Technician Versus Performer / Video Games

• Brütal Legend: Edward Riggs is The Roadie, knowing all the technical aspects of running an army. But due to being, well, The Roadie, he gets outshone by Lars Halford, whose charisma allows him to inspire Ironheade to go through Hell and back. However, Lara can’t organise an army for shit, so it’s up to Eddie to do all the logistics and actual commanding. Even after Lars’ death halfway through, he STILL gets the credit for Ironheade’s success, and even Eddie resigns to being overshadowed. However, Eddie is still recognised for his work, and it’s ultimately because of his greater technical skills that Ironheade was both able to get off the ground and finish the fight, a rare win for Technicians that didn’t rely on the Performer having Worf Had the Flu.
• Luminous Plume: Valerie went through more formal sword training with her father while Raven learned his skills by observing and roughly imitating his teacher, Victor. Despite their different training, they are considered evenly matched in Valerie's first boss fight, where Raven refrained from using aura and only relied on his swordplay.
• Splinter Cell (technician) vs Metal Gear Solid (performer). Both are stealth-oriented games. Splinter Cell is quieter, but more technical in it's stealth mechanics. Metal Gear Solid's sneaking is more simplified, but the game is more bombastic and gives more of a Hollywood blockbuster vibe.
  • Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance has a rivalry between Samuel "Jetstream" Rodrigues and Raiden. The former has been trained in swordsmanship and has a formal style, while Raiden discovered a natural talent for blades while growing up as a Child Soldier. Sam even immediately pegs Raiden as "self-taught" in their first duel. Their relationship is also inverted in how they use their expertise, as modern-day equivalents of a samurai and ninja: Sam is a Blood Knight who openly challenges his enemies in straight fights (Performer), while Raiden is a Combat Pragmatist who uses stealth and agility to eliminate his targets with minimal risk (Technician).
• The music game Gitaroo Man features this in the final guitar battle with the hero U1 versus the villain Zowie, even in the first few bars. Zowie opens with a bunch of rapid fire notes, but it sounds harsh and atonal. U1 (and thus the player) responds with one crystal clear reverberating note, showing his intends to win the duel with melody versus skill.
• Street Fighter has quite likely the most famous example in all of video games in Ryu and Ken. Ryu is a Blood Knight-Spirited Competitor whose actually has no talent, but dedicates every waking moment of his life mastering his fighting skill and learning from his opponents. His fighting style is simple, uncomplicated, honed into its purest form to do the optimum amount of damage without any flash or drawbacks, but also without much option for variety. Ken, on the other hand, has all the talent in the world, so he slacks off until a challenge comes along (typically Ryu), and then he trains for a month and he's back to being a world-class fighter. Ken is a showy combatant with a focus on fast kicks and punches, and tends to put his own spin on the same moves he and Ryu learned (his signature Shoryuken has flames and hits multiple times, compared to Ryu's single-hit basic punch). In this sense, Ken is more combo oriented and therefore, while each of his attacks are not as damaging as Ryu's, if combo-ed, they can do a lot of damage, but it also opens him up to more mistakes.
  • Interestingly inverted when it comes to the personalities and fighting styles of Sakura Kasunago and Karin Kanzuki. Despite being the more arrogant and aloof of the two, Karin is also the "technician" because her fighting skill relies on the Kanzuki school of martial arts. Her strikes are formulated and controlled as well as her style employing Counter-Attack moves that can reverse an opponent's offense. Sakura, who is the warmer and more modest rival, is the "performer" as she doesn't have any formal schooling in martial arts or fighting, simply being very adept at gleaning what she's seen Ryu do. Her attacks are somewhat rough and she has a tendency to sacrifice execution for force, resulting in wild swings that leave her reeling at the end. That said, she's also an amazingly gifted fighter and comes out victorious in her battles against her rival.
• Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love plays it straight in the fifth act when protagonist Shinjiro has to take Subaru's place on stage after losing a contest to them. Subaru is the ultimate technician, while Shinjiro is the ultimate performer. Subaru also has a similar moment when she first tries to play Jazz music at a club. While she is technically proficient, it takes her a while to understand the performance aspect of the genre.
