The Mindgame Meta - when high skill meets low skill
You're at home with a friend wondering which game you want to play.
"You up for some Street Fighter 6? It's pretty sick!", you say.
Your friend looks at you a bit scared. "Never played it, but sure."
You boot up the game, give your friend a cheap knock-off PS5 controller, and get into the character select screen.
"You can play Marisa, she's pretty easy.", you tell your friend.
They hover over her and decide to go with your suggestion.
You know you're going to absolutely wipe the floor with them, but you'll hold back a bit. Keep it interesting.
The characters face-off against each other in the loading screen, you make your character pull a funny face, because you know you can do it. Your friend doesn't, but is probably too focused on their own character and all the unfamiliar sequences.
FIGHT. You move in, ready to play footsies and dominate the neutral game. Get a hit confirm and follow-up with a 6 hit combo. Meaty them when they get up. Cross-over into a super. Wiped. Your plan falls into perfect place in your mind palace.
And yet, as soon as you walk close, your friend runs in like a total baboon and hits your character. Okay, fine. Beginner luck.
The sound of what is button mashing eminating from the crappy controller next to you. What the hell is going on?!
MARISA WINS appears on the screen while your friend laughs like a maniac. Stunned, you rematch and go in with absolute concentration.
A repeat of the previous set. Hundreds of hours down the drain and this is the result. You're done with this game. Your friend can go play story mode or something, it's fine. Play something else, even.
Almost all multiplayer games where you play against another player have some amount of depth and skill expression that you learn over time. As you play against, understand, and apply these mechanics, you will become a better player and thus climb the eternal ladder of elo/mmr/other arbitrary number based ranking system.
This number then, in theory, matches you with players of an equal skill level. They may be better at some mechanics you're not well versed in, but perhaps you're better and other mechanics. You didn't get to that rank with sheer luck.
This loop ensures that you will always be exposed to challenges, forcing you to improve if you want to climb and meet more difficult opponents.
I'd consider most of the above "hard skills", where the game tells you "you can do this". However, when you reach higher and higher ranks, "soft skills" become more and more important. What I mean with that is both strategy and getting in your opponent's heads (the mental game).
The Art of the Macro Game
To use mobas as an example for strategy, there's a lot of guides talking about the right way to play the macro game (aka map movements). Do x and y and you will win games. And yes, it probably is the most optimal way to the play the game, you'll get the most amount of gold and apply pressure around the map, forcing your opponent to do things they don't want to do. Perfect!
But what if they just don't have a concept of what the right way to play is? What if they suddenly, at a really bad moment, decide to group up and walk to your location to kill you?
It makes no sense!! They could've done so many other things that were more optimal to try and get you, the high skill player, out of the game! And yet, they did exactly that.
High skill players have an expectation of how the game should be played, and when the reality of a low skill player's strategy (or lack thereof) meets expectation is when the high skill players may ironically be beaten.
"gg ez". You feel your anger boiling. They worked 50 minutes for that win filled with insults and questionable comments, damn it! How can they even say it was easy?! You let your emotions get the better of it and write a novel of text in the post-game chat to verbally humiliate your opponent (and make yourself feel better). It doesn't work. You took the bait. You're done.
That's one type of mental game, though not the one exclusive to high skill players. But it is one that anyone can use. Wittling away at someone's mental game is, I think, a big part of how OG won the biggest tournament in Dota twice in a row. Not by typing things in games, of course, but by taunting on Twitter and by making very unconventional moves to target the "star player" of the opponents team. I mean, how would you feel if you already have a lot of pressure on you to win the mid-game for your team, and then you also get ganked and killed before the 10 minute mark? You'll start making mistakes and being predictable by sticking to what you know. Creativity goes out the window.
You may think these are underhanded strategies, but for any competitive game and sport, not tilting is always part of the game. I think it is simply another layer of competitiveness. Keeping your cool is an art on its own.
A dependency on the opponent
There will always be things higher skill players will be better at. Last hitting in lane, knowing when to go in for a kill, higher situational awareness, keeping better track of resources, and much more. These foundational concepts are the things they will always rely on to try and pull a win out of the bag.
What differenciates these things, in a vacuum, is that they don't necessarily rely on the opponent to do something. You know that you can get more last hits. You know by instinct that you have 4 bars of resources to pop into the next combo. You know you can do your super move after certain moves.
The difference comes from where you need to interact with the opponent directly. So when you're ever in the situation where you need to play against a lower skill player, do not overthink things and try to punish the "dumb" moves they are making or find gameplay patterns you yourself can exploit.
"If I don't know what the hell I am doing, how the hell are they supposed to know what I am doing?"
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