The team fights threatened to start, as the damn Skylanders couldn’t make up their mind.
“Back on defense guys,” I said. “Let them do it to themselves.”
They knew what was up. It was like they had agreement to not work together. Maybe they were getting into their late semester partying mood way too early. It was 2 weeks to Thanksgiving or so and maybe they just got past their midterms. I mentally noted to check with the manager, knowing it was unlikely that was the issue. What was going to be going on was me keeping us in a holding pattern in the defensive position.
At the same time, I had to allow for the possibility that they were going to need to go in and start team fights before the 10-minute mark. Now we were still in close to the end of round one. We were tied on kills, neither side having any, so it made sense for us to start to expand our potential. It also made sense for us to mess with them.
It was just going to take Esther killing their jungle or one of their other guys to really unsettle them.
I had to remember that three of the people that were playing again were in the last game and they knew what we did. So maybe that was leaking out somewhere between them.
After all, I didn’t have a bug in the air of The Skylander team when they went on their intermission and had their team chat. They might as well be that the guys that left took the new guys aside and told him what was up. I looked over to see what they were doing with Wyrm Haven. It looked like whichever one that guy was; I think was a jungle that he was having a way better time there than he was with us.
God bless America and these gen z kids with the absolute faith that they will make a killing playing a video game when they divide their attention between two or more of them.
It’s almost like they were brought up on videos of other people playing games and seeing let’s plays. I saw a study the other day that said that people played less than they watched. Let’s play. This confused me, but then I remembered all the time that I’d sat to watch someone play just to get the technique down and then try to do that in execution multiple times. I will not say that I’m the best player for this to be the example, but I am a person and what is sometimes true for one person can be sometimes true for another person and maybe people lied on the study. Maybe they just noted what was going on and did the thing.
They were Two towers deep when the team fights properly started. I shifted my strategy to attack. I could see that it was round two, and the harassment began. The campaign of continued harassment was a thing of beauty. It wasn’t just the full court press. It was the knowledge that we were doing this and that we had done this before and now gotten them in between a tower and a mass of enemies. They were about to get squeezed.
If it turned out that a little squeeze was all they needed, we would make some juice. The entire team jumped out from the jungle, snagging two early stuns on their tank and their support. They focused on the fire.
Unfortunately, they were right outside of range of where I wanted them to be for the tower to hit the Skylanders. Still, it was impressive how quickly they split. After 10 seconds, we had our first gank and within 20 our second. Unsurprisingly, it was Esther who got both.
Then Murph racked up a kill, because of course you did. When one guy ran over a mind area that he had set upright prior. It had been a long shot, and he had made the shot. And I was so grateful for that. It wasn’t a full team wipe, but it was damn close as the last two somehow got out.
And I must credit the enemy here for doing us a favor. Immediately, Esther went and respect her character with all new armor and weapons befitting her kills. It was exactly the thing you needed in the endgame. So it was that due. To their ill plan team fight, she was riding high on the hog way before we’d even sign the lease for a hog farm. I knew that if I looked over at her, I would see her match rating at 10:00. She was good. She was one of the greats I played with.
But damn, did she have an ego the size of a Mack truck when she was on a winning streak?
It was totally endearing and probably the cutest thing about her.
I checked the patch again to see and yep; they had changed their tactic again from attack defense, probably since three of them were recovering back at their base. I was going to let Rachel guide this one.
I mentally nudged her to take towers.
There was enough minion-on-minion action halfway down that was just evolving into no experience and no forward momentum because of the steam fight taking place. True, we had killed three of theirs, but they have destroyed two of our towers and gotten close to getting the third down. It was one of those things that took time to sink in.
The money that you got from defeating a tower was slightly less than the money you got from. Basically, just doing regular farming was good, but it wasn’t a gank.
One kill gave you 400 or more gold pieces. Increasing bounties might bring 800 gold to your wallet.
That stuff added up, especially after two kills when you might get a bonus for getting a double kill or triple kill. God forbid somebody got a Penta kill where they wiped the whole team.
Five kills? It’s a game on.
They could just move into their end game equipment right away or, better yet, based on where they should be at that point in time. Move to take there the opponent’s space.
It might be me thinking that they were better than they were. After all, their match ratings were poor. But I wanted to give the Skylanders a benefit of the doubt. They were shaking that first battle and when I turned us back to the slow work of just slowly pushing up, known objected. They waited for another minute or two before heading towards dragon. Usually this starts another team fight. I was surprised when the announcement that came over the game that let everyone know that the dragon was being attacked.
