Defend is Underrated
A post for the gamers
Like all cool guys, I used to swordfight in public parks with slender foam bats. You make the bats by taking a golf club and using postal tape to condense a pool noodle around it, then wrap the whole thing in some pantyhose.
A beginner’s duel is each person with one sword, like in the movies. But you can get fancy by using both your hands. My preferred style in my high school heyday was called Florentine: a sword in each hand. Mostly because it made me feel like Ganondorf in Wind Waker. The coolest Ganondorf.
But a sword and shield kicks Florentine’s ass. Tower shields were legal, and those covered almost the entire vulnerable area. But even a little buckler could easily deflect its fair share of attacks.
I never got the hang of shields. It felt… not like cheating, exactly, but there was a frustration fighting a shield that bled over into the idea of using one. Like, isn’t the point the sword? Isn’t defense an annoying but inevitable epicycle on the real game, the fountain of fun, attacking?
But I’m a hypocrite, of course. Because I spent way more time on another activity, versus swordfighting in the park. And there I loved the shield.
In Super Smash Bros, a shield is a big bubble that covers your character’s entire body. Bowser is pictured here shielding against Mario’s impolite headbutt.
Like in park swordfights, the shield is Super Smash Bros is powerful. It blocks almost everything. And apart from the very first game in the series, where you’re stunned for a while in your shield (and so shields are not great), you can drop your shield and counterattack whenever you want.
I’m out of practice at Smash Bros these days, but I can still beat casual players by shielding a lot. Few people will call shields “cheap” or consider their repeated use “spamming,” even poor sports who would complain if you used the same attack over and over again. Shielding is almost invisible. It’s hard to notice. Until you get used to using it, it doesn’t register as an option. When you see little kids play, they never shield, and may not even know what that button does.
It doesn't do damage! What’s the point?
Or take RPGs. These are single player, so there’s no opponent to get subtly annoyed with you. But defend commands tend to be overpowered, and also ignored. I remember one action role playing game I played, I somehow failed to notice that defending blocked absolutely everything, with no downsides, until the final level. The whole game, I’d relied on precise dodge timings, because defense was invisible. It didn’t do anything.
In turn based RPGs, defend sometimes just reduces damage for a turn, but if you understand an enemy’s attack pattern, reducing damage on the correct turn is the whole ballgame. Yet it’s tough to remember defend is even an option, despite its dedicated UI element.
I’m not sure if there’s a deep psychological lesson here. Maybe to pay attention to actions that don’t obviously further your core objective, rather than insisting on scoring points with every move. Maybe to model your opponent as much as or more than you model yourself; my favorite fighting game tip is that you should be looking at the other guy’s character more than you’re looking at your own, since you can control your character’s actions and thus know what they’ll be doing. Maybe to think more about the Ancient Greeks, who taught the world this lesson with their phalanx.
But mostly this post is for the gamers. And so the lesson is simple. Defend!