“Is it worth teaching old fighting games to new players?”
Hey Pat! I’m not usually one to ask for help or advice, but I thought about my circumstances and felt that perhaps I’m not entirely alone in navigating a strange situation, and maybe your insight could help someone out there.
I’m not here to ask about managing a mental stack, learning how to hit confirm, or dealing with getting 9th place for the 50th time. I have already been there and done that, which was years ago; we’re talking multiple-presidential-administrations years ago. I’m coming to you as a certified “old head,” but one that has forsaken Facebook and its conservative bullshit, and thus has not succumbed to the brain rot that impacts so many of my peers. And that brain rot problem is at the core of my dilemma.
These days it has gotten harder and harder to just sit down and press buttons when I know the people my age that play the games I grew up with are wretchedly stupid. I’ve cultivated decades worth of experience and knowledge that I don’t want to go to waste, but I also don’t want my efforts spent on some fuckwit that can’t be bothered to stop listening to Joe Rogan. It feels like the field of people I can play with has shrunk to an uncomfortable degree, and that has me at a loss for what to do.
I’m not sure I can sell the newer generation on the magic of getting stunned off a touch, or combo videoed for accidentally getting hit back-turned. Furthermore, if I do manage to get people onboard, am I condemning them to dealing with the bigots if they branch out to test themselves? How worthwhile is it to create a scene that’s ultimately secluded?
Cheers,
A Veteran Between Seasons
Ah, a question near and dear to my grizzled fighting game veteran heart.
I think you and I are both old enough to remember a time when the grass was greener, the footsies more honest, and the likelihood that two people would be violently divided by different political realities was much lower. We share this world with people who hold views that we find morally intolerable, and staying sane means seeing as little of them as possible. It can be fun to be jerks among jerks when you’re a dumb kid, but it gets old fast. (Just like us.)
I describe this primarily in terms of politics because it’s the most obvious vector for anyone reading this to relate to, but I think it’s true in terms of all kinds of human qualities. In general, I care about the quality of people I spend my time with. I want to feel invested in the people around me, to grow alongside them, and if I find that people around me do not meet that standard, I will go to people who do. I want to be better so the others around me can be better, and vice versa, and by being protective about my time and upfront with my ideas about how people ought to treat each other, I have generally been successful at creating networks of people around me who feel similarly. It does mean that I have to discard friendships that don’t point in this direction — I’ve had people tell me that real friends ignore each others’ flaws and insecurities instead of acknowledging them as things to be worked on, or that hanging out with me feels like being lectured by their father — but each experience like this leaves me more grateful for the new people I find who are down to grow together.
So: We have a situation where we want to play some good old games, but we do not have the patience or the leverage to deal with the people who we came up playing these games with, which brings us to your questions three:
- Do the kids like the old shit?
- Does getting the kids into the old shit expose them to jerks?
- Is it worth getting the kids into the old shit at a relatively small scale?
Let’s start with #1.
I can tell you that the answer to question #1 is unequivocally yes; crouching medium kick might not be what it was 20 years ago, but fighting game sickos are fighting game sickos throughout the generations, and plenty of the youth raised on modern fighting games of today can still appreciate a good [KOF2k] Hinako CMV Ultimatum -BLACK SIDE- [REUPLOAD]. You just might have to do a little work to find them; in my case, building community for Guilty Gear Xrd Rev2 for the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Windows Personal Computer has been real good for finding the younger sickos because it’s a game that’s visually and mechanically polished enough to appeal to folks raised on newer games, but has enough old-game stank on it that anyone who is into it will likely be down to dig deeper into the dustbin of history. Our Xrd locals routinely run side tournaments and one-off brackets for all kinds of stuff and it has done my old heart good to see the youngins running around embracing the depth and breadth our genre has to offer instead of taking what they’re served up and told it’s rock and roll.
I wrote about this a little bit in my take on “Old games good, new games bad”; the new games have brought in a wider pool of people, and those people might value different parts of the experience than we did when we were there age, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find people whose freak echoes your own. They’re still out there, you just have to look for them a little harder. Basically, the percentage of the population who likes the stuff you like in fighting games probably hasn’t changed, but the size of the population who likes fighting games has gotten bigger, so your odds of finding those folks are a bit better.
The good news is that I think it’s actually a little easier for people to like the older fighting games now, untainted by contemporary esports marketing and social media hype, because they’re very clearly just a fun way to spend some time working on yourself and meeting new people. This is all fighting games are (and, I believe, all they really should be), but when you’re playing the new stuff it’s hard not to feel like everyone around you isn’t just holding on to a little bit of desperate hope that playing this game can deliver you from the hell that is the capitalist treadmill. No patches, no prizes, just you and that crouching medium kick.
