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Mark Twain's Hot Take on Smash Brothers

  • Writer: Aidan J
    Aidan J
  • Jan 7, 2019
  • 3 min read

Super Smash Brothers: Ultimate came out about a month ago now. It’s really fun. Surprise! If you could play as a crocodile, destroy a suspension bridge, and proceed to throw a giant monkey down the gaping chasm, you have a recipe for a good video game.


There's a lot of characters that you get to beat up. This is 1/6th of the total cast.

The other part of Smash (as the game is so affectionately called) is the competitive scene. Most players care about getting better at the video game, so they could face better opponents, so they can get better at the video game, so they can, uh, face better opponents. Eventually, they become so good that people pay them to play the video game, and they start making brand deals for gaming peripherals such as headphones and chairs and such. It’s the same story with many other games as well, such as the ever-popular League of Legends, or the first-person shooter, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.


I'm working on my photoediting skills. I have to say, they're coming along pretty well.

I became heavily invested in the latter competitive eSport. I’ve played Counter-Strike for forever, spending way too many hours trying to move my mouse more efficiently and learning strategies to win more games. I became pretty good, hovering around the 96th percentile, and considering I was a young teen, that was great. But the game became BORING.


I no longer had fun with the game. Losing a match made me angry, winning a match made me feel normal. It sounds like an addiction, coupled with the fact that I thought I could stop at any time, but I just did not want to. However, eventually, I gained the ability to play a couple games with friends and then stop for a while—I don’t relapse, and so I think labeling it as an addiction is disingenuous. Instead, I think an excerpt from Mark Twain can explain why this happened with a competitive video game.


I don’t know if it’s an official title, but my source calls it “Two Ways of Seeing a River.” Twain writes about the river losing its beauty as soon as he unveils the mystery.


“Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!”

While the whole passage is beautiful, and I’ll link it down below, this quote is all I need to get across my point. Whenever we attempt to master an activity, whether it be sailing down the Mississippi or playing video games, we lose the wonder it inspires within us.


Mark Twain is so cool!

I think we all desire to become better at whatever we’re doing. When we hear a brilliant guitar solo, we feel compelled to pick up a guitar and learn at least a couple chords. Most of the time, we only learn a couple of chords and stop short of learning the part, making us discontent. We also build up a tolerance to other performances of the song. Suddenly, there are so many more bad musicians, while only a select few guitarists can make you happy. From this natural desire, we make ourselves less happy.


This post was a long way of saying that I do not care about getting better at Smash. I want to play the game and have fun, not enter a fugue state where I watch a bunch of videos on how to get better and invest hundreds to thousands of hours in the game.


I would suggest that, if you have not made a New Years resolution, you think about how this subject applies to your own life.

For the small amount of people who care about seeing the full passage, you can find it at this thoughtco article:

https://www.thoughtco.com/two-ways-of-seeing-a-river-by-mark-twain-1688773


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