The Appeal of SmashCPU

Since 2015, the SmashCPU community has cultivated a committed community based on watching CPU vs CPU matches within video games, most notably within the Super Smash Bros. series, as the name implies. What started out primarily as a funny novelty livestream has somehow turned into a tight-knit group that can’t get enough of this stuff, nearly ten years later. How did this happen? How does predetermined AI programming result in seemingly endless entertainment for a group that’s observed and analyzed this stuff to death?

As many in the SmashCPU community will tell you, this is an incomplete descriptor of what watching these matches represents to them. Beneath the conceptual layers of ridiculousness in such a concept lies a format conducive to communal expressions of creativity, achievement, and data-driven analysis; a harmonious blend that extracts meaning from the meaningless in the most irony-poisoned Zoomer way possible.

The typical form of a SmashCPU event is a tournament in which each CPU entered into the tournament by its organizer is represented by one equivalent individual. Each person looking to join this tournament will select their chosen character — their player avatar, if you will — and are then left helpless to watch and observe “their” performance in the tournament. The tournament organizer will go on to broadcast the event, highlighting the performances of each individual that entered it in a way to emphasize the excitement of “their” performances as a part of the CPU vs CPU environment.

This is obviously ridiculous, and everyone knows it, but that’s part of the point. The goofy nature of assigning player credit to CPU performances lends a lighthearted and low-stakes atmosphere to SmashCPU events. From an entrant’s perspective, engaging in this form of pseudo-competition carries with it many of the benefits of interpersonal competition, but without the typical risks one would normally assume in engaging with that. Any given entrant has the opportunity to win an event in the same way as all other entrants: through pure luck. A win is a thrill to get excited about, and a loss is ultimately beyond one’s control and responsibility. One can win — or lose — without actually viewing or otherwise engaging with the event beyond signing up for it. In this sense, SmashCPU serves as an accidental social experiment that strips back to the foundation of interpersonal competition: If one were to create a competition that fully eliminates the factor of skill, and everyone knows it, what would happen?

The meaning behind competition in the world today can largely be traced back to its widely accepted intrinsic link with meritocracy, which is something that is highly valued both in others and ourselves. To win a competition that is testing a particular skill is proof of one’s merit by comparison in that skill. A demonstration of merit is a demonstration of ability gained through diligence, intelligence, and personal growth, all things that we assign value to when evaluating others and ourselves. Therefore, to win a competition and demonstrate merit is to be the “better” competitor, the “superior” competitor, in that particular skill. To those with assigned superiority, this brings along with it not only personal validation, but — depending on the context of the competiton — currency on both the physical and social level. These are desirable outcomes, of course, and it has driven people to become excellent at the types of competition that we reward the most. But what if the core component behind these rewards, the sense of meritocracy that is linked with competition, was stripped away?

Since entering SmashCPU events is about as riskless as it gets, there are a lot of ways to freely engage with it. One’s player avatar they select might be a representative of who that entrant thinks is most like them or their ideal, it might be the coolest character available, it might be the most interesting AI behavior available, it might be an x-factor pick for the sake of adding intrigue to the event, and of course it might be the character assumed to give them the best opportunity to win the psuedo-competition with their free lottery ticket. There’s a lot of ways to draw meaning out of one’s pick, and the event organizer is responsible for reflecting that collective meaning into something worth engaging with. Typically, this involves manufacturing some sort of drama and prestige to provide additional, theatrical appeal to the viewers of a CPU event. After all, viewers of an event may be entrants by definition, but the absence of meritocracy in this psuedo-competition leaves a void of participation from the viewers that must by filled by context, from the organizer or otherwise. In SmashCPU, one may sign up for an event disguised as a competition, but they are actually electing to become a character in a production — and that character’s performance, of course, is out of their control.

This creates an extra layer to one’s connection with their player avatar, and how one engages with this will normally be indicative of how they wish to shape their on-screen character. A classic example of this is an entrant that, over time, will gravitate towards the character that they believe will give them the best chance at winning, even if they didn’t start with that mindset. We have already established that there’s no real material benefit to winning a CPU event, since this psuedo-competition has already distanced itself from meritocracy, but there is the ability to nudge and influence this entertaining production’s on-screen character that one is most invested in, which is their own. Wins are celebrated, of course, and only become more collectively celebrated when there is a mutual understanding amongst community members that winning a CPU event is desirable.

But you can still have a compelling on-screen character without being a winner. After all, losing a CPU event is not an extension of one’s lack of merit, but one’s lack of luck. Everyone knows that, and it’s why one’s on-screen character winning or losing in CPUs doesn’t have an impact on one’s status as a person within the greater community. There is no rational reason to inflate or bruise one’s ego, to evaluate one’s self as a product of their acquired skills, following a result from one’s detached avatar in a SmashCPU event. The only way to truly lose in SmashCPU is to not have fun with it.

