Guest Column: This Is Your Brain on Esports

Disclosure: At the time of publishing, Patrick Miller is an employee of Radiant Entertainment.

Back in the late '90s, a lot of people believed that video games turned children into mass murderers, and so the Holy Grail for the game industry was a game that we could confidently point to and say, "Look! It's productive." But aside from edutainment stuff like Number Munchers, or hard puzzle games like Myst (which we figured made you smarter in some hard-to-describe way), we couldn't really do much more than hand-wave stuff about improving our hand-eye coordination--as if a noscope 360 MLG headshot would somehow become a key facet of modern life in the mysterious future.

Which is funny, because during that same period of social anxiety about the effects of games on young minds, I was playing a game that showed me the importance of consistent practice, developed my critical thinking and problem solving skills, helped me develop the ability to reflect on my actions and habits and change them, and taught me how to research, study, and form learning communities with other like-minded people. That game was Street Fighter II.

All across the game industry I've found other people who picked up a competitive game like StarCraft, Counter-Strike, or Super Smash Bros., played it seriously, and found that in their desire to "Git Gud" they developed skills and habits that were useful for other things besides just playing games.

Weightlifting for My Brain

I was something of a smart kid growing up--and like many kids that are told they're smart, I never really learned how to work hard to get good at something I was bad at, preferring instead to stick to the stuff I was good at so I could continue to feel smart. When it came to school stuff, I was basically a B student until I found an assignment I was interested in. It felt like I was just born with the things I was good at and the things I wasn't, and I didn't really know how to get better.

And then I found a Capcom vs. SNK arcade cabinet in an old Berkeley pizza place. I walked through the crowd, put my quarter up, lost, and realized that nothing in my life to date had been as exciting as playing video games against strangers in front of an audience. I met a friend at school who was also into fighting games, and we started practicing together, meeting other people, traveling to different arcades, and going to tournaments. I was still a B student, but I kept up those Bs while spending 2-3 hours after school every day playing at the arcade, entering every competition I could, devouring old VHS tapes of tournament footage for clues, and hunting for new practice partners.

The funny thing was, it wasn't the feeling of competence that got me hooked--I was bad. But unlike school, the path to improvement in fighting games was somehow less intimidating. All I had to do was ask the people who beat me what I was doing wrong, and I'd get better. I must have been embarrassed by the thought of getting a tutor or extra help from a teacher ("smart kids don't need help!") but when my friend beats me at a fighting game, he wants me to improve, because he doesn't get better unless I get better.

"Practice things you're bad at and you'll get better at them" is one of those things that seems so obvious I feel a little silly just typing those words, but for me, being able to actually see my time turn into measurable improvement was powerful stuff; up until that point, I was good at some things and bad at others and didn't really know what I could do to change that. I never won a single tournament back then, but it didn't matter. For the first time in my life, I felt like I could be whoever I wanted to be. All I had to do was consistently put in work.

Getting Good at Getting Good

Don’t get me wrong, I don't think our fighting game skills translate directly into life lessons; if there's a secret code to success in life, it probably doesn’t take the shape of a dragon punch’s control input. But I do think there's something special about learning how to get good at a video game, and it stems not only from the fact that we're learning to practice and work hard, but also that we can be motivated to do so completely on our own. Most of us don’t do our homework because we want to get good at math, but because our teachers and parents tell us we need to if we don't want to work a shitty job for the rest of our life. And hey, if we discover that we love math and want to get better at it, there are always established resources to study and classes to take.

But those sorts of structured learning environments and resources aren't available for most video games (at least not yet). There aren't any Street Fighter Alpha classes to take, no Hearthstone professors holding office hours. While YouTube does offer some help, it's often the case that players need to first know what questions to ask to even take advantage of those resources: How would someone who has never played a competitive RTS before even know to search for "build order"? So when you’re trying to improve your skills, you don't just have to learn how to play better, you have to learn how to learn to play better. And all without a prebuilt system of education.