I checked, and all their lanes were emptied. One by one, their avatars showed up trying to steal dragon from the outside. Of course, my guys had planned for this with Murph leading another mind and just the wrong position for them.
Honestly, it was sad for them that they had phones for the same thing again. It wasn’t the same, but it was one of those things where it was a stun, a slow and a damage over time that crept up on you. Especially when Murph realized that if he stunned the guy with another skill, he would be nearly locked down for about six seconds.
Now I don’t need to be a man with intimacy issues to tell you that six seconds is a very long time.
It is not.
It is, however, an extremely long time when you’re trying to escape being attacked and you cannot. The whole team got an assist for that one which I’m going to be honest made me smirk. It was a great feeling to see that kind of effort put in when I knew that they were going to be in top shape for the finals.
You know at that point where the inevitable snowball starts to form and you just letting it happen?
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
We had reached that point about fifteen minutes in. We were up five kills. They were not even up towers anymore and I could really see the defeat on their faces. I could have taken this opportunity to shift our strategy into attack. Really, I could have. But I wanted to milk this out a little more if not from my points for their training opportunity. If we got to twenty minutes, this would be a an easy open and shut case. If we got the thirty minutes, then it would be better than that.
We were not going to make it to thirty minutes. They were falling far behind just as fast as we got ahead.
I checked the match ratings of the other team and they’d all reset down to three save the jungle and support who had gone down to seven. Ours hadn’t changed, meaning that this was about them, not about us.
Look, I understand some people have performance anxiety or they have problems showing up on game day. But if you’re going to come to us, you had better bring your A game.
With the game in the bag, I let Rachel take over. True, I saw Esther as a leader, but Rachel had been their coach. It was going to be the last 5 minutes of the game, anyway.
I could sacrifice that experience If I really had to, even if the patch would not assume that she was in charge. It would not change anything significant.
It was just that I wanted her to think that she was in charge and have her make the decisions. It built character, but more importantly, it made her more competent.
If you think of the decisions that are potentially available to you in a game like DOTA, then you’re thinking about what the optimal thing is for a team to do at a time and when to do it versus what they should be doing.
At all times, they should be defending lanes and or farming mostly unless they’re going for dragon or if they’re going for a gank or something like that. Those are situational.
At the endgame, when everyone’s fully powered up and walking around ready to kill, that’s when it gets shakier.
If I was to draw a graph of the choices, one could make it would start going from a branching path of two or three or four in the first round to something in the twenties and the second round to a wiry mess of decisions well into the one hundred for the final round where the game would take over based on the previous choices made and how that interacted with reality.
We had a bias here towards practical work that would get the game done. It was just like my classes. I had a bias towards practical work. First theory later so that you got the Hands-On experience that would let you understand why I was teaching theory.
What is the theory of business anyway on anybody? Someone in the back? No?
I’m not going to bore you with the theory of business. Suffice to say there’s no reason to teach it. That would be like teaching history at a Plumbers school. There’s a time and a place for that and it’s later and through the medium of a YouTube historian with undiagnosed autism.
Sure, it’s nice to understand why things happen, but why don’t we just teach that at the end after you have developed all the necessary hands-on skills and can explain how things change and why you will see a terrible mess when you enter a house built in the 1960s or earlier. I don’t know why I busted out that example, but I could imagine a house built before the civil rights at having two separate but equal bathrooms.
It really is a great way to figure out if you’re going to a college that’s going to help you or if you’re going to college. That’s just trying to educate you. If you don’t leave a college with practical skills or a resume or a portfolio based on what you’ve already done, and it’s going to be hard for you to come out and interact with the real world. The more that you get, the more reps you put in, the more I feel you get out of it.
I didn’t leave the area, but I started looking at the guys playing Wyrm Haven and seeing if that might be something that I could get into.
My breath caught.
From out of the corner of my eye. I thought I saw a little white beard atop a professorial tweed jacket. It had those holes in the arms that really reminded you that this guy didn’t really lift a finger to do anything in his personal life, ever. If anything, he let things sit for way too long. The brown jacket overlaid a red Christmassy vest with blue and green satin that had to be seasonally appropriate.
It was him.
I have been looking for him all semester. Trying to figure out if he was real My imagination and if he was real, I was going to be asking him some very pointed questions about why the heck he had chosen to do something. So ridiculous to me.