Now let’s talk about questions #2 and #3 — does building a community for an older game create avenues for jerk exposure, and is there value in building a community that is a little bit removed (perhaps in order to minimize jerk exposure)?
I think the answer to both these questions is yes; exposure to old games will increase exposure to old people who play them, including the jerks. Nevertheless, there is still value in doing this, you just have to be smart and intentional about it.
People give me a lot of credit for the work I do with the Xrd community, but some of the most powerful organizing work I’ve seen was actually done by my wife Irene, who found early on that while the existing community spaces and resources she had access to were enough to learn from, the vibes were generally pretty counterproductive; new players were asking the wrong questions, old players were giving the wrong answers, and people generally weren’t getting along well enough to make the game feel worth digging into. I’ll save the full history of the Hoely Order for another day, but one of the neat things that we found when she started her own Discord is that it became a “home base” for the kids to get comfortable playing among themselves, and then once they felt ready they’d go and brave the jerks in public lobbies or Fightcade or whatever and would feel a little bit more confident and self-assured after having done so.
As a fairly socially awkward kid myself, this was exactly what arcades did for me — put me into social contact with people I didn’t know and didn’t understand, and gradually build confidence in my ability to navigate those interactions as I branched out from my home base.
The thing is that if you only play in jerk-infested spaces, you just kind of assume that the jerks are an unchangeable fact of life, but if you can clearly see where the jerks are then they can become a useful mob to farm for life experience. Having that contrast between jerkified and jerk-free spaces also puts the jerks in a bit more context; people whose lives are going well do not spend the years of their precious middle age being hateful playing a thirty year old game on the Internet, and they’re probably acting that way because they didn’t have the space you’re making for the kids now.
To be sure, you do need to be careful. Warn them of the predators and the grifters and the fascists and the elevator-shitters as much as you need to. Building community means keeping people safe as best you can. But they will be exposed to jerks, eventually, and with the right practice and preparation it could be a useful growing experience for the kiddos — and possibly even the jerks themselves.
I think you’re asking yourself these questions because you want to do the work, but you don’t have a clear idea of what the work will lead to or how it’ll pay off. You won’t raise any Evo champions or get any esports deals, and you might just spend a couple years of your life teaching someone to play Guilty Gear only to have them go off and play Strive. This work is the fighting game equivalent of an afterschool kids martial arts program, and while that might sound dismissive, those programs do a lot of good for a lot of people, even if they don’t end up breaking new ground in the art or winning competitive accolades. (I wrote about this a bit in Building confidence through fighting games.)
When I think about what makes it worth it for me, I think about how incredibly formative fighting games were for me in terms of giving me things I needed in life that nothing else around me had given me — a community, a sense of purpose, the desire to do something for myself and on my own terms — but I also think about how I wouldn’t have been in a position to have all those formative experiences if I hadn’t had my high school debate coach who gave me all the tools I needed to understand the experiences I was having and grow from them. For every me, there are probably a hundred other people who could have had a life-changing experience through fighting games, but didn’t stick around long enough because they didn’t have someone to help them through it.
The value we create in building communities to teach people to play fighting games is the same as the value we get from any other sport or hobby community; it’s a place for people to do things for themselves that grow themselves as people, meet others, and learn, and these are all things people need to be happy. These spaces need coaches and teachers and mentors to share their experiences with others, and you should be one of them. With your help, and the help of others like you, we might be able to have a few less jerks in this generation of fighting game players than we did in ours.
It’s also worth pointing out that the difference between playing a new game and playing an old game in this example is you — you get to share your knowledge and experience with others, and ground the practice of the game in the history and tradition that you understand. It’s important to pass these on to the next generation, I think. I like to teach the NorCal kids how to play Capcom vs. SNK 2 because I believe that it’s NorCal’s game, and that learning strong footsies is their birthright. It’s just like passing on old forms of martial arts just because it feels good to move your body in a way that people have for generations before you, and connect your practice to the people who came before you.
And, in case you were wondering, I think you also need this in your life. You may have learned everything to learn from being a player of the game, but that’s only the beginning. Learning to teach others will feel like learning these games all over again, and it’ll be good for you to continue to grow yourself in this way.
Just don’t do this because you want to teach the kids about getting CMVed for accidentally getting hit back-turned.
Do this because you want them to thank you for it.
Thanks for reading!
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