Finding our reasons for playing fighting games
The best damn advice column in fighting games is back for 2023, and we’re kicking it off with some updates from previous write-ins. Coincidentally, both of them are about finding and comparing our motivations to play fighting games, so I’m putting them both together for one cool mega-column where we talk about why we play, how that reason informs our practice, and what happens when my motivations don’t match the motivations of those around us.
Hey Patrick!
It’s been a while since I wrote in about feeling pressured and obligated to be more competitive than I personally want to be (“How can I keep playing fighting games without feeling pressured to compete?”, and since the new year is upon us I wanted to give an update on where I’m at!
First off, the downer part: it took a lot of time and a fair bit of a break, but I had to just admit to myself that for many reasons, some of which are outside my locus of control, I’m just never going to be able to play on a regular or consistent basis, and that’s fine. That second part is both really important and also probably the most difficult thing to hammer in. Still not always perfect about it, but that specifically has made a tremendous improvement.
I want to say that you were very right when you said that what I was more than likely dealing with was struggling to feel comfortable participating in communities with competitive-minded growth. It’s not just the feeling of getting left behind due to lack of time to play, but also just feeling like I don’t belong because I felt less invested, as though I didn’t truly Care. And if I don’t Care, then I’m not any fun to play with, because I’m not playing for the same goal or the same end.
On top of this, I realized I tend to internalize the goals and methods of others when learning something new, and since a lot of people I met very early on were more focused on competitive success, and had either detail-oriented methodologies or just an absolutely staggering amount of time to play, that left me feeling that as someone with neither of those, there wouldn’t really be any reason to even play past a certain point.
It took a lot of time during the break to really untangle all this stuff out and just reach the conclusion that not only is being “good” not the point of fighting games, but it’s also fine for me, specifically, not to be particularly good at fighting games. It takes an annoyingly long time for something like this to just really sink in.
The good news, however, is some of the things that I’ve done during and since! I have been:
Working with other players to build out parts of a character wiki, which also incidentally taught me a fair amount of how to think about structuring my play. I may not have the raw time or will to implement these structures in a “timely manner”, but knowing that I’m able to understand well enough to teach and assist others gives me a lot more confidence in progressing at my own pace.
Leaning more and more into being a more “random select” type player who knows a little about a lot of the cast of the games I love, which is a lot more in line with my own personality and how I play other games. This removes a lot of internalized pressure to “perfect my game” as it applies to a single character, and shunts it to something that’s actually fun and useful for me, and lets me learn new things and work on improving things I already know.
Taking the time to hang out with other new / learning players and generally just trying to be a positive / friendly interaction for new or inexperienced players. This way, I get a lot of opportunities to play at my pace, and even when I feel completely outmatched it’s a lot easier to understand that I’m helping someone else learn. It also means that I take a lot more stock of my social energy before I play or engage to make sure I don’t cause problems for myself because of some arbitrary obligation I assigned myself at a different time.
Making sure to take the time to actually appreciate my progress, and working on decoupling that appreciation with results. This can be small, like noticing that my inputs are a lot cleaner than they used to be in a replay, or bigger, like realizing how strong my oki and pressure game has become. I still get hung up on results sometimes, but it’s a lot easier to manage those moments when I’m managing my social energy well, so I can talk to the other player and remind myself that it’s just a game, and I likely learned something anyway.
They’re all things that show up a bunch in FG advice talk (I’m pretty certain you’ve talked about all of them), and all things I knew were what I needed to do, but got hung up on feeling like I needed to excel in-game before being able to do them. Now that I’m doing these things, it’s clearer to me that I can bring myself as I am and still be a welcome member of a competitive community. And it’s also clearer that the path to improvement doesn’t necessarily depend on having 4–8 hour chunks of time every day to sit in the game without doing anything else. The big thing for me is, I can play when I am able and not feel like a drain on community resources.
Another thing I’m finding is that I’m understanding a lot more about how these games function, and how we interface with them, and how to communicate that understanding outside of the game. I’ve kicked around the idea of trying to write my own general-purpose beginner’s guide, which is absolutely pure conjecture at this point, but definitely something I’m simmering in the back of my mind.
Finally, there’s a lot of exciting developments for me at my job, which will let me relocate to the community I’m currently working in. It’s not far from where I live now, but it will likely be a good place to either find a locals scene to help with or build one from scratch. So once all that comes to pass and I get settled in, I expect to have quite a few questions about that process!
Thanks,
Gently Grinding
Hi GG!
Thanks so much for following up. This whole letter was a joy to read, and I’m glad I could be a small part in you feeling a little more comfortable.
I don’t think there are many people in the world who are so perfectly suited to fighting games that to continue playing them indefinitely is the ‘obvious choice’ or path of least resistance. Anyone who keeps playing these games usually has found a reason to keep playing these games, and that reason typically changes over time. As I mentioned before, most people aren’t sticking around in pursuit of being The Best; more often it’s a combination of “being better than I was yesterday” and “hanging out with the homies”.
You found a reason to play and a way of playing and engaging that fits the present you, and that’s awesome!
And, as you’ve picked up, the funny thing about these games is that as long as you keep playing, you’ll get better. How you play informs the kind of progress you make and how fast you make it, but I’m a firm believer in cultivating sustainable fighting game personal practices because I think being in the game for the long haul is the most consistent way for people to get better than they ever thought they could be.
