Game Theory: You ARE Your Character! (Super Smash Bros Ultimate)

Hello! Day 23. I continue living among Pac-Man without being detected. To them, I am invisible, just another hungry yellow orb with black eyes, another jaundiced stain, built for one purpose: to consume. I like it here. I feel at home, at peace. This is my sister from another man, a family from another arcade machine. This is yellow Kirby undercover, out and about. (Introduction to Game Theory) Hello, Internet! Welcome to Game Theory: the show that can't wait to dedicate an episode to why the Pirhana Plant has feet. Seriously, Nintendo: what... what is this? But we're not just the show dedicated to exploring the anatomical anomalies of predatory plant life, today a new challenger has entered the ring, baby, and it's us.

Speaking of new challengers entering the ring just in time for the release of Super Smash Brothers Ultimate, right now, TODAY, a theoretical new outfit has entered the ring just in time for the holidays. We call it a neighborhood vacation because it's cold outside. So we wanted to keep everyone warm by putting a hood over literally everything. Do you want a long sleeve t-shirt? Excellent. Do it better with a hood Do you want a reversible jacket? Awesome idea, but put a reversible hood on it. How about a stylish sweater dress for all the girls? Boom! Hooded dress.

Game

theory

and movie

theory

socks? Well, we all know that socks are just hoods for

your

feet. This

game

theory ski cap? Hood to wear Even this film theory hoodie has a hood. Which would be ironic if I didn't have it. Hoods upon hoods upon hoods upon hoods! Hoodseption... (Dramatic sound plays) Something about one of those moments was like saying a word so many times and it just loses all meaning Hood, Hood, Hood... But don't leave the rest of

your

body out. the cold What's better in winter than snuggling up on a cold night with a cup of hot chocolate, some video

game

s, and staying warm in your game theory pajama pants!

Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the height of maximum comfort. So wrap yourself in a big cocoon of theoretical warmth this holiday season. Whether you want to look warm in the cold or just bundle up and disappear into your own hooded wonderland. wear literally has you covered. You know where the links are! Below in the description below And if you order in the next few weeks, it's guaranteed to arrive before Christmas because remember, (singing) there's no gift like holiday hoods in the latest episode of Super Smash Brothers I asked you to answer a survey covering your favorite brothers and sisters from the franchise and over half a million of you answered five hundred and fifty-one thousand five hundred and thirteen answers in total to be exact, making that survey and this episode the largest data set ever. we have never tried. with on this channel Do you know how jealous normal researchers would be of us?

They'd kill to get this kind of sample size, but don't worry, I've got my star rod and I'm ready to keep them at bay. No No you don't, this is my amazing audience data and you can't touch it like a bad researcher. No, throw my star staff at you. So the question I needed you to help me answer was the psychology of Super Smash Brothers Ultimate. My hypothesis was that this game could be used as a kind of personality assessment and that the

character

you choose to play could serve as a reflection of what makes you you (that's me!).

Are beauty gurus more likely to be attracted to pink

character

s or Eastern Europeans? Attracted by the gothic styles of the Castlevania clan? Travel video fans are more likely to choose characters who are popular abroad. With so many different characters in this game. It didn't seem that exaggerated to me. There really is a character for every type of player and free personality type, every personal preference, every play style. Whether you're a newcomer or a die-hard veteran of the series. I wanted to test that hypothesis with the help of half a million of you, as well as some of my YouTube friends.

So what does your favorite Super Smash Brothers Ultimate character say about you? That's what I'm about to explore today. So increase those actions to three and keep an eye out for falling beam swords because it's time to fight our way through a lot of data. Oh, so much information first, let's look at the lay of the land. Oh, the survey participants, around two hundred and fifty-five thousand were men, one hundred and twenty-five thousand represented ladies, eighty-six thousand of you reported that you are not- binary meeting that you are not exclusively masculine or feminine and another eighty-five. six thousand preferred not to say it and this question actually became important from the beginning, as much as we all like to think that we have broken gender stereotypes in 2018.

Some things seem to still be true. The first is that girls apparently still really like playing as princesses. That's right when you're asked who you think will play in Super Smash Brothers Ultimate, women were three times more likely than boys to choose strong female mainstays like Zelda or Peach, as well as newcomer Daisy, but when it comes to female role models, apparently no one can. overthrow Rosalina, who was six times more popular with girls than boys. In fact, Rosalina was so popular with women that she was chosen almost twice as often as most other characters. I mean, I get it if I had my druthers, I'd probably choose to be a star princess with powers throughout time.