Put another way: If I took you aside and told you I'd give you $1,000,000 if you could beat me in Capcom vs. SNK 2, what would you do to get that money? How would you practice? Where would you find help, and what kind of help would you ask for? How would you identify your weak spots and patch them? How would you identify my weak spots and exploit them? How would you evaluate your performance? How would you validate your training methods to make sure you're using your time as efficiently as possible? These are all problems that we tackle on the regular in any competitive game, and since there isn't an established practice of amateur coaching in video games, it means we're trying to learn this stuff on our own or with peers, which means that we learn to become our own teachers and coaches as well. As we learn and test all these things, we invariably fail a whole lot, which means that we have to embrace failure (even publicly-broadcasted-on-stream-in-front-of-a-lot-of-people failure) as a necessary step of getting better.

Now I'm 30, and I've spent over half my life playing fighting games, not because I'm trying to win EVO, but because they continue to teach me how to improve myself. Ironically, I'm still not very good at fighting games--most of the high moments of my career involve losing to well-known players like PR Balrog or Daigo Umehara--but I can confidently say that they taught me how to persist through the demoralizing feeling of being bad at something until I get better at it, and that's something which I've applied to other aspects of my life as well.

Working hard in Street Fighter became working hard in actual martial arts; I started in Shotokan Karate hoping to learn to do some Shoryukens in real life, and ended up getting a year-long Fulbright Fellowship to study Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in Japan (it's a long story), then came back to the United States and worked as a youth boxing coach for a year. Applying this same learn-as-you-go mentality to my writing and editing skills got me the chance to be the editor-in-chief of Game Developer Magazine for a year and change before it shut down (sadly, the death of print is not something I could stop, no matter how practice I put in). And in a wonderfully recursive twist of fate, all this eventually got me a chance to work on a fighting game with the team at Radiant Entertainment.

While my story sounds lovely, there's a far more common story in competitive games: "I quit."

Chasing the W

I hear it all the time: "I started playing [game], I got obsessed with it and spent all my time playing it, then after [long period of time] I decided to quit and I've been much happier since." I'm sure that sounds like a familiar story to many of you. (Tell me about it in the comments section!)

This is, I think, the downside to competitive games: They can often feel more rewarding than everything else going on in your life, which makes it easy to spend more and more time on them. It feels good when your friends give you props for hitting Diamond rank, even better to make a few bucks winning a local tournament, and better still when you find people from across the world recognizing you because they saw you play on stream. And so people chase that feeling of self-improvement, grinding away and climbing the ladder until one day you look around and realize you're miserable and burnt out. You've hit an insurmountable wall, and you feel like you've wasted your time. To continue with the brain-weightlifting analogy, you've burned out from overtraining, and maybe you came to the conclusion that building big muscles for its own sake isn't as rewarding as using them to do something else.

Most of us who play competitive games do quit, eventually. Maybe that's because in the end a little part of us expected that these games would end just like any other video game ends, where we beat the final boss and we get to be the best. But so many of us stick around, because we find that playing and competing is actually just the start of our path through these competitive games. At first, you learn and play and compete, but eventually you teach and grow and build. Maybe your love of the game inspires you to throw a tournament; maybe you start to draw or make music or something creative in homage to your favorite characters; maybe you make your own game. (In my case, it inspired me to write a free book teaching people how to play fighting games). And then you get to find joy in making stuff and sharing it with others who understand it.

Just like in physical sports, anyone who only plays competitive games primarily because they enjoy the satisfaction of winning won't last long. The joy isn't just in winning, it's also in the losses that led to your leveling up that led to the win, and eventually, it turns into being a part of someone else's journey and growing alongside them.

I don't know who you are or what your life looks like, Giant Bomb readers. Perhaps you already have something like this--a hobby and a community that challenges and inspires you to learn and grow. If you do, that's great! But I'm sure that some of you out there feel trapped by your comfort zone, believing that you will only ever be able to do what you can do now, beating yourself up for not being better, or perhaps never even daring to think that you could be better than you are. I was there, once, and I didn't even realize that mindset wasn't normal until I looked back at it years later.

