Speaking in Smash Tongues (The Ladder to Progress)
Vermanubis - May 24, 2017With the exception of those raised as feral children, we all speak a language; even those of us to whom our own native language and how we acquired it is still a mystery have some concept of grammar and what it means. Grammar gets a little too much glory though. Grammar is the connective tissue of language, but connective tissue is useless without something to connect and frequently overshadows an equally important facet of language.
When you learn a new language, you have two distinct phases: the grammar phase and the locutionary phase. The grammar phase is conceptual and academic; you learn the conceptual framework of the language and how to structure its content. The locutionary phase is the content. Consider the following sentence: “It is pleasing to me to play Smash!”
This sentence is grammatically sound but to native English speakers it just sounds really, really weird. A proper locution would be “I like to play Smash!” So, the rules of grammar are cast in stone, but how do you know if something sounds awkward in another language? The short answer: you don’t. While you can, in theory, learn the grammar of a language in a single night, proper locution is 100% arbitrary and must be learned piece-by-piece over a long period of time.
Now frame all of that mess around Smash. You see, Smash is a lot like language, and with those similarities come similar frustrations, especially for lower-to-intermediate-level players. When learning a new language, few things will pull the rug out from under your enthusiasm to learn than repeatedly embarrassing yourself with errors you simply couldn’t have known were errors until after the fact. It is important to italicize this point because it’s difficult to overstate that to a large degree, many of the mistakes we make as players are mistakes we must make to know they're mistakes!
As with language, Smash has two distinct phases: the conceptual phase, wherein we see discrete, marked level-ups and the “locutionary” phase, wherein we have to lovingly labor towards our fluency one new situation at a time. In fact, we could almost venture to call the “locutionary” phase of Smash the metagame: a sort of “climate” that describes what we expect in a given context that is not bound by hard and fast rules, but through experience.
As a natural corollary to this, the notion that people simply discover “the way” overnight is fantasy. This applies to all levels of play, especially mid-to-high level. There is no easily digestible, elegant sort of “singularity” according to which all Smash knowledge and talent will descend upon you, just as there is no way short of communicating with native speakers of a language to learn a natural-sounding manner of speaking. Even with the most superior conceptual understanding of the game, you must still pay your dues of acquainting yourself to conceptually irreducible situations -- in other words, you have to buckle down and commit to improving one new situation at a time. You could call this your “vocabulary.” Your grammar is how you frame these situations and your vocabulary is the content of that situation; you must build your vocabulary piece by piece.
To wit, imagine trying to pressure Sheik at the ledge. Say you don’t expect a ledgehop bouncing fish and you either get hit or flub a punish. That’s a niche, albeit significant, situation such that when you begin to add all such situations up, you wind up with meaningful progress. It’s sort of like watching hair grow. You’ll never detect it in a fluid continuum, but in discrete chunks over time.
This, of course, isn’t to say that brief bursts of conceptual progress can’t still punctuate the incremental monotony of which I speak. But the fact remains that many people struggle to break their ceiling by jumping, when in fact you must sometimes get there using a ladder. There is, after all, a reason we say competitive edge and not competitive Howitzer (though I do like that one better).
My name is Vermanubis and I am one of three of the Unholy Triumvirate of worst Ganondorf players in the world. If my Kindergarten-level writing hasn't scared you off, and you would, in fact, enjoy reading even more of it in the future, then allow me to direct you to my Twitter: twitter.com/Vermanubis
If you're curious about me as a player, then allow me to direct you to my Youtube: Tourney sets, FG series -- Youtube
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