It's based on the fact that women were two and a half times more likely to choose a female wrestler than a male, and well, that may not seem too surprising. Which is shocking. is that the female bias doesn't apply to characters like Samus, Shi, and the Wii Fit trainer. So when interpreting these results, I guess it's a matter of appearance: Samus in his normal outfit was on the lower tier for girls. Samus with his zero suit. on the other hand, she was one of the best and it's not because she's one of the best characters from previous games, that's what I initially thought.

But then I split the data to show only women who reported they would be first-time players with Super Smash Brothers, Ultimate, and Zero Suit Samus were still in the top tier, which leads me to believe the differentiating factor here is the characters. who looked, quote-unquote, traditionally feminine versus those who don't have Zero Suit Samus, obviously traditionally feminine, Samus in her normal form. spacesuit Not so much. Shi dressed as a boy, Wii Fit trainer, creepy fitness avatar who attacks you with hoops. So, by extension, that begs the question, are boys more likely to choose other peers? Surprisingly not, I mean characters like Snake are much more popular with kids than others.

Genres But according to the data, what kids are really looking for are monsters. Ridley is two and a half times more popular with boys than girls. But the big surprise for me, at least, was King K Rool, who took first place among the boys. Overall, almost 5% of all male respondents were excited to get their hands on that crown now to ensure this wasn't just because Ridley and K rool were new characters. I eliminated all the veterans of the Super Smash Brothers series and still two persisted I'm just going to demonstrate the classic phrase kids will be kids unless they can be scary reptile monsters, in which case they will absolutely choose to be scary reptile monsters So we definitely see some stuff that falls into classic genre lines But it gets really interesting when He looked at the group of you who?

Self-identified as non-binary where male and female identifiers had clear winners and losers, people outside of these genders had a much more diverse set of options. It's actually fair to say that non-binary players seem to discriminate less, try out more characters, and have fewer attachments to specific types of characters to show for it. I turned to standard deviation, so when you look at many data points, standard deviation is the measure of how spread out the numbers are in that data set, for example. If you're looking at this height chart of Mario characters, you have some characters like Bowser and Piranha Petey who are huge and others like Shy Guys and Toads who are

super

short.

It's a wide spectrum, and as a result you have a pretty large standard deviation compared to the heights of characters in the Super Smash Brothers series. smallest standard deviation Since everyone is fighting on the same playing field, I mean, if memes have taught me anything, that was the reason it took so long for Ridley to join the list in the first place, the fear that was always too big. for the stages and other fighters. So when looking at the Super Smash Brothers characters,

ultimate

ly the male and female standard deviation was twice as large as the non-binary standard deviation, meaning that men and women had a much more extreme difference between their favorites. and the least. paper characters There was less middle ground when looking at previous games in the franchise.

It was even more extreme, six times larger. The same applied to those who preferred not to reveal their gender, a standard deviation much less extreme than those who identified as either. Strongly masculine or strongly feminine, but we don't just look at gender all the time. The local culture of your country also seems to play a huge role in who you choose to play, as for example, try to figure this out Mexico Spain Portugal Brazil Chile was taco Italy and France had a much higher than average number of players willing to take on the role by Simon and Richter Belmont.

New editions of the Castlevania series were two to four times more likely to choose those characters compared to the rest of the world. In fact, can you think of why this would be the most interesting question on the SAT? My hypothesis is that it is because these particular countries tend to all be very religious and not just any religion. But Catholicism specifically Italy is the home of the Catholic Church. France is often called the second daughter of the Catholic Church. And Spain is 70% Catholic. The country's history is steeped in a series of religious struggles between Catholics and Muslims and that religiosity is transmitted to the culture of most other Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries such as Mexico, Portugal and Puerto Rico, so it would make sense that The characters of a game franchise will be about crosses and saints. water and battles against demons and spirits would resonate more strongly in those territories.

Do you know what other character is surprisingly popular in Spain and France? Isabelle from Animal Crossing Is it just because these countries are more enthusiastic about fishing their way out of their crippling debt? for a thrifty raccoon, I don't think so Isabelle and Isabella are classic French and Spanish names, the equivalent of our Isabel and the English names that belonged to multiple queens in both countries, including Isabella Castilla in Spain, who sponsored the explorations of Christopher Columbus and one of the most notorious women in English history Elizabeth of France, who led the invasion of England that

ultimate

ly resulted in the deposition of her husband Edward II and Pause on the spot.

You see, after I finished writing this episode, I discovered that this part of the theory is probably wrong because Isabel's name is different in both Spain and France in Spanish. She is Cannella and in France, she is Marie. So yeah, the full name theory is probably wrong on this one. The case would not be the first time that one of my theories is wrong and now we return to your regularly scheduled potentially less wrong theory. One more time. We see that it is about Representation, seeing a reflection of yourself in a character, whether in the form of a cultural gender story or simply your names picking up interesting geographical trends.