If that sounds familiar, try picking up a competitive game and putting in some work. Lose a whole lot, but instead of getting angry and blaming the game or your teammates or whatever, try finding concrete, specific things you can improve on, and do those things in the next game. Did you win? Doesn't matter! You got better at a thing. Now just do that over and over again until you save your life.

Patrick Miller does a lot of thinking, talking, and writing about fighting games. When he's not managing communities for Radiant Entertainment, he's tweeting inane stuff @pattheflip, teaching fighting games on YouTube and Twitch, and writing on Medium. Make sure to check out his chat with Austin over on Giant Bomb Presents!

As a teacher, I'm continually learning how to teach better. It's one of the coolest things I've ever done and I continue to be amazed at what I don't know and how I can bring that into my teaching.

For a while, I felt like I knew everything about teaching and then I came across a job that made me realize how little I knew. It was a very humbling experience for me and I'm so thankful for it now that I can see how much I needed that wake up call.

Oh man this is a surprise. Didn't expect Pat the Flip to appear here. Greetings from the Giant Bomb FGC!

Now I know why @austin_walker was looking for fighting game imagery.

Nice article! SFV is the first Street Fighter I'm trying to take somewhat seriously (my goal is to be competent at the game, not necessarily pro) and although I'm complete trash right now, I am noticing small improvements over time and getting a lot of enjoyment out of it. I'm having fun with the "getting better at a thing" loop.

Survival mode does piss me off sometimes though...

I am going to link this.

And keep linking this.

And KEEP on linking this every time I hear lazy people with a sheer lack of anything but excuses reugaurding Fighters making demands they have no onus to reward.

Somewhat related: Many of the people who bray loudly about competitive games not bending over backwards to teach them how to get to the level where they think the real game occurs don't even realize that they simply don't have the attitude and discipline required to become the player they think they kind of already are. They want a tutorial to teach them how to be a competitive person, which is why no specific tutorial is ever good enough for them.

If those people want to become excellent players, their first steps lie outside the confines of their game. They conflate their hatred of losing with a competitive nature, when the two are not related. I don't know what the solution to this problem is, or if it's a problem at all.

Yeah, I feel the same. I'm not yet teaching (on my way there though) but I love reading about stuff like this. Also, I feel like this is a really important topic, not only because games teach how to teach, but also because we really have games that are pretty good at teaching difficult concepts (Think: Orbital mechanics in Kerbal Space Program).

This is probably my favourite guest column so far.

For me it's getting better at Dota 2. I'm not great yet, but i do feel myself getting better at a good rate.

Great Write-Up!

I feel like unfortunately people don't play fighting games because there isn't that easy reward or and the losses are as real as they get.

There's no one to blame for your loss but only yourself, no teammates to shift your blame onto.

There's also no one to carry to victory. You can't just be decent and expect to win better players.

It's a pure one versus one situation that relies 100% on your skill.

It's the same reason why I get nervous playing Street Fighter 5 online, but can play FPS online games with no stress involved.

BUT, But there isn't any other competitive game that is as satisfying as getting good at a fighting game. Every loss you analyse and find out what's missing in your game. It's all you, so you can get better by practicing elements missing in your plan, better execution, better hit confirms, better shimmies, better punishes. Better mind games.

If you have the right mentality, win or lose, you level up as a player. And that feels amazing.

The games I did this with were Soul Calibur 2, 3, 4, and 5. But it's never about beating people for winning's sake, only if you're an asshole. It's about mastery of a system, predicting an opponent, and then executing a strategy.

It's an interesting schism. On one hand, if you never try to win, you won't get better; you accept playing at a casual level, appreciate losing. If winning is all you care about, unplugging the other guy's controller is fine because you got your win; hack and cheat and call it a day.

The balance between the two is likely where most competitive players end up. And, as others have stated already, it's about learning how to master the system yourself, and then helping others master the system with you. It's about taking wins and losses together.

