.
But isn’t that true about everything? & how good actually is this version we currently use?
Here’s a fun thought experiment. Let’s imagine what it would be like if we adapted Overwatch-style matchmaking from videogameland back into meatspace pickup sports. Rather than people showing up before the game and awkwardly doing chitchat, let’s make something more Overwatch: Let’s say a squad of four gamedevs carry you to the gym atop some fancy futuristic palanquin, with screens that blind you to whomever your teammates/opponents will soon be.
You already told these developers which position you wanted to play, so they blindfold you and walk you out to the part of the court where you’re supposed to start (the blindfold has a ‘loading…’ bar painted in Undark along its inner side). After they’re done setting everyone up, a whistle sounds: You all rip your blindfolds off at the same time, 5 seconds before the match is about to start. You quickly size up your teammates, making a bunch of wild & random guesses about them based on zero information. You quickly size up your opponents. Then the match begins, and now you’ve got to play sports for no longer than 25 minutes!
You probably had different teammates the last time around, so when you pass the ball to whichever new person you’ll be using speeds/angles that were tuned for another context. Say that throws somebody off: Say the pass fails, and your team loses possession of the ball. This is a huge problem for you, as a gamer, because you now have 5–10 seconds in which it’s possible to think about what just happened. Did somebody ‘fuck up’ here? Did you ‘fuck up’ your throw? Did they ‘fuck up’ their catch? If the two of you are out of sync, was it just about the slight difference in tuning? Or is there a difference in skill playing out?
(In videogame terms, you’d like to know: Is that person “BAD”? Are you in fact “BAD”? Is anybody in this situation “BAD”? Goddamnit, surely someone has to be.)
No one in this match is ever gonna speak with any other person for the rest of their lives, so you’ll never learn the answers to any of your questions. Instead it’s best to just make a wild assumption based on zero information. Like, if you want you can scowl and shout “Learn 2 receive a fucking pass!”
This will force your teammate to defend themselves, using a wild-ass assumption of their own. You can expect a friendly response from them, along the lines of “Learn to give one you fucking [slur]!”
Lots of people will choose to shout things like this, all the time, & this shouting shall become a hallmark personal interaction for the whole entire sport. Everyone who plays it will come to know about & deal with the stress of angry shouting. And yet, all the powerful people around you promoting this sport as a product will act like hostile interactions don’t matter (or are negligible, or some unfortunate ‘bug’ within this intellectual property they claim to own). These people can only emphasize the good parts of their mostly-anonymized arrangement; they’ll downplay horrible conduct as ‘something for which noone important is responsible’, & they’ll issue a bunch of official-sounding excuses as to why their various policies cannot change. They’ll readily admit that abuse does happen, & that it happens all the fucking time. Yet they’ll discount the idea of abuse as a core part of their official game experience (since, being rich/powerful, they’re used to verbally dictating which aspects of reality are ‘officially what happens in our product/on our property!’ vs which are magically excluded & supposed to be ignored).
Maybe you play Overwatch, or something similar. Maybe you judge my story too fatalistic; maybe for you it’s a fine game to play, making all my complaints seem overblown!
I think you’d be correct to state that indeed, a typical game of Overwatch is 100% fine. In the grand distribution of every quickplay match that’s ever taken place, there’s a big fat bell curve of ‘fine’ ones down the middle (with some awful ones on the left and a handful of excellent ones on the right). The bell curves look nice, and the bell curves look normal; whichever very-smart design person can show you a million bell curves and explain all about how they’ve defined this ‘abuse’ thing out of existence. Abuse always hides inside bell curves, y’know what I mean? I could play 100 Overwatch games, and 99 of those will surely be 100% fine. The problem, I’m afraid, is that harassment isn’t something we can measure in terms of ‘total minutes endured’. Shitty interactions don’t end once the person’s mouth finally shuts. They tend to make you feel shitty for a long while afterwards, right?