Consider Pac-Man. He seems random, but in reality he is three times more likely to do it. be chosen in the countries of India and Romania, which begs the question: What do those two countries have in common that could also contribute to our favorite yellow chewer devouring the competition? Well, my theory, my game. Yes, you get it, the point is that it is related to the use of the Internet in these countries. You see that both are countries where Internet connectivity is on the rise. But little by little, most people play games on their mobile phones. And that means a focus on classic titles like the fighter formerly known as Puck Man and that's not all, studies have also concluded that in India quick thinking or reflex games like Pac-Man are also particularly popular with 22% of the total population that plays that type of titles.

So, with the limited availability of the game within the country's borders, you are looking in the direction of familiarity, i.e. a latest trendregional that I can't really understand and I would love to hear your theories about greninja. He was the number three pick. in the Philippines, the number two pick in Singapore, the number one overall pick in India, are three to five times more likely to be selected in those countries compared to any other in the world. Why would a ninja Pokémon be so much more popular there? Especially considering that Nintendo doesn't even have an official presence in India and the anime is really the only way for countries to experience the Pokémon franchise.

Give me your opinion. Seriously, I couldn't understand this. And finally, you didn't just look at demographics, the last big part of the survey was breaking down how creators and online viewers play Super Smash Brothers games. Do educational creators play smarter characters like Fire Emblems Robin? Are food channels more likely to pick up Kirby because of his voracious appetite? Do vloggers choose greninja because it looks like he's tapping his enemies half the time? Well not exactly. The beauty gurus who responded to the survey showed an even more pronounced version of the female preferences we talked about earlier, heavily favoring characters who were pretty or cute women by a factor of two to one, with Daisy and Bayonetta like your top-tier options, but Jigglypuff and Pichu. also having a strong performance and if Pichu is being chosen, you know.

It has to be because it's cute because it's definitely not for strategic purposes, meanwhile, the beauty gurus definitely stayed away from the quote-unquote ugly characters since they were the only group out of all the groups questioned that I didn't really want. Playing as King K Rool or Ridley is about 75 percent less likely to choose either of those characters. Meanwhile, creators making travel content also had some surprising results, although not all of them were Fire Emblem characters. As I expected, they were the only category actively participating. Choose to play as Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong. It's actually surprising because of how popular King K Rool is.

Donkey and Diddy just, for some reason, don't look at the data, it doesn't even go back to the original Super Smash Brothers for the Nintendo 64. and

super

smash

brothers. Melee DK has always been filling out the bottom of character lists since the beginning, occupying the last spot or at least the bottom 10% of picks for every game we asked about, maybe players just have something against him of the high form. Precisely, my theory is that maybe these characters attract older players. You see, travel content tends to attract older creators and viewers. Older because they have a lot more money to spend on things like plane tickets, hotels, international experiences as such, they would be much more likely to gravitate towards some of the classic arcade games like In this case, Donkey Kong is three times more likely to choose this member of the Kong family.

Supporting this hypothesis is the fact that trip creators also leaned more toward the duck hunting dog. Hit and Steal all the classic characters while choosing characters from more modern games like Inklings and greninja. They were also twice as likely to choose the Wii Fit trainer. So yeah, like I said, older audience and ultimately for all of us self-identified game creators, our choices matched our experience and franchise the longer we've been playing the Super Smash Brothers series, the more likely we are to pick newer characters. And this makes sense, right? If you've been playing Mario & Ness since the game's first release in 1999 on and off for six games over the next 20 years, Lang um once again in Super Smash Brothers Ultimate will be a little less spicy than getting your hands on something new . characters with some new dynamics, that's why Bayonetta Isabel, Belmonts Cloud K rool and Ridley were now at the top of the list of experienced players.

All we need is Waluigi for the meme crowd and we've got everyone covered. But if we could put aside our differences for a moment. There is one last thing. I want to point out about the facts, the characters that brought us all together in a game filled with so many options with a ton of popular new faces, two stood out as the all-around winning characters that literally topped every chart no matter what manner. broke down the data Can you guess who the links are? And Kirby in all generations of Super Smash Brothers games in all genres in all genres of content and levels of experience with the franchise link and Kirby was always always number one and number two in the photos, and they just passed unnoticed. a significant margin He looks like the cute blonde elf from a retro game with a huge arsenal of weapons and the cute pink ball that can literally turn into anything attractive so that literally everyone trusts the data.

But hey, that's just a theory. A THEORY OF GAMES Thanks for watching. To make sure you understand what Super Smash Brothers Ultimate's story mode means and what the world of light symbolically represents, then you'll want to make sure you hit that subscribe button. Then you will receive a notification when that video comes out.