While I think "The Internet" is great, it's probably one of the worst things to happen to fighting games. Ragequits? Disrespect? Where could you do that at a local arcade and not lose friends, rivals, opponents? And instead you have Capcom collecting videos, and then not even punishing people properly for losing. It takes the people who only care about winning and empowers them.

If you take this axis of "scumbag asshole" and "decent human being," and overlay it with "casual player" and "competitive player", you get a good sense for who has what goals. Whine on forums for nerfs? Complaining about lack of story content? Playing alongside opponents and improving casual players? Publicly call out others who are bad? Pull out knives at a tournament?

Some people rile against "that guy always spamming the best character and the best move." Some people take that person and make them a rival, an opponent to cut their teeth against. Some players refuse to play that person. And, the "best character" guy might pummel newbies under the guise of "helping them improve." Or, he might pummel them and give them feedback and help people who want to improve advice to beat him someday.

As someone who skirted through High School on inherent talent and has had a lot of trouble with college as a result, this article was a little too close to my reality sometimes. Probably also explains why I've never gotten super deep into fighting games.

"I was something of a smart kid growing up--and like many kids that are told they're smart, I never really learned how to work hard to get good at something I was bad at, preferring instead to stick to the stuff I was good at so I could continue to feel smart."

God that line hits me hard on a personal level. I still actively tried to avoid things that make me feel dumb, especially RTS and fighting games.

The game I got into that got me to start thinking the way described in this article was league of legends. It started out innocently enough, the pirate character looked cool and I wanted to play him, but eventually I started losing to specific champions and thinking "wow, that character is really broken." But, instead of just leaving it as is, I would save up for that broken character so that I could play them and understand why they were broken, until I ran into another character who beat me so hard that I thought they were broken too. As anyone who has any sort of experience learning a competitive game could tell you, about 90% of those characters I thought were broken actually weren't, and coming to that realization was probably one of the big milestones in terms of developing that improvement mindset.

6 years later and I'm still playing the game, constantly still learning new things whether it be by playing against people who are much better than me or watching people who are extremely good play and trying to absorb their thought process and habits.

Agree with this piece so much, especially using fighting games as a comparison, and as a way to develop the habit of learning and persistence.

Had a similar experience with a game doing this for me recently, currently in college right now, and math has always been my weakness, i could never understand the logic behind it very well, and i was also making my way through the witness, oddly enough the way the witness forces you to apply its concepts, look at things from a different perspective, take things step by step, has dramatically made college algebra click in a way for me that i didnt thought would be possible.

Hey Pattheflip, really dug you ebook!

I'm still terrible at fighting games and likely always will be given how entrenched my decades old self taught habits are (and more importantly my lack of willingness to devote all my scant gaming time to fighting games), but it was super useful to help decipher livestreams when I watch EVO etc.

there's a ton of jargon, concepts and such, that those games never surface explicitly to solo players.

What is this... Radiant Entertainment...? Don't they like... make stuff for LoL or something?

This was a really good read! I've just gotten back into Street Fighter with the release of V after dipping out for IV which was just too complex for me. I've been having a blast, too. I'm awful, and I lose constantly to really basic spammy shit. But I never get mad, I'm just having a great time learning how to slowly but surely better myself. A lot of what was discussed here really resonated with me, and I'm super glad this is a thing that exists, and even more glad that it's at Giant Bomb. I'm gonna take a look at that ebook, too. I gotta GET GOOD.

The "good at school and nothing else because being good and not trying" thing was also really close to home for me. Getting to college really put things into perspective for me when not trying at all started to fail me.

But I ramble. Thanks for this great contribution!

I love the parallels between fighting games and martial arts. I've taken martial arts classes my whole life for that exact feeling of pushing myself to get better at something for the sake of being better at it. Years of playing Capoeira and it somehow never occurred to me to try and get good at fighting games until SFV came out. Now I am working on learning to play Laura and just busted into Bronze Rank. It is one of the most satisfying gaming experiences I have ever had.