I remember being stuck in one ranked Overwatch game with this guy who seemed basically to be the realworld equivalent of Leo from Twin Peaks. Picture a vindictive screamy person, but not the crackly-voiced 12 year old kind. This guy sounds like an adult. He has the practiced dramatic delivery of a Hollywood actor: he’s spent quite some time observing abusive parenting techniques, if you get what I’m suggesting. Off-brand Leo from Twin Peaks starts his monologue at the 30 second mark of the match (which is pretty early in an Overwatch match). “You did that wrong. Hey, you DID that wrong. What, nothing to say? Is this how you conduct yourself? IS THIS HOW YOU ACT AROUND PEOPLE? YOU JUST FUCKING DO THAT??”
Leo goes from zero to 100 so quickly that it feels like he’s come here specifically for the purpose of going 0-100. He’s convinced that I committed some grave Overwatch sin, yet it’s unclear whether he knows how to play Overwatch himself (most of these ‘you fucked up!’ guys seem ignorant to basic gameplay concepts, if I’m being perfectly honest).
One thing this guy does understand is how to berate & belittle me for no reason while I’m helpless to exit the match (games like this seldom punish acts of abuse but ALWAYS punish leaving the match early). It’s an intense experience to just saddle me with, y’know what I’m saying? I’ve never seen this guy before, but for the next 3-15 minutes it’s like Blizzard makes me into his case worker.
Obviously Jeff Kaplan or whichever corporate wordfaceman can sit around explaining how the company’s ‘moderation tools’ have been 99% effective at keeping Ragey Sadderson out of my Overwatch games. Yet that’s a pretty sunny view towards the data, and towards the overall problem! Because again, moments this intense don’t stop existing once the match completes: They linger in memory, and they change our outlook. They make us question our safety within the online social environment; they caution us to be on guard against everyone, and to distrust basically any kind of speech. They make us keenly aware of the people NOT talking during matches (I suspect for fear of drawing abuse). They add layers of tension to every possible discussion we could have with any teammate going forward. Should I try to suggest a new team composition, I’d expect some response along the lines of: “What do you mean -I- should change -my- character class? Maybe YOU should learn to ult properly, you fucking [slur]!”
I remember the feeling of sitting there—sunk into my desk chair, listening to Leo go on for a bit before I hit the mute button. It felt at the time like he really wasn’t SUPPOSED to be getting away with this. My days playing meatspace pickup sports told me what should’ve happened instead. In that world, pulling flagrant aggro bullshit on a teammate for no reason is considered beyond the pale. Everybody would stop playing, the game clock stumbling to a halt as the score becomes irrelevant. A few bigger bodies would go over to de-escalate the encounter and cause ‘cooler heads to prevail’. We’d all perform the awkward non-verbal waiting game by which someone becomes nominated as ‘in charge here’, and that person would need to ask this guy to leave. Should nobody vouch for his future good behavior, he’d likely be disinvited from future games; and that, I think, would be a satisfying conclusion to the story.
What actually happened was of course that this dude got away with it, completely, and went on to shout his face off at a hundred more Overwatch teams. How many of that hundred were unable to shake it off at the end of their match? How many altered their behavior a little, to account for the probability of some asshole issuing frenzied/baseless ‘callouts’ at the drop of a hat? This I feel forms the main difference between pickup sports and Overwatch. In pickup sports it’s players who own the conditions of play: Any rule can bend in service of folks having more fun, which means lots of rules tend to bend (and often people have more fun). Overwatch’s rules are privately owned/administrated by Blizzard, which makes them incapable of flexing one millimeter; as a result, ‘fun’ within Overwatch becomes wholly detached from the need to respect other players. It’s too hard bending Overwatch to accommodate our norms; instead we ourselves change, hardening a little, and closing off from most of the players we meet.
