“How can I teach my friends to play fighting games?”
Hi Pat,
Over the past year or so I’ve been in the process of helping a group of friends get into fighting games. It’s been really cool to see people take to Guilty Gear, in particular, and find something about fighting games that they love. I’m a long time player and competitor, and now I’m finding myself playing with people who have a wide variety of experience and skill levels. I’m trying to be the best teacher I can be for these newbies, and I love sitting down with folks in training mode and talking them through the game’s systems and cool things about the characters they’re interested in.
My problem is that I don’t think I’m a good teacher or training partner once the match starts. I feel like it’s too easy to fall into running my shit and seeing how the other person deals with it instead of giving people an opportunity to use what they’ve been working on or what we’ve been talking over. How can I be a good teacher or training partner once the round starts? What should I be looking for to help people grow and not just get frustrated that they’re getting run over?
Thanks,
Struggling Sensei
Hi SS,
This is one hell of a question! We spend so much time and effort learning how to kick ass, only to find that the hardest thing is actually to not kick ass. More than anything else, learning how to better teach these games is the challenge that has kept me obsessed with fighting games for decade after decade. I started out just teaching my college roommates the basics of Capcom vs. SNK 2, Third Strike, and Guilty Gear XX — much like what you’re doing with your friends now, perhaps — but since then I’ve gotten to be an amateur boxing coach and BJJ instructor, a self-published author of a book called From Masher to Master, a local Xrd community leader, an advice columnist, and as of a few months ago, a full-time fighting game instructor in my day job.
I can’t say I’ve got a silver bullet for you, but I can certainly share some techniques and perspectives that have worked for me, all of which have been tried and tested by coming up with stuff that didn’t work and figuring out why.
Have fun, then maybe we can learn something
Believe it or not, a lot of the methods and practices used to teach martial arts apply very well for fighting games. When I teach fighting game group classes, I often find myself drawing from techniques used in martial arts or other physical education. One of my best projects was my Guilty Gear Warmup Series, which is basically the format of a yoga instructional video except applied to anime ninja training mode.
In most cases, however, treating fighting game education as an exercise in copying knowledge from one person to another is a recipe for failure. Running workout classes is comparatively ‘easy’ because the people who attend them aren’t just there to learn a new skill, they’re also there because they want to maintain their health and fitness, and as long as they learn something and get a good sweat going, they’ll have a good-enough time and will come back. Most people who sit down to play a fighting game want to enjoy their downtime, and if their practice sessions feel like all the emotional effort of going to the gym without any of the physical benefits (or endorphins) then they likely will not stick around long.
In other words, people come to fighting games expecting to play a fun video game, so your goal as a teacher is not “Impart my knowledge and experience to these players as quickly as possible so they can Get Good ASAP and we can start having fun,” because learning fighting games can take a long time, and if they’re not having fun, or they think that you’re not having fun, they’ll churn.
Instead, the goal is:
“How can I make this game fun for us to play together even though they suck?”
Sometimes the fun comes from helping them level up, but a lot of it comes from just being patient and making sure they know that they’re not dragging down the vibes. As a teacher, the most powerful thing I ever did was run our local Guilty Gear Xrd beginner bracket, and it was because we gave people a zone to be bad at the game, celebrated them for showing up, and got hype while we watched them scrap. Once we got them to feel like they were welcome in our community no matter how bad they were, it was easy to find opportunities to teach more explicit skill development because they were already having fun.
Which brings me to a warning before we move on: I certainly get it when you say “I love talking them through the game’s systems and cool things,” but if you do too much of this it can be counterproductive long-term, even if it feels good for both of you in the moment.
This is because a major part of the joy of learning to play fighting games, and video games in general, is learning to love learning itself. Explaining a lot of stuff all at once feels satisfying in the moment, but your student is probably not going to absorb much (if any) of it, and it can deprive them of the joy of learning stuff slowly and at their own pace. It’s kind of like showing someone a speedrun of a game instead of having them play it for themselves.
You know what they say,
“Teach a noob a combo and they mash for a day; teach a noob to lab and they mash for the rest of their life.”
You can’t let yourself underestimate just how much work it is to learn stuff in fighting games! It takes so long for most people to chew on stuff before they really get it. In Criticism is Easy, Teaching is Hard I go into how much work it takes to internalize seemingly-simple advice like “Use this button more” or “Wakeup DP less”. By pacing the amount of new stuff your friends have to absorb in a session, you’ll make it easier for them to feel satisfied and keep them learning longer.