Woot good to see your writing cross over here Patrick! Read your book shortly before SFV released and loved your breakdowns and analogies. Btw, I think you're missing a "much" in this sentence:

(sadly, the death of print is not something I could stop, no matter how practice I put in)

I saw your Laura breakdown from SRK, great to have someone in fighting games on GB!

Thanks for the article!

I suppose I'm kinda-sorta doing this with Rocket League, but that doesn't feel very similar to learning fighting games to me. I think that's because there's a 25-year history of fighting game knowledge that has accumulated and made that genre in particular tough to crack into. The skills one learns in 1992 playing SFII are directly applicable to the biggest fighting game release of 2016, more or less. With Rocket League...really, there's only a niche game from last generation that a fraction of a percent of the owners of Rocket League have played and mastered that has transferable skills and knowledge. The vast majority of Rocket League players started on the same foot. If I were to boot up Street Fighter V on release day, I'd already be decades behind a large chunk of players.

I hope to dive deep on Killer Instinct when it releases for PC, as long as I can get used to using a 360 D-Pad with a fighting game. I'd have done so with MKX, but Christ, the PC port of that was a gigantic mess that I refunded almost immediately and, with the recent news of discontinued support, won't pick up until it costs peanuts. Killer Instinct, though, has some rad stuff that seems helpful as hell with regard to the process of self-coaching.

Oh, and I tried the beta for an obscure little game called Rising Thunder. It seemed neat and looked to be going on the right track, but I didn't commit to it wholly because, well, it wasn't a full release. Once it comes out, as games are wont to do, I'll probably play it!

@hassun: aw, thanks!

When I saw the Ken and Terry gif, I knew this man.

Anyone else feel like the subtle animations and character told via intro and ending vignettes is one of the biggest things missing in SFV?

@pattheflip: Thanks again for that Karaface interview a while ago. Had a great time listening and talking about boxing and Edwin Haislet.

Nice write-up.

Welcome to the site, Patrick! Every time I've tried getting into a fighting game I've given up in frustration, but this makes me want to stick it out.

This is a fantastic column. Spot on about the similarities between improvement in fighting games and martial arts. I've always been interested in the mindset/skillset of efficient learning across various disciplines.

Especially curious about that Fulbright Fellowship @pattheflip, what's the story? Where did you study BJJ? If you kept it up, what belt are you?

Filed under esports.

This was a fine read.

I remember the moment of realization when I had played Halo a lot. I saw the venues to improve and it was all achievable, but I didn't get on with it. It had felt like work for some time and I made a mental decision: Games are for fun, not work. Playing for me is for unwinding and using my spare time, relaxing with friends. Sure, I love it, but I don't want to hate it one day. On the same note, I sometimes feel sad for the GB staff for their constant-gaming-burn-out that comes through momentarily.

"Practice things you're bad at and you'll get better at them" - I refer to it as "the Skyrim lesson" and it resonates even with people outside of the gamer bubble!

My interest in fighting games has primarily been the bombast and cool character designs, and hence I've never really managed to stick with them, but man oh man did I want to get good at Guilty Gear at one point. Strictly playing against AI probably doesn't help.

This article still hits home, though. Been working a boring job that I know I'm good at for quite some time, and I've only just started looking into getting skills for other careers - they're all completely outside of my comfort zone and I used to beat myself up constantly for not being insta-great, but I'm coming around to seeing small improvements (alongside the general knowledge gained)

@edmundus said:

Thanks for reading!

I started training BJJ in college as a P.E. class and kept it up during school and summers. The college I went to was very good at working with students to apply for Fulbright fellowships, and I got to work with a fantastic professor whose work in sociology had largely been about studying how sport played a role in community formation for marginalized folks (she studied basketball in Chinatowns in the U.S., which was super cool).

