“How do I make learning a fighting game less boring?”
Hi Pat!
Happy for you and Xrd, it’s been a long time coming.
I’ve recently picked up Tekken 7 because it was on sale, and I’ve always thought the game and competitive storylines were super cool. I (someone with a background in competing with anime and platform fighters) have naturally started off pretty blindsided given how different it is from either of those games.
I’ve also gifted a copy to a friend of mine with a limited fighting game background (we’d play Smash together, but nothing past that). He has a pretty extensive background in other “esports” like games (Overwatch, Teamfight Tactics) but has always strayed away from fighting games. During our session, we talked about it, and his rationale was that “when he plays other games, he can intuit how to learn and get better just by playing without needing to lab or structure practice, but with fighting games, he needs to treat it more like school.” This mindset is a little confusing to me — as someone who’s tried to get into Teamfight Tactics with him, it’s a massive deluge of information that you need to learn off the rip — but I think it aligns with trying to help someone find where the “reward” is. Tekken’s “movelist problem” is similarly daunting for him. Obviously, I’m not forcing him to play with me — I asked him if he thought it was cool and if he wanted to before even gifting him the copy — but I’m just trying to figure out where the motivators are for getting better.
Right now, the two of us go about even, but I’m trying to help find and tap into the motivators for labbing and getting better that I’ve kind of hardwired my brain on since I entered my first Smash local. From a selfish perspective, grinding ranked and training mode is the loneliest way to experience a fighting game, and I’d much rather get better alongside my friend. I can’t handhold him throughout the entire process though, and besides, he’s still kicking my ass — even if he doesn’t fully understand how he’s doing it. We’re having fun, but eventually, a bit of my legacy skill (namely, just understanding what is safe and what isn’t safe) is going to start to catch up, and I’m afraid he’ll get demotivated.
Neither of us are out here trying to win EVO, obviously, but for me, getting better at fighting games is cool, and for him (as it stands right now), winning is cool. I’m afraid that if I get better and he stops winning, he’ll put the game down and I’ll either put the game down too or be subject to the lonely grind of ranked.
I guess my main questions here are:
1. How do I make labbing — even just the super small things, like knowing how to input specials — feel less like homework? Furthermore, how do I help someone translate lab practice into their actual play?
2. How do I help guide someone towards the traditional dopamine receptors that other games provide?
3. How do I best find a way to help a new player shift their goals from “winning” to “getting better?”
Thanks so much!
Sincerely,
Granblueversus Nextpls
Dear GN,
Thanks again for another excellent letter! (I will keep Granblue in my prayers.) There is a lot of stuff to dig into here, and understandably so, as this question hits at the heart of why a lot of people don’t play fighting games, and that’s because getting good can feel like work.
Personally, I like that it feels like work sometimes. I like feeling rewarded for putting in effort, especially when that effort requires discipline and creativity and focused thought. And I like being around people who feel like cool things are worth working for, especially somewhat ludicrous things like fighting games. I’ve written about this before in Why fighting games are hard and Why fighting game execution is hard for new players; to me, these games being hard and requiring the player to work for it is an important part of the unique experience that fighting games provide.
Just as your friend is allergic to games that feel like school, I am allergic to games that do not feel like they’re worth systematically dissecting, isolating, and refining, because they do not feel like my efforts are valuable. I like to play games that make me feel like I could play them every day of my life and still not completely master them. For the past few years I have forced myself to play exactly one narrative-driven single-player game per year, because I think it’s important to take a break from mashing on fighting games, but if I didn’t force myself to play a single-player game I wouldn’t do it. (In case you’re wondering, last year’s was 13 Sentinels, the year before was Hades, and this year’s is probably going to be Disco Elysium.)
So: Before I get to the part where I talk about how to make these games feel less “like school”, as your friend puts it, I think it’s worth being clear with your friend that this is a core aspect of the genre’s appeal, and long-term successful engagement with the genre often comes from learning how to change your mentality to enjoy the grind more (read Developing the training mindset in fighting games for more on this topic!) Not everyone who plays fighting games feels like this, but I think the ones who are having the best time playing fighting games usually are. If your friend doesn’t like that or doesn’t want to become that, you may be better served just letting them do their thing in Overwatch or TFT or whatever. As the old saying goes, it’s easier to make friends with fighting game players than it is to make friends into fighting game players.
That said: I’m hardly the most disciplined lab monster myself. I do not, generally speaking, pursue truly optimal improvement strategies in the games I play because to me part of the fun is in learning to create learning tools and methods that I find enjoyable — and while systematic drilling and lab research is a part of my toolset, it’s certainly not the whole plan. I was the kind of student who got As in stuff I cared about and Bs in stuff I didn’t, and that carries over to my fighting game practice as well.
So let’s talk about how to make the grind a little less grindy.
Spending time in training mode learning moves, practicing inputs, and figuring out tricky situations is the most efficient way to master most of the various skill tests that a fighting game throws at you. However, sitting down to learn every character’s moveset one at a time is the fighting game equivalent of learning a language by memorizing the dictionary; it might be the optimal way to “learn” that language, but the learning you’re doing likely doesn’t match the way you’d actually use the language while talking to people in everyday life.
Many newer players think that they have to master the entire game in training mode before playing their first PvP match, and that couldn’t be further from the truth — just like how languages are typically best learned in immersive environments where your learning is guided by having to do stuff like ask for directions or navigate an ad-hoc social situation instead of just studying in a book.