• Fatal Fury's Kim Kaphwan and The King of Fighters' Jhun Hoon. Kim is a very traditional Tae Kwon Do practitioner and his moves, while pretty flashy themselves, are fairly traditional and get the job done. Jhun Hoon, Kim's rival since childhood, is very much pure flash: he fights with only his feet (Kim has two/three punches) and kicks out ki phoenix talons (someting Kim doesn't do). He also has a very flamboyant aura about himself and is obviously very showy with his moveset, while Kim shows off a little less in exchange for being more reliable.
  • The Bogard brothers, too. Andy is a serious-minded and very focused individual who strives to be a well-rounded fighter while Terry has a more lax attitude, just looking for a good match and relying on his natural talents. Unfortunately this puts Andy into a Hard Work Hardly Works situation because in addition to being the "performer" of their duo, Terry is also the better fighter. Andy's efforts to become a great fighter are surpassed by Terry's pragmatic and naturalistic fighting style, which can leave him a bit down on himself despite his affection and respect for his older brother.
  • Kim's sons from Garou: Mark of the Wolves: Jae Hoon and Dong Hwan. Jae Hoon is his father's son through and through, using his dad's staple moves (but with an Incendiary Exponent) and having the same stern attitude on training and evildoers. Meanwhile his brother is the Brilliant, but Lazy sibling, who uses a more individualized take on TKD that injects some electricity for the contrast, preferring to show off, self-aggrandize, and rely on natural talent during battle.
• Used in a subplot in The World Ends with You. The Ramen Don's ordinary but very tasty and masterfully made Ramen is being ignored in favor of the mediocre, yet flashy and crowd pleasing Shadow Ramen, and Neku and Joshua work to reverse this by getting the celebrity supporter to try the "plain" Ramen and therefore support Ramen Don. Although in this case, Ramen Don is a guy who loves his Ramen, where as Shadow Ramen just views it in terms of cold hard cash, and this subplot is about integrity and doing whats right, not what looks good. It's also played straight with the characters of Shooter and Yammer. Yammer himself says he's more technical, but Shooter has more heart so he wins all the matches.
  • Shooter and Yammer are parodies, they parody this trope along with other cliche'd Shōnen Serious Business tropes.
• Virtua Fighter (technician) vs any other fighting game (performer). Virtua Fighter is known for being Difficult, but Awesome, while not being flashy like Tekken, Street Fighter or Dead or Alive, games that aren't as revered in terms of Competitive Balance.
  • In general, Yu Suzuki has shown himself to be a technician as a game developer, which is especially evident with his most ambitious project Shenmue, an extremely graphically detailed and expansive open world game. Suzuki's body of work can be compared to fellow SEGA game designer Toshihiro Nagoshi, the performer. Nagoshi has produced games like Super Monkey Ball and Daytona USA, remembered not only for their nostalgia values, but how engaging and fun they were. On top of that, he's also the creator (and was its producer until 2021) of the acclaimed story-driven Like a Dragon series, which is seen as a Spiritual Successor to Shenmue, but had a less strict development cycle overall.
• Street Fighter vs Tekken. Street Fighter is the 'technician' role, a game largely focused on trying to balance characters, but its very difficult to get into 'casually' vs Tekken, the performer, a fighter game which is easy to play but has fewer special moves. Though considering that the 'Technician' here has spectacular special attacks and characters shoot fireballs, while the performer is focused largely on hand to hand combat, the lines can be blurred.
• Street Fighter (again) as the technician vs Mortal Kombat as the performer. The contrast between both franchises can be illustrated with their grand returns in Street Fighter IV and Mortal Kombat 9: both were highly acclaimed by critics and players, the former for its deep, competitive gameplay system, the latter for its visuals, detailed storyline and several game modes.
• Yuri and Flynn's fighting styles in Tales of Vesperia can be distinguished in this way, as discussed here. In story, the explanation is given that they were trained in the same style but while Flynn perfected his skills, Yuri chose to add his own flair, causing them to diverge. Gameplay-wise, this maifests as Flynn using many of the classic Tales Series sword artes with sharp, precise movements, while Yuri moves in a flashier, more fluid way and combines original artes with variations on the classics.
  • This trope also applies to their cooking abilities: Flynn has skill, Yuri has talent. Though unlike in fighting, where their differing approaches are treated as equally valid, Yuri is very clearly the more competent one in the kitchen. Though this is because Flynn's skill cannot compensate for his Cordon Bleugh Chef status, especially with his idea of what tastes good. The result is usually over spiced at best. Yuri does have a good sense of taste and applies it to how he cooks.