BJJ has kind of an interesting history because its roots are connected to Brazil and Japan's history together; in the early 1900s, Japan had way too many unemployed young men, so they encouraged them to ship off to Brazil and work in the farms, creating an ethnic Japanese community that set down roots -- and brought Judo with them. Judo techniques were adapted by various fighters, including the Gracie family, to Brazil's more free-form, proto-MMA combat ("vale tudo"), and in that arena, the ground fighting techniques that would gradually be de-emphasized in competitive Judo became the basis of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

Fast forward about a hundred years, when Japan was at the peak of its economic boom, and the country had a hard time finding people to do dirty and dangerous manufacturing jobs. The JP government's answer was to make it easier for immigrants to come over and work, but in order to not jeopardize national cohesion, they decided to make it particularly easy for people who could prove some kind of ethnic Japanese heritage -- basically targeting the descendants of the original wave of JP->BR migration. At this time, the Brazilian economy was booty, so even doctors and professionals in Brazilian could go work in a factory in Japan and make more money. Also at this time, the MMA boom was beginning to take root in Japan (Pride, vale tudo tournaments, etc.), and BJJ experience was relatively hard to find outside of Brazil -- but incredibly vital for a fighter's success.

My pitch, in a nutshell, was to contrast the way that ethnic Japanese nationals practiced BJJ compared to the immigrant Japanese-Brazilian workers, to study what kinds of communities formed around the martial art, and to see if BJJ was a possible venue for Japanese-Brazilians to navigate power and privilege in a society where they're perceived as lower-class others (kind of how boxing became a venue to navigate racial tensions and conversations around Black Power with Muhammad Ali, for example). And it was super fun, because it basically meant I got a paycheck to live in Japan and train every day with the good folks at Alive Academy in Nagoya (you might have heard of Hatsu Hioki or Daisuke "Amazon" Sugie") along with a few different Japanese-Brazilian training groups in the factory suburb areas.

I've been training for 12 years at this point, at many, many different gyms (mostly in California). Most recent promotion was my purple belt in 2011 under Eduardo Rocha (Gracie Humaita). Right now I'm at Milton Bastos BJJ in Mountain View, CA, though I occasionally pop down to train at Henry Akins's spot in LA, so if anyone ever wants to roll, that's where you can find me! <3

Thank you! One tip for dealing with frustration: you shouldn't tie your perception of personal improvement to whether you're winning or losing, but whether you're capable of doing more useful things and making better decisions than you were the day before. Benchmarking your personal growth over time by seeing how you've grown as a player is more satisfying and more accurate IMO, and if you do that, you'll see the wins come in time.

I know this was mentioned in the article, but anyone with even the slightest interest in fighting games should give @pattheflip's book a read. It (along with last year's EVO) is what finally got me thinking about taking fighting games seriously and I can trace most of my current (limited) competence directly back to his outstanding book. If you're looking for an a way to get "in" to fighting games, there's no resource I would recommend higher.

I never comment on stuff, but this was excellent.

Great to see someone able to eloquently explain why competitive fighting games are so god damn good. I personally see no difference to why I also play tennis or BJJ, beating someone's ass is a delicious source of schadenfreude. r/Kappa

Do you have any idea how insanely hard it is to get into some games? Not only every online guide is complete chinese before you know all lingo, but without knowing the basics you can lose and lose and lose without learning anything.

Also, people want a tutorial to explain basics mechanics in the game. Not this whole nonsense that you are spouting. Look at SF5 for a prime example. What does the "tutorial" teaches us? Walking forward,backward, block, hitting 2 buttons, it shows you how to use v-trigger, not what it is or what it does, only the button prompt and a basic hadouken. That is all, with that info you are supposed to go online and getting slaughtered over and over without knowing what you did wrong cause you have no idea what you are doing in the first place.

I started to get better on fighting games around sf 4. I wanted to learn why my friend was able to block super even thou I timed it perfectly on his neutral jump. That lead me down a rabbit hole. I started to learn about block stun and so on. I got stick because I wanted to eliminate my input errors that frustrated me. In the end I improved myself. Defeat my friend so badly he hates playing me on sf 4. I kind