Additionally, I’ve noticed that players who have a big gap between Stuff They Know and Stuff They Do in a fighting game often have a more frustrating learning process, because they ground their self-evaluation of their skill at the game in terms of Knowing but their results are tied to Doing.
I try to keep the gap between what the player Knows and what the player Can Do as small as possible. When I’m teaching classes at work, I focus on giving the students one or two things to do in a thirty minute session, and we just drill those things for 30 minutes. They’re introduced to the thing at the beginning of the session, and we’ll build off of it gradually over the course of the week, making sure we get those reps in over time so that they have a chance to absorb stuff gradually with frequent short practice sessions, without covering so much content that someone feels like they’re ‘falling behind’ if they miss a class or even a week.
For what it’s worth: This is actually where I think From Masher to Master failed as a learning text — I spent most of my effort demystifying the core concepts in fighting games, but didn’t spend nearly as much effort showing the player how to actually apply those concepts in any kind of rigorous structured practice, so I ended up with readers who knew what was going on in fighting games but weren’t any better at playing them (and in many cases were actually worse, since their minds were overloaded with thinking too much). Gief’s Gym by Joe Munday did this a lot better.
Learn the student matchup
So now let’s dig into the critical part of your question: “How can I be a good teacher or training partner once the round starts?”
The answer depends heavily on your relationship to your friends, their individual personalities, and their tolerance for being “taught” over “playing with.”
One of the things that I appreciate about experienced fighting game players is that most of the ones who stick around are the ones who have learned to love doing the work and are interested in grinding through the awkward beginner phase as quick as possible. Whenever a fighting game player sits down to learn a new skill, they’re often enthusiastic to apply all the tools and lenses they’ve refined in fighting games to skip the bullshit and level up quick — and it usually works!
When I learned how to play League of Legends, I played with my fighting game friends who were all too happy to show me how to use build guides, organize my learning for consistent useful progress (like helping me focus on learning specific roles so I could fit the group well, or showing me where to find good character build guides so I could learn to play competently before I was ready to get any useful experimentation from figuring my own builds out), and run me through a lot of 1v1 lane practice sessions to grind early game proficiency instead of spending that time trying to make nigh-impossible comebacks. This is not how most people learn how to play MOBAs, but because we all shared a fighting game background, we also shared a pragmatic appreciation for breaking down each part of the game and practicing it in isolation to learn more quickly.
If your friends want to optimize for skill transfer, then you don’t even have to play ‘real’ matches with them — just find a thing they want to work on and help them drill it in training mode. Be the training bot you wish you had for them, and they’ll probably pick things up and put them together more quickly than you did. But I’m guessing that your friends are not quite about that grindset, and they want you to have a good time too. So eventually you can help them be less bored while labbing stuff, but don’t worry about that yet.
Instead, let’s remind ourselves of something I mentioned earlier:
It’s actually harder to Not Beat Someone’s Ass.
Reading How to be a good sparring partner is a good first step, if you haven’t already — in general, the idea is that if you’re way better than your opponent, there are things you can do to make the match productive and enjoyable for both of you, but it takes active work to avoid autopiloting into just Running Your Shit.
For example, good sparring partners in martial arts know how to ‘let their partner work’. Often this means letting the weaker player set the pace instead of forcing them to play at yours, and giving them the chance to practice doing the things they’ve been working on without immediately punishing them for doing it less-than-perfectly. When I’m letting my partner work, I don’t attack as much and instead focus on moving in and out of their threat range in neutral, and practicing my defense until they land a couple hits, at which point I start attacking until I’ve evened out the health count a little bit.
You can prevent yourself from autopiloting into Running Your Shit by finding other things that you can work on and focusing on those instead to make the match feel more even. Ideally, you’ll feel challenged by working on the stuff that you’re not good at, and they’ll feel challenged by working on the stuff they’re not good at, so both of you will have a good time even if you both know that the match wasn’t “real” or “competitive”. (Playing weaker players is good for you goes into this a bit more, if you’re interested.)
If they absolutely will not settle for anything less than Full Intensity, I’d recommend experimenting with more clearly defined handicaps to give them something competitive. Pick your secondary, or play random select, and you can go “all out” within the bounds of a handicap that you can both have fun with (and it’s good for your learning, too).
Weaker players are usually self-conscious about being bad because they’re worried about their partner having fun, so as long as you make it clear that you’re having fun, they’ll probably be having fun too. As long as you can keep the match in the zone where you’re not bored and they’re not frustrated, you’ll be fine. Think of it like going from MMA to WWE — the goal isn’t about winning, but about putting on a show that makes both you and your partner look good.
I hope this helps! Thanks so much for writing in, and from one teacher to another: Good luck!
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