• In Tales of Symphonia, another game from the series, Kratos and Zelos have similar artes, but Kratos is the Technician to Zelos' Performer. Kratos being a well-trained mercenary, has all the experience in his moves. Zelos, on the other hand, tends to favor bravado to impress the ladies.
• World of Warcraft has this distinction between the PvE (technician) and PvP (performer) crowds. PvE players often spend their time memorizing spell/ability rotations and managing buffs/debuffs over a fight while working a specific role (Tanking boss damage, dealing damage, or healing other party members), while the much more chaotic PvP depends more on the players essentially improvising. One PvE boss encounter back from the Wrath days re-created PvP conditions as you faced a squad of enemies from the opposing faction in battle. It benefitted from using PvP gear and mechanics, which caused a lot of consternation in the PvE community.
  • The same may be said of MMORPGs in general, although how much the "Multiplayer" part of the acronym is enforced in PvE throughout any given game will greatly determine where any given player lies on this scale. Within PvE, a Technician may be the player who plays primarily in highly organized groups and spends a fortune giving his/her character top-of-the-line gear, and who has little to no tolerance for new players or anything that might interfere with dungeon-crawling or other in-game activities that require groups. The Performer, on the other hand, will know what to do when and have decent (but not supreme) gear for his/her character's level, but is generally much more tolerant of the Pick-Up Group and will keep the "fun" factor in the dungeon- or event-run by methods including but not limited to taunting AI-controlled enemies in the group-chat channel in order to give the group a good laugh.
• Banjo-Kazooie has Kazooie the performer and Banjo the technician. Kazooie has greater agility and speed and always tries to show off herself as possible when she engages her foes, fitting her Deadpan Snarker attitude. Banjo is focused on his strength and power and is very skilled at self defence with various techniques at his disposal, being a big brawny bear. Whoever is better at combat is very much something of a debate between them both, but they really are considered equals.
• Dive (Technician) and Kick (Performer) from Divekick are unusual examples in that both of them neglect their divekick practice, but Kick has natural talent while Dive applies his math skills to his divekicking instead.
• An example from e-sports: in professional Dota 2 play, North American and European teams tend to lean towards being performers, while Asian teams tend to favor being technicians.
• In Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, the siblings Luthier and Delthea fit in very well. Delthea is the performer who is naturally gifted with magic, but doesn't really care to refine herself since she's Brilliant, but Lazy and just wants to have a normal life. Luthier, on the other hand, is the hardworking technician who is not particularly exceptional, but works very hard to get as good with magic as he is. In the end Delthea seals her power away and is Happily Married to a high-ranked nobleman, while Luthier continues to travel and study magic.
• PlatinumGames, a game studio whose design philosophies align with the technician side of the spectrum, took a more technician-style approach when it came to the development of NieR: Automata.
• In A Hat in Time, the dueling directors, a dancing penguin called DJ Grooves (Performer) and the train-loving owl-thing known only as the Conductor (Technician) have different directing philosophies. DJ Grooves is all about popularity and stardom, but always loses out to the more technical-minded Conductor, who loves making movies with action, thrills, and explosions. This is also reflected in the missions they give you: the Conductor's two levels have more of a focus on plot, while DJ Grooves' levels focus on Hat Kid putting on flashy performances and attracting fans.
• Victoria vs. Max in Life Is Strange. Victoria isn't a great photographer, but she's very skilled and knowledgeable. Max takes great photographs almost without intending to, because she has a good sense of what people want to see or hear to convince them to make different choices. It mostly comes down to personality differences: Victoria is an extrovert who wants to be in pictures, and Max feels most comfortable in the background, waiting patiently for the perfect shot.
• The third Tetris: The Grand Master game introduces the Super Rotation System (called "World Rule" in-game) alongside the TGM series' more traditional Arika Rotation System (called "Classic Rule" in-game), creating this dynamic. ARS is the technician, favoring a simpler set of rotation physics that are more rigid but simpler to understand generally result in faster runs, while SRS is the performer, with a more lenient and flashy rotation physics that allow for wilder twists (up to and including the infamous T-Spin Triple) and easier recoveries but often a slower performance (hence why in Shirase mode, the time checkpoints for SRS are looser).
• Devil May Cry: Vergil is the Technician, since he fights with pure skill and concentrates on being as precise as possible. His brother Dante is the Performer, since while he is very skilled, he concentrates on being as stylish as possible when he fights.