I try to embrace the law of diminishing returns in my personal practice, so if I’m spending four hours playing fighting games in a day, I’m most likely breaking that time up across the day and playing different games instead of burning all that time on a single game. I know there’s a limit to how much I can practice and absorb in a single day or session, so I aim to put in just enough time to hit that limit for the day, and then move on to something else.
So I look forward to seeing how you grow through your practice, and how your practice grows to match you. You will grow in ways that others won’t, and I think it’ll have some cool effects on how you play your games.
Good luck in 2023!
Dear Pat,
Same guy from “How do I make learning fighting games less boring?” with a few updates! On and off, given our status as pretty busy students that live halfway across the country from each other, we’ve managed to find time over the past few months to play a sizable amount of Tekken 7 together! I’ve caught up and am able to beat him consistently all things considered, but we’re still playing and having fun together — and he’s definitely gotten a lot better intuitively! I guess im reaching out to say that a new issue has arisen — if it even is an issue at all.
He doesn’t play/really think about the game if it’s not with me.
I’ve been grinding ranked and watching guides to try to hone my craft (and his! thanks to teaching him I’ve become very familiar w the Kazumi matchup) but he doesn’t ever really touch the game without me, and honestly, I can’t blame him. He’s reached a level that provides him with enough enjoyment when we play, but when he sees any sort of complexity added, a lot of his response is to limit himself with a somewhat reflexive “I can’t do that” or an “I won’t remember that when actually playing.” Tekken 7 has a pretty prolific ranked match setting as well, and that was enough to keep me motivated, but it’s really interesting to see how that hasn’t been able to catch him (despite his propensity towards queueing ranked in other competitive video games)
I guess this is kind of another compound question then:
1. Is it even an issue that he only really has his interest in the game tied to playing with me? Is it a fair expectation to hope an enjoyment of the game or a desire to solo practice and matchmake develops?
2. This one’s for both him and me — how do you get over the “I can’t do that” or “I’ll never do that in an actual match” hump? For him, it’s a matter of embracing training mode and finding motivation, but for me a lot of times I’ll try to practice some new combo routing but inevitably find myself going with the execution I find “comfortable” even though I know it’s much lower damage output.
Thanks!
- Tekken Tutor But Hardstuck Green
Glad to hear from you again, TT!
I suspect that there are a couple things going on here, but let’s start with the question “is this an issue?”
They say that it’s easier to make friends with fighting game players than to make friends into fighting game players. You both have fun playing the game, but it’s clear that it grabs you more than it grabs him. This is pretty common; heck, it’s true of Ken and Ryu.
There could be all kinds of reasons why this is the case. Fighting games are great at giving people a problem set that is uniquely challenging in many different ways, and some people gravitate towards that kind of thing because they need it in their lives, and others have enough challenge in their day to day life that they find the thought of doing it recreationally to be unpleasant.
Whatever you see in fighting games that keeps you playing, your friend either doesn’t see it, doesn’t want it more than the other things he spends his time on, or doesn’t think he can get it, so he doesn’t bother. Any of those blockers could be resolved with time and energy, but you kind of have to ask yourself if your friendship is the kind of friendship where moving heaven and earth to get the homie into Tekken is a reasonable thing to do. After all, your friend might have other things he wants to do in his life besides getting good at Tekken.
If you’re looking for a good reason to get your friend into a new lifelong obsession, I can say from personal experience that fighting games are a pretty great way to practice getting over the whole “I can’t do that so I’m not going to try” thing, but I never went into fighting games thinking “Man, I’m gonna do this because I want to overcome my personal flaws.”
I went into fighting games because I like being good at video games, and I wanted to beat some of my friends. It wasn’t until after I stuck around for a while that I realized I had personally grown from playing fighting games in ways I thought were pretty cool, and I decided I liked that and wanted to keep playing. So while you could deliberately structure your play sessions to focus on doing the things outside your comfort zone — $5 every time you land the Hard Combo, for example — you could also just keep playing and you’d probably just see it start to happen organically because he’ll get a little better and things that seemed impossible at first start to feel more possible later on.
Anyway: He obviously does see something else in it, or else he wouldn’t keep playing. Since he only plays Tekken with you, he’s probably playing it because he likes playing it specifically with you.
This is also completely normal. Back before netplay was a thing, most fighting games were played between people who liked each other. The compulsion to travel from arcade to arcade in search of stronger people to fight may have formed the backbone of the modern day fighting game community, but the thing that has kept this genre alive is mostly that they’re fun games to play with people you like. (Llosing to people you don’t like is actually one of the worst things you can feel in a video game, or just about anything else.) Fighting games, unlike many popular modern video game genres, are made to be played with people you like, and while you can play them with internet randos, they’re not as fun or as deep that way, because you don’t get to feel each others’ growth over time.
So if you two are homies playing fighting games together because you want to spend some time doing something you both have fun doing, then no, it’s not an issue. You’ll get better than him over time, and that will make it easier to practice using stuff outside your comfort zone with him to even things up. Eventually you might end up playing a secondary or something instead of your main to keep your matches in the Fun Zone. He’ll still get better just by continuing to play the game, and since he will only ever have one opponent, he’ll probably only learn the parts of the game that he’ll have to learn while playing with you. Given a long enough time, he might eventually fall so far behind that he just doesn’t want to play with you at all, but then you can just play something else, or call him a scrub and get him to play Tekken with you anyway.
If your friendship is dependent on both of you being similarly invested, then yeah, it’s a problem for your friendship, but it sounds like that’s not the case. It just means your respective paths as Tekken players will diverge, and even if he stops playing eventually he’ll probably have fun cheering your growth on.
Thanks for reading!
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