SmashCPU is a wonderful, weird thing that can only be brought to life through interactions between multiple real-world people. From an entrant perspective, this is simple enough — someone else needs to host an event for that person to join it — but entrant organizers also require people. In the most literal sense, one doesn’t need other humans to be able to run a CPU vs CPU tournament, but all the magic here comes from the commentary and reactions surrounding the CPU vs CPU matches. That’s what brings meaning to the meaningless. Because of this, everything in SmashCPU is for the community, by the community. Everyone has a mutual interest in seeing more CPU events.

The resources for organizing events (including entrants!) are readily available for everyone, and real-world incentives such as cash prizes and wider internet influencer clout have been largely distanced from the community. This combination, in tandem with the de-emphasis on performance and perceived merit, have removed many traditional centralization-focused power dynamics from the SmashCPU community. Every new entrant in a SmashCPU event is welcome, because that’s a new character added to the production. Every new event is welcome, because that’s a new chance to see these characters interact on a new stage. The only real social deterrent behavior in this type of environment is being an asshole. Performance doesn’t matter, access to capital doesn’t matter, but in a social environment that is built upon grassroots collaboration, getting along with others does matter, and attempting to throw one’s social weight around to compensate for their unlikability isn’t going to work out too well.

SmashCPU’s low barrier to entry, lighthearted nature, and aforementioned emphasis on community facilitates a space to explore creative endeavors without judgment. Since there is little in the way of perceived “purity” of what SmashCPU is, and little risk in entering an event, event organizers are able to experiment with plenty of elements when creating something new. This can range from changing the rules to see if it makes a better production, to trying one’s artistic hand at a newly constructed OBS layout, creating hype trailers in anticipation of an event, constructing elaborate shitpost image edits, dropping diss tracks, or really anything to spice up the context around one’s new event. Creating something new is always welcomed, because it’s for the purpose of engaging with the rest of the community. Artistic competence is not an expectation, or even necessarily a goal, but rather a little treat on top of the requisite community involvement that makes a SmashCPU event a SmashCPU event. Artistic incompetence is its own treat, after all, in a group irony poisoned enough to enjoy this stuff.

Similarly, community members will often engage with events by trying to work towards the goal of “solving” a CPU vs CPU metagame and recognizing the strongest picks available. This is where the deterministic nature of AI programming plays into SmashCPU’s strengths. After all, the tools for orchestrating CPU vs CPU matches are readily available for not only an event organizer, but for everyone, and with that comes a lot of potential data to collect and analyze. This has historically been seen as a challenge for many in the SmashCPU community to collectively solve through shared time and effort, as the answers to some of these questions within the CPU vs CPU meta are of interest to many community members on both the entrant and organizer sides. Once again, this is something with a low barrier to entry in which anyone’s input, no matter how minimal, can be used and appreciated in some way.

Thus, when enough time passes, a new CPU vs CPU game will eventually be accompanied by its own tier list, matchup chart, custom rules, and community balancing. More so than winning, entrants in the SmashCPU community are generally more interested in creating a compelling production, and one step necessary to reach that conclusion is creating a healthy metagame that creates suspense during the most amount of matchups possible, and incentivizes the widest variety of picks among those interested in winning. The fact that these are CPU vs CPU matches doesn’t change the fact that some matches are just more exciting to watch than others, and that’s a goal worth striving for.

All of this emphasis on collaboration, community involvement, and irony-laced theatrics sprinkled throughout SmashCPU has the byproduct of fostering a group that simultaneously respects its history while still celebrating its new chapters. Each SmashCPU event features a largely recurring cast, and each on-screen character’s story is an ongoing one, so drawing connections between historical results for certain entrants is a natural conclusion. However, the inherently stagnant nature of AI programming necessitates constant motion between styles of CPU events, and with that comes a culture of pursuing and embracing freshness and newness over pure nostalgia loops.

Or, to think about it another way, SmashCPU being what it is encourages people to get together and become friendly with each other. Friends like to reminisce in the old times and forgotten memories, but they also want to experience new things in new ways. This applies to community members as well, many of which come and go and sometimes return as they reach different stages of their lives. Old heads are welcomed back, since those memories are cherished and preserved. New blood is welcomed in, since it’s a new dynamic for the group to engage with. Just like with the events themselves, some people will be more into the community side of things than others. Some are content with just killing some time by signing up for events and checking to see if they’re a winner, and that’s fine. For those that want to be involved on a deeper level, that’s fine, too. SmashCPU represents something different to everyone, but it will always offer the opportunity for one to create meaning out of the meaningless.