• Let's look at the relationship between the games Freedom Planet and Spark the Electric Jester. They're both 90's inspired indie platforms that use the fan-made Sonic Worlds as their core gameplay engine. The level of detail found in the former can genuinely be used as a benchmark for how powerful Clickteam Fusion is in general, evident in the game's high-action setpieces, level quirks, distinct character and enemy animations, slick touches of 2.5D, and accommodation of various play styles. Meanwhile, Spark has its main appeal rooted in the way it combines elements of LakeFeperd's favorite games and how the players use either Spark or Fark.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, this is played with depending on how you build your character. A destruction-focused mage is a technician, and will have an array of spells allowing them to adapt to a particular enemy's weakness. But even the highest level spells can't match the damage output of a properly built warrior with a good sword (the performer). And a stealth-focused rogue swings it back to technician again, as with the right gear and perks they can do up to 30x damage with a sneak attack, allowing them to one-shot all but the toughest bosses.
• In Final Fantasy VIII, SeeD mercenaries fight with weapons, utilizing disciplined strategies, years of experience, and tightly controlled Guardian Forces. SeeDs exist to kill sorceresses, spellcasting loners who fight by unleashing the primal forces of nature within their souls and hoping that they will get something like the result they want. Sorceresses are much more powerful, but there are so many SeeDs that power doesn't really matter.
• Inscryption has the clashing dungeon master performance of Leshy in Act 1 and P03 in Act 3. Leshy is the Performer, focusing on generating an ominous atmosphere, immersing his player in the story of their journey, and presenting interesting characters. His decks meanwhile are relatively straightforward and easy to master, and his dramatics (especially his Final Boss) can get undermined by the mechanics in hilarious ways that annoy him deeply, but he's forced to concede. P03 is the Technician, focused on developing intricate, multi-layered systems which incorporate and arguably improve on mechanics from the other Scrybes but can easily veer into the overcomplicated. His story by contrast barely has an Excuse Plot and most of his world-building and character interactions are used to take potshots at the other Scrybes.
• Among e-sports teams, OG has been both: because of their mastery of the metagame, they are a lot more confident in performing with unorthodox team builds and strategies, making them look more like performers than technicians on the way to winning TI8 and TI9. TI6 winners Wings also had the same playing style, but not as outlandish as OG during TI9, where a Diffusal Blade on Gyrocopter and Ana playing Io as carry was played in the deciding game 4.
• Empires of the Undergrowth pits two colonies of gene thief ants against one another for the third challenge mission, having the player's colony fight a second one. The rival colony is the Technician, having specialist ants dedicated to melee fighting (slave maker ants act as the solid frontline, with trapjaw ants have powerful bites and can pull back to heal themselves, while army ants provide buffs to increase melee damage), while the player colony is the performer (black ants act as the vanguard, with wood ants providing rnaged attacks and leafcutter ants acting as tanks). In an inversion of the normal formula of this trope, when put before the "judges" (the scientists), the performer ultimately ends up defeating the technician, as the player colony has more versatility than their opponents (to list one example, wood ant mortars can wipe out army ant majors from a distance before they can provide their Damage-Increasing Debuff).
• Mid-90s FPS were brilliantly programmed in two different ways. Games like Quake, Quake II and Unreal were the technicians, as they were developed on concrete 3D engines with polygonal characters, engines which were used as bases for future games (the Unreal Engine comes from the titular game); they also had genuinely unsettling atmospheres, and revolutionized the player's controls at the time (these were the first games where players could use free mouselook), as well as weapons' precision and the enemies A.I., but they were focused on moving fast and shooting enemies in maze-like levels with conventional weapons while the setting was just an excuse to live an adventure and the protagonists were only mute avatars for the player to control. On the other hand, the "Build Engine Holy Trinity", Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior (1997) and Blood, were the performers, as they prefered to use the maximum of an already optimized 2½D game engine (which forced players to use keyboards commands to look around, making auto-aim necessary, and limited graphical possibilities, as maps were prerendered after a 2D map and characters were only sprites with eight preprogrammed directions); however, this didn't stop the developers from conceiving concrete and destructible environments with these limitations, or to create Black Comedy settings with expressive protagonists who always had a funny line to deliver, and unconventional weapons with secondary fires, including perky ones with unique effects.

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