Alright, fair enough. To be honest I'm more worried about what the facts are than what other communities think about me for stating them. If someone's enjoyment of a game or a sport hinges on whether or not other people consider it competitive, that seems pretty shallow to me.
Anyways, let's talk about competitive and how the term is generally used in the context of Pokemon, because that's where a lot of these kinds of arguments stem from. By the most literal definition of competitive, which is any match, competition, tournament, or what have you where both participants are trying to win, Pokemon is competitive. So is Poker, golf, etc. In fact, by that definition, flipping a coin, where neither 'player' has any control over the outcome whatsoever, could be competitive so long as both players desire to win.
However, that strict dictionary definition quickly proves itself inadequate in the context of modern gaming. I'd argue it's been inadequate for a while now, but that's an aside. To illustrate this, let's look at a game that is most definitely competitive by anyone's standards; chess. Luck is essentially not a factor in chess. There is one single degree of entropy in a game of chess and that is deciding who plays the white side and therefore gets to move first. If you lose a game of chess, you can blame only one thing in the entire universe; yourself. There were only two factors at play, you, and your opponent, and your opponent outplayed you. Simple as that. Because of this, extremely good chess players are regarded as some of the most intelligent people on the planet, because they are. They must be to get where they are, there's simply no other way to get there.
There's a clear and fundamental difference between this and, say, Poker (or pinball or golf or any other highly entropic game/sport). While the players within these games do have at least some control over the outcome of the match (skills such as reading your opponents in Poker or timing when to swing the paddles on a pinball machine), the fact of the matter is there are many more degrees of entropy involved, and luck has a much bigger hand in deciding the outcome. If you lose a game of Poker, there's always the chance that you were, in a vacuum, the 'better' player; more knowledgeable, with more skill and experience at all the various nuances that come with playing the game, and you lost simply because you drew bad hands while your opponent drew good ones, and there's essentially nothing you could have done about it. Control over the outcome of the match was not in your hands.
So why is that even important? Poker and pinball and golf are still fun to play, right? Sure, but fun isn't what's in question here. As I've stated before, the literal definition of competitive refers to both parties desiring to win, so we need to look at that in a different light. Why do we want to win? This is a bit more of a psychological topic that I'm pretty underqualified to talk in great detail about, but it essentially boils down to a fundamental human desire to succeed, and the logical path to success is to be better than the rest of the pack in some way, whether it be by being more intelligent, more talented, more knowledgeable, employing superior tactics, etc. I know it seems pretty egocentric to say it this way but it's subconsciously true, even if a lot of people don't like to admit it. Of course, it's no reason not to have sportsmanship, nor does it mean being egocentric or cocky is justified.
Luck is the scourge to this fundamental desire. When you win a luck-based event, it somewhat undermines that victory. That victory means less, generally both to you and to other people spectating it. There will always be that nagging thought, both in your head and the heads of the spectators, that maybe you just got lucky. Maybe you didn't really deserve to win. Maybe you drew a better hand than your opponent did. Maybe the wind blew your golf ball just the right way. Maybe that time you OHKO'd one of your opponent's Pokemon with a critical hit changed the outcome of the match. On the other hand, if someone wins a chess match, it can essentially only be because they were the better player, so naturally there's a lot more respect and admiration for that, and the player themself usually feels more satisfied as that nagging doubt that maybe they just got lucky and didn't really deserve the win simply isn't there. There's no reason for it to be.
This is, in essence, what the modern colloquial usage of the term 'competitive' revolves around, and it's put into practice in more than just chess. A lot of modern competitive FPS games, such as CS:GO and Rainbow Six: Siege, go to extreme lengths to remove randomness from the games, to the point where certain weapons like shotguns, that you would logically expect to spread their pellets in a random fashion, have fixed and predictable pellet spreads, and automatic weapons recoil in predictable ways that allow you to consistently compensate for it, given enough experience. Luck is essentially a non-factor in these games. If you want to be puerile you could argue that no game could ever be truly competitive as there's always the chance that, say, one of the players has a sudden heart attack and drops dead, causing his team to lose, but players have as much agency, as much control over the outcome of the match, as can realistically be expected.
Pokemon isn't a FPS game (it's a turn-based strategy game masquerading as an RPG), but the fundamental principles of competitiveness in its modern usage still apply. It's not as random as a coin flip, and players do arguably have at least the majority of the control, but luck is enough of a factor to undermine a victory in a Pokemon match. Luck can and does swing matches. Player skill is not always the deciding outcome of a match, and manifests itself more through long series of matches. This rubs a lot of players the wrong way, especially ones who are better used to games similar to the aforementioned ones that seek to remove luck as much as possible, with me being one of them. When I win in a game, I want to know that I won because I was, in that match, the better player in some way. In Pokemon, it's hard to ever be certain.
Anyways, I just wrote a seven paragraph essay on a Pokemon forum about what it means for a game to be competitive, I think I'm going to go think about my life decisions now.
