Identifying Motivators / Why Play Melee

Identifying Motivators / Why Play Melee

Why you want to play melee influences how you can best play melee.

You can play melee for fun, for mastery, for achievement, to learn, to invent, for the social dynamic, etc. Any reason that you want to.
ALL of these are viable reasons to play. They are also attached to different systems of prioritization. As such, the best advice for each type of player would be different.

Sometimes, well-meaning individuals create unnecessary roadblocks for other people because they don’t discern or ask about their motivations. It’s easy to imagine a more competitive individual degrading a Yoshi main for not “playing to win,” or “wasting their time” but actually the personal prioritization places “achievement” lower than another aspect of competition such as “mastery.”

Similarly, we can imagine a Ganondorf main that finds it difficult to reconcile “playing to win” with “play who you find the most fun.” Despite finding some success, the tournament grind feels like an uphill labor. Is it worth it?

Before we can solve for that kind of struggle, we have to ask ourselves, what does playing melee do for me? What need am I trying to fill? After identifying motivators, it’s easier to understand our relationship to the game.

Consider your most rewarding experiences with the game. What exactly was that emotion? What were you doing? Seriously, journal it out.

It might not have been winning. It could have been learning or even discovering new tech. It could have been experience with friends. Maybe you have a list of different experiences. But chances are there is a highlight or a theme that you can better engage with. That might mean you keep doing what you’re doing, or playing a better character, or playing more often, or playing less often if at all. Maybe it means backing away from tournaments and all-inning on a tangent like TOing. You have to consider. Why commit to a process that isn’t fulfilling? Why not better engage with the parts that are?

Despite what I think is a prevalent subtextual expectation, “play to win” isn’t a fix-all. Achievement isn’t the sole good of competition. It can actually be misleading insofar as it conflicts with (rather than enables) a stronger motivation.

As such, judging the worth of your experience and orienting your behavior solely around your results is perhaps unnecessary. What is necessary is of course for you to decide. Whatever you come up with, try not to use it as an excuse for laziness. Instead, try to tailor your involvement to better achieve what you really want!