I checked the game. We were winning handily. I checked on him. Everything is fiber of my being. Wanted to go over there and talk to him. But then I remembered I was the driver.
Rachel, can you watch the rest of the game? I got to talk to this guy over here; I said.
Sure Professor, Rachel said. Let me put my manager's hat on.
I kept him in my field division as I turned. He was not going to get a chance to disappear. When I looked away. The fact was that he was playing in the Wyrm Haven games, and it looked like he was crushing whoever he was playing against.
Next to him, a poor little white boy who had to be no older than eighteen looked as if the man had explained in detail why his dog had to be taken out back and shot.
They were both playing together, leaning in, but I could almost feel the life leaving his opponent.
Either that or my guy was just giving him a different reason to hate himself.
The way it was set up was that they had two laptops set up back-to-back so that the screens were facing the opposite direction. That was one game. At least five pairs of gamers were actively playing.
There was a row about ten of these booths set up and then a referee or two that was milling about, checking and making sure that no tom foolery was going on. Because of the low requirements of the game, they could use computers that what otherwise have not been possible for a higher spec game like the one that we were playing.
Look, I love me a card game, but there’s no reason in the world for that computer to be the same specs as the one that was playing a five-person team versus another five-person team on a live 3D game. It just doesn’t need it.
There’s this concept in Business, “Actionable”. When I say actionable, what I mean is that you can use the thing towards some concrete goal. Seeing that man there, looking like Jamaican rum ad Santa Claus, was an actionable item. I needed to speak with him desperately, and I found my legs drawing me ever closer.
He was just quietly devastating his opponent. I couldn’t take my eyes off his screen. Something about it drew me to see that his hand was like a hand of all aces. There was a little red glow that led me to believe that there was some magical fuckery going on.
The man had given me an usb drive that had ostensibly given me an aneurysm or unspeakable eldritch powers.
He was, naturally, playing a horse deck against his opponent’s dragon deck and he was mopping the floor with him. It wasn’t so much that he was a better player. It was like his deck was stacked.
---
So I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you here today, I said.
I’m not wondering that at all.
Are you surprised that I made it this far? I asked.
“I’m not surprised. You guys are doing good. You started strong at the beginning of the season and stuck with it.”
He hadn’t yet lifted his eyes up from the screen.
“You’ve been keeping track of us?” I asked.
He finally turned to lock eyes with me. It was like staring down the school principal.
“Oh, I’m a huge fan of the Bulldogs,” he said, emphasizing the word huge.
“Oh really,” I said. “Then maybe you can explain about that USB drive you gave me the last time we met.”
“Oh, that’ll be getting up the game too early,” he said.
I looked across the way. His opponent plays another card. It showed up almost meeting on our side and yet he was not doing very well.
“Look,” I said. “I don’t have enough time to rake you over the coals when I would like an explanation. I feel like I’m due an explanation.”
“You might feel you do an explanation, but I don’t think that you’re going to get a satisfactory one. I’m not one of your exes that you can track down and ask what you did wrong.”
How he kept his eyes locked on me as the game continued, I might never know. Having never gone after an ex because of unsatisfactory performance, I was content to let that statement slide. He was going to have to dig a little deeper if he wanted to hurt me.
“Just tell me you did some sangoma bullshit and leave it at that. Did you do some sangoma bullshit? Because I would really like to know. “
“You know as well as I do that you need to play the game in order to reap the rewards,” he said carefully.
Well, that wasn’t cryptic as fuck. Of course, he would say something like that.
“Hey great talk,” he said, clicking a button and winning the game. “I’ve got to go.”
I put one hand on my shoulder. “Just tell me one thing.”
“It’s not a brain tumor,” he said.
My shoulders sagged. I can feel my hand on him as he got up and made to leave. I took a few deep powerful breaths to Center myself and then looked up to find that he had fully disappeared.
Because of course he did.
I was really going to ask myself some quick, tricky questions about what I wanted him to answer the next time I saw him. Because of course it would be great if he was paying attention and actually gave me a usable response instead of telling me it wasn’t brain cancer. Like howdy, reached into my thoughts and drawn out that conclusion or have you just been there listening in from the next room over when I went to get my MRI done?
I turned back to see the Bulldogs cheering. Clearly, we had won.
Our match against the Skylanders that was over, but whatever had happened with Jamaican St. Nick? It wasn’t over.