I am a strategy game fraud

For many years, I have been living a lie. Since I was a young child, I have claimed to be good at strategy games. This is a blatant lie.

I transitioned to only playing strategy and sports games after a Call of Duty career that featured a kill/death ratio of about 0.5. I am not good at sports games. It turns out I'm not very good at strategy games either. This is bad because I have sunk thousands of hours into strategy games and had very little to show for it.

There were signs of my complete fraudulence. There was the chess game I lost to my 11-year-old cousin in which I flipped the board afterward. There was the time my uncle saw me playing X-COM and this exchange occurred.

"You're playing on easy mode?"
"Yeah."
"That's pitiful, man."

There were hours of playing Age of Empires 2. I couldn't hack it in the real game other than the William Wallace Tutorial Campaign, so I only played with the cheat "how do you turn this on," which spawned an army of blue, bullet-firing cars that rained death on my enemies. The main problem with this cheat was that I needed to create about 50 cars because I couldn't win the games otherwise, so I had to copy the cheat and rapidly paste it into the cheat area.

But I didn't realize that I was truly mediocre compared to the community at large until I started playing Advance Wars By Web last month. After a few weeks of play, I can confidently say that I was once the worst competitive Advance Wars By Web player in the entire world.

Advance Wars is a turn-based strategy video game series released for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS. The game features a cast of fun cartoon characters waging mass destruction and death with tiny sprites on your handheld gaming system. For the uninitiated, the Advance Wars series (known as Famicom Wars in Japan) is a mixture of chess, Fire Emblem, and Go. They were really, really good games. Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising is my pick for the greatest strategy game ever released for a handheld gaming system.

Nintendo basically stopped making Advance Wars games seven years ago. Nintendo doesn't really do legitimate war games, and Advance Wars is a series that has been completely neglected. There's little hope we'll ever get a new one. However, that hasn't stopped a community of fans from creating Advance Wars By Web, a version of the game you can play on the Internet like online chess or backgammon. It expands the game in new ways (supporting up to 16 players at once) and is one of the most loving fan creations you'll find in the Nintendo universe (shout-out to Walkerboh1, who is a legend).

The most fascinating part of the Advance Wars By Web community is the Global League, which is basically the Major Leagues of Advance Wars enthusiasts. League play involves a 1-v-1 match between two players. There is an ELO rating system that determines how good certain players are. It's like professional chess, except with a kids' handheld strategy game.

I played the game religiously as a child and I thought I was pretty good. Not elite, but any stretch of the imagination, but good enough to S-Rank some of the normal campaign missions and muddle my way through the first two hard campaign missions. I replayed the campaign recently and was...bad, but I attributed that to lack of practice.

Every human being is probably in the bottom percentile for performance at something. Even for the best of us, there's something that one could spectacularly fail at, often for no apparent reason. Nobel Prize winners could be awful at driving, soccer, or singing. Humans have deficiencies. That's what makes the world interesting. However, most people don't get the opportunity to statistically determine exactly how bad they are at a certain activity. Thankfully, due to the Internet, there are many, many ways to statistically determine how bad I am at various tasks or games.

My first league game on Advance Wars by Web was a 13-turn disaster. If you take out my two wins because my opponent failed to play his/her turn, I lost my first seven competitive Advance Wars games. Then, miraculously, I won two games. I then lost my next 13 games that were played to its completion. Because there are many inactive players on AWBW, my record stood at a respectable level for much of this time. Unfortunately, my adjusted record had a win percentage under 20 percent, and my "win streak" of wins over inactive players ended with a loss to the worst player by ELO on the entire site, a great chap named "usmchayward," a lifetime 5-34 player (3-32 in games that actually went 7 turns or more) who defeated me in what can only be described as the worst Advance Wars game played in 2018. Yes, that's right, one of his three legitimate in 7 months of experience came against me. The game was notable for its complete lack of tactical acumen and blind charges that eventually led to my defeat after a staggeringly miserable THIRTY-EIGHT TURNS.

But being in the bottom quartile of performance for something you care about is actually tremendously liberating. Because of the virtues of the American education system, you can basically get away without becoming an absolute idiot for a very long time. I don't need to test my lack of experience in STEM fields and get judged on my performance very often. I don't need to paint anything. 97 percent of my classes involve writing (either in English or in music) in some way that makes me feel comfortable, which also feels intellectually stifling, in a way. If I were to try to jump out of my comfort zone, I'd pay a serious real-world penalty in terms of stress, GPA, lack of sleep, etc. Thus, I am thoroughly enjoying my time as one of the 5 worst AWBA players to have ever played. There are very few things that I'm bad at that can be fully measured like my Advance Wars futility.

For example, I'm pretty bad at tweeting, but there's no real statistical measure telling me how bad I am at tweeting (likes and retweets are meaningless), so I can still send awful tweets and no one will stop me. I'm at 4,197 tweets now, and I have no idea if it's ever going to get better.

However, another great thing about being truly awful is watching myself become better at something over time. I once thought about creating a live stream that just recorded me as I learned a complex piano piece. The conceit of the channel was that viewers could watch as I painstakingly learned and refined something over time and that you could compare each moment of the learning process from complete amateurism to mastery.

Right now, this graph of my ELO rating on my profile is the closest I've come to replicating this vision.

If you ignore the enormous spikes that signaled when I won a bunch of games by my opponent's resignation, you can see that I was a horrible player for my first 60 games of Advance Wars By Web. In fact, looking through my results, by Game No. 60, I had only won 4 games without my opponent going AWOL, good enough for a 6 percent winning percentage. That was rock bottom (you can't actually dip below 700 on the scale, thankfully). Since then, I've managed to earn 4 legitimate wins in my last 23 games and take another helping of auto-wins because I'm the only one still playing.

Granted, that's still not very impressive. The lesson here might really be, you can't lose if you're the only still playing. Still, I'm proud of my slightly less woeful abilities and I'm confident that either I'll become an average Advance Wars player by the time I'm 30, or I'll have finally stopped playing a very simple grid-based strategy game from 2002.