Amiibo is Life

by: DaveK

Why should you think about training amiibo? It seems a little weird that people spend all this time not even really playing Smash and just have some scannable AI figurine play the game for you. Admittedly, amiibo training is kind of quirky, but there are practical, transferable lessons in amiibo training that are applicable in the real world.

Problem Solving

The first lesson is problem solving. Each amiibo has its own AI issues. What this means for training is that each amiibo must be trained with its AI issues in mind and trained in such a way that diminishes the amiibo’s tendency to pick up bad habits. To figure out your amiibo character’s strengths and weaknesses, train your amiibo by fighting it using its character, and take note of patterns in the amiibo’s behavior. As you train your amiibo, you can start to modify your training to reinforce good habits and diminish bad ones.

The same concept applies to the real world. In new situations, we all start out at Level 1. To level up, challenge yourself by embracing these new situations. As an example, let’s say your friend invited you and some others over to their place for a cookout, but you’ve never met the others that they invited. You say thank you for the invite, it sounds like fun, and that you will be there. You want to make a good impression with these new people, because you will likely see them again at some point in the future. On your way to your friend’s house, ask yourself, what do you know? What are you knowledgeable on? How can you use what you are knowledgeable on to set yourself up to learn more? The reason that you ask yourself these questions is to orient your mind. You want to be able to converse with these new people, so you take stock of what you know to be able to respond if someone asks a question or makes a comment. You also know what questions you have, and maybe someone at this cookout knows something that you don’t yet.

While you are at your friend’s house, take note of your thoughts and actions. Pay attention to the kinds of people that talk to you and where around the house you spend most of your time. After you leave, ask yourself, what do you think you consistently did well in your interactions? How are you going to reinforce good practices and turn them into good habits?

Strategizing

The second lesson of amiibo training is strategizing. Amiibo training is very statistically based. Amiibo Doctor summarizes amiibo training with the Utility Formula. A combination of the character’s AI, the trainer’s ability, and inherent randomness together all comprise a character’s viability. The key to training an effective amiibo is taking each of these three parameters into account to give your amiibo the best possible chance at beating all possible opponents. To evaluate your amiibo’s potential, trainers can submit their amiibo to Amiibots, a 24/7 live stream on Twitch. Amiibots has a corresponding website where trainers can track their amiibos’ win-loss record, rating, and win percentage. These are all ways to measure progress compared to prior attempts at training and compared to other amiibo.

Just like in amiibo, in life, each of us has our inherent abilities, a capacity to learn, and is subjected to randomness – those parts of life that are out of our control. The most that we can do about the randomness is simply acknowledge it, be grateful when it favors us, and be patient when it does not. When it does not, it is ok to feel negative emotions like frustration, anger, and annoyance. We are human, and emotions are built into us. Feeling these emotions is acceptable and common; however, it’s important that you do not let these emotions write any more of your story than they have to. We can reinforce ourselves against the randomness. How do we do that? You use your inherent abilities to put yourself in a position to learn. The two form a stack – we know what we know, and new information can modify what we know and make it better than it was before. If you are good at something or enjoy something, try to put yourself in situations where you can flex that. The caveat to this approach, though, is to not be the most or the least skilled. Ideally, you want to be skilled enough to keep up. That way, you are challenged by others with more experience and you are not always starting at level 1. This dynamic of knowing where to position yourself to learn is also called intelligence. Intelligent people are constantly learning and getting better. We train our amiibo to do the same thing – learn and get better!

We continue to learn and get better until we reach what we consider to be optimal. What is important to know about being optimal is knowing that being optimal looks different for everyone. The reason that it looks different is because each of us has goals, whether we are aware of them or not. Whether or not you have specific goals, think about these questions: what does your optimality look like? How sure can you be that you’ve reached it? What constitutes “good” on your journey to optimality?

Competition

The third lesson of amiibo training is competition. Back in 2020, competition was difficult to come by given that most of us were locked down. However, although restrictions have lifted and people are back out, amiibo training has stuck around and continues to provide a competitive outlet. The best part is that it’s mobile. We have the Twitch app for Amiibots and we have Discord, which houses multiple competitive amiibo servers. On these servers, trainers can submit their amiibo to tournaments and compete against other competitive amiibo trainers. The Amiibots stream and the Discord servers are ideal places to test your amiibo’s viability. It is important to test your amiibo’s viability because you want to win, and to win you have to measure your progress towards training a competitively viable amiibo.

As we aim for a competitively viable amiibo, we also aim in the real world. An aim can be thought of as a grand goal, or optimality. Having an aim means we need to strategize and chart a course to reach it. Reaching optimality, or that grand goal, involves meeting a bunch of smaller goals along the way. Having an aim also means we have standards, or what constitutes good or bad as it relates to our aim. Winning, whether in amiibo or in life, is impossible without standards. If you are someone that is scared to fail, recognize that failure is a part of life. It is part of the randomness that we mentioned earlier. Sometimes, we can do everything right, and still fall short. When you fall short, be patient and stay focused. Good things will come.

All of this sounds very abstract and maybe overwhelming, but that’s where competition can help us. Competition teaches us how to take problem solving and strategizing together to strive towards optimality. It demands that we establish our standards of “good,” which tell us how we are doing in pursuit of our goal.

As we are aiming, so are other people. They might be aiming at the same goal that you are, or a different goal. If they are aiming at the same goal, how are they fairing? What are they doing the same as you or different than you? What do you have at your disposal that they do not?

Knowledge Sharing

The fourth lesson, and more so the culture of amiibo training is knowledge sharing. The cool thing about amiibo training is that it is an evolving science. Amiibo AI has lots of quirks that continue to be “labbed out” and tested. As trainers find new information, it is shared with the community so that other trainers can benefit. Trainers can also reference the Amiibo Doctor website for the most up-to-date, informational character training guides for the community’s reference. There are also character informers on the various competitive amiibo training Discord servers that can provide advice, tips, and tricks for training a specific character.

Amiibo can be thought of as life lite (Ha! See what I did there?). Our amiibo are essentially avatars, or representatives of us. Yes, there are many Marios, Sonics, Links, Pikachus, etc. in the meta, but each one is trained differently. Why do we get frustrated or discouraged when our amiibo do not perform well? Because they are 1-byte extensions of ourselves! We put time into training these amiibo and expect to see that time well spent with results like a high Amiibots rating or top 8 placements in tournaments. When our amiibo fall short of that, we think about what might have gone wrong. Sometimes, nothing went wrong. It could have been a bad matchup, or our amiibo simply fell victim to randomness. We pay attention to our amiibo’s progress, and if it continues to do well, we leave them alone and if they start to lose consistently, we go back and retrain it. Life is the same – as you slip, fall, and get back up in life, share your experiences. Most problems are not unique, so why not share your experiences with someone who can help you, or with someone that you think could benefit from what you have to say?

Final Thoughts

Amiibo training is a hobby, but more than that, it’s a teacher. It brings out qualities that we might not otherwise hone. As we train our amiibo to compete, so do our amiibo train us to think differently. We are willing to put hours of time into training a competitively viable amiibo. We teach our amiibo how to use its move set in such a way that it can beat most possible opponents. When our methods don’t work as we had hoped, we make adjustments, or we start fresh and teach it differently. If we have the motivation and the focus to train a competitively viable amiibo, can we really say that we can’t muster the motivation and foster the focus to train ourselves to be optimal? Take it from our amiibo – keep “Learn” On.