I know there are folks out there who view hardness as being awesome, and who figure ‘git gud’ is a valid sorta sports attitude. I’d like to believe that too, I guess. But really I think those people are incorrect, and that this attitude has zero sports validity whatsoever. My evidence is very simple: Just listen to the shit people actually say during an Overwatch match. It’s not smart, or insightful; it’s usually predicated on some extremely obvious misunderstanding re: how the game even works. Nobody ever schools me on actual, practical Overwatch tactics e.g.: “Everybody needs to engage together as a group, everybody needs to attack the same target at once, and everybody needs to watch squishier teammates’ backs!”
This is just rudimentary advice that any OW expert will always give you as a way of introducing the game. It’s remained highly-relevant to every player since launch back in 2016. I’ve been playing this game weekly since then, sometimes in ranked mode but usually in quickplay (the supposed ‘pickup sports’ version of this game). Allow me to disclose something, reader: Not one single time, since the launch of this product, have I heard this kind of advice uttered within the Overwatch client.
Of course I’ve heard a ton of… other advice, over the years. People will say “We need more damage!” or “We need more healing!” which kinda SOUNDS like it might be tactical; but if we think about that for a second, we can see it really isn’t. Your healer teammates are already attempting to heal you, and your DPS are already attempting to damage opponents, so how does it help to request ‘the same thing except GOOD’? Obviously the other team is working against your success, and your team might be working against its own success. It’s a team fucking sport, and in team sports the central challenge is always coordinating & cooperating. That is the entire point of what you’re doing.
Imagine if these gamers’ sad/useless complaints were common in pickup basketball. Like, imagine you’re in a game and the other team starts beating you, so suddenly your teammate chimes in like: “Okay, my brilliant tactical plan is that we need to score a lot of points quickly! And the reason we haven’t done that yet is because Brendan fucking sucks! Okay, so that’s our plan, let’s go get ’em.”
It sounds ridiculous to me; I don’t think it would ever happen that way in meatspace. Yet this is exactly what Overwatch players do, all the time. They understand certain concepts e.g. “ultimate attacks are important”, yet they haven’t any idea of how to synchronize ults with strangers; & the resulting mix of defensiveness + ignorance goes on to create abject misery for everyone. Should you deploy your ultimate and ‘not kill enough enemies’, people claim you’re BAD at ulting. But if you hold onto your ult waiting for the perfect multi-kill situation, people whine about you never using your ult. If they disagree with your Hero choice, they’ll claim you suck at said Hero; yet seldom do folks propose a solid alternative choice (since mostly folks don’t know what a good alternative choice would be, lacking awareness of their opponents’ strategy + who their teammates are).
Always it’s just some petty accusation, devoid of constructive comment or advice. Mostly it’s a bid to affix blame onto others, and free the complainer temporarily from the constant burden to seem hard/’gud’. It gets in the way, & it makes success impossible whenever it happens, & frankly it sucks.
Why is it, do you think, that whenever I play a pickup sport people mostly make small talk + share point-scoring ideas… yet whenever I go to play Overwatch they can only howl wildly re: any perceived lack of ‘gud’? It’s sad, and gross, and I lay it at the feet of this whole anonymized matchmaking concept. Meatspaces are socially mediated, & that certainly has its problems! Yet Overwatch is antisocially mediated, and the results from that are cruel + predictable.
Once upon a time these games were all less corporate: They came with both a client and a server program, letting players build communities & invent their own house rules. I get that this seems outmoded now; maybe people are right, that this one-button quickplay thing really is more valuable than sustained social contact. But if that’s true, how come playing Overwatch doesn’t teach people good Overwatch conduct? Why do these supposedly ‘no hassle’ features force me to contend with the hassle of endless verbal abuse? And why would I actively desire for the recipient of my passes to be some new rando every damn time I throw a pass? What am I even trying to achieve out here, when I click this insta-play button and the game rips my blindfold off and I’m stuck in some arena with a bunch of hostile strangers?
Anonymized matchmaking purports to provide us with ‘the universal player’ as some infinite source of gameplay, yet it doesn’t actually provide that (because no ‘universal player’ can ever really exist). Instead it winds up providing confusion, and frustration, and a sort of cold rejection of the most human elements in sport. How much, exactly, would you say the added convenience is worth?