The most reliable pattern I’d recommend for day-to-day fighting game practice simply involves playing against a couple human beings, taking notes on specific things that you couldn’t figure out how to deal with, and then looking at that stuff in training mode and figuring it out in training mode. You’re essentially using your netplay sessions as a search strategy to locate things you don’t know about the game, and they feel more relevant than memorizing movelists because you can feel the practicality of learning this stuff quite clearly since it just beat you up. (Check out How to use training mode for more on this.) Instead of practicing something in training mode and hoping it’ll be useful in your PvP, you’re using your PvP to guide what you practice in training mode.
That said, I do recommend learning every character’s moves, because the last thing you want in competition is to be surprised by something you’ve literally never seen before and have no idea how it works. Instead of memorizing movelists in training mode, though, I usually suggest that people learn how to play all the characters over time. I spent a good half a year or so playing a different Xrd character every week, doing their combo challenges and playing them online and everything, and that was hands-down some of the most valuable time I’ve spent playing that game in all my years and hours of playing it.
I think a lot of players believe that any time spent not playing their main is a ‘waste’ or somehow unproductive, but I’ve found that the easiest way to learn a matchup or download an opponent is to have your own experience playing as that character, so you know what it feels like to play them yourself. You paid for the whole damn game, after all, might as well get your money’s worth.
For dexterity and muscle memory challenges like learning special move inputs and combos or practicing throw breaks, it’s far easier to level these up in training mode than it is to grind it out in a live match. However, these generally aren’t going to click in a single practice session, especially early on in a player’s fighting game practice, so I recommend treating them like the equivalent of warmups and drills while practicing a sport or a musical instrument; list the stuff you want to improve on and do them for a few minutes each before you hop online. Time-gating these sessions will make them feel more manageable, and you can add game-y win conditions like “Execute this move perfectly ten times in a row on each side before moving onto the next one” to create a goal that feels more satisfying to work towards. You can even make it a PvP game out of it; if you’ve ever played the basketball mini-game HORSE, well, you can do that with combos, too.
None of this will make playing fighting games feel quite as ‘natural’ as mindlessly mashing solo queue or whatever, but it does make the bitter pill of “git gud” a bit easier to swallow. So now it’s time to talk about why we choose to do the work in the first place.
The satisfaction of a job well done is the feeling of seeing your efforts to do something pay off; the greater the effort, the greater the satisfaction. But in order to supply the energy required to put in that effort, you’ve gotta want it. Without a strong motivation to improve, your friend will never feel inclined to want to put in the work to actually do so, no matter how much you do to make it feel less like work.
Right now, it sounds like you are the only reason your friend is playing Tekken, which is fine, but it’s not a strong enough motivation to actually dig deep into the game and learn how it works. Your fears that your friend will get discouraged and stop playing the moment you get better are well-founded; right now, the game requires minimal effort to have a somewhat satisfactory outcome for your friend, but the moment that your friend starts losing, it’s going to take some work to get that satisfaction back, and they’ll have to choose between doing the work or walking away.
There are some people who care so much about beating their friend that they’re willing to put in the work; this is the story of countless pairs of friends, roommates, siblings etc., not to mention Ken and Ryu. (If you want to deliver the true Tekken experience to your friend, you could consider throwing him off a mountain when you do beat him, and see if he has the motivation to climb up for the runback.)
However, the reason that those stories are special is because most of the time, a single rivalry is not strong enough to get both players perpetually coming back stronger. And if you look at longterm fighting game competitors, any one of them could probably tell you about rivalries that have motivated them during specific moments in time, but they’re usually the exception rather than the norm. So if you think your friend might have the potential to become an engaged fighting game player, you’re going to have to do some legwork in figuring out what will motivate them.
The good news is that I have spent a lot of time puzzling this one out for myself, because I’ve always wondered what it is that causes fighting games to have as polarizing a draw as they do. In my experience, there are a core set of people for whom fighting games are completely irreplaceable as a passion and nothing else quite hits right. And I believe that their motivations are tied to a combination of the following factors:
- They like winning
- They like developing their mastery
- They like performing in front of others
- They like being around other people who like these things
There are few activities in life that can deliver on all of those motivations, and most of the ones that do aren’t video games. This is the reason why I am generally ruined for not-fighting games; they simply do not deliver all these motivations to me as effectively as fighting games do, and so the cost of spending a little time in the lab feels like nothing compared to the drag of playing a game where I don’t get the thrill of competition, the satisfaction of getting stronger, the attention from other people, and the fantastic community vibes that I get from fighting games.
Your friend might not need these things in his life. Maybe your friend has the first two needs satisfied by the other games he plays, doesn’t like the attention of being visible, and has his social needs served by work or school or whatever else he’s got going on. If that’s the case, and you are his only motivation to stay engaged in Tekken, then that engagement will likely not last long-term.
This is why I think locals are so important to the continued health of any fighting game community; they are often the first place that a new player is exposed to all of the things in the fighting game experience that aren’t in the actual game. The first moment that got me hooked on fighting games forever wasn’t at Evo, it was at a Capcom vs. SNK cabinet at La Val’s pizzeria in Berkeley, where I mashed out a clumsy anti-air DP and heard a reaction from the people around me watching and waiting for their turn. I had spent almost every year of my life playing video games up until that point, but I had never felt anything like that, and I’ve spent the rest of my life chasing that dragon punch.
Take your friend to a local. If you don’t have a local, take them to the nearest tournament you can find. Both of you can go 0–2 together, mash casuals, get some pizza afterwards, and talk about what you’ll do with each other, together, to get better before the next one. Be your friend’s training partner, rather than their obstacle, and make him yours as well. It’s not guaranteed to work, of course, but I think you’ll find that most of us who stuck around for the long haul started with a story that sounds kind of similar.
After all, there’s nothing like a good friend to make school suck a little bit less.
Thanks for writing in!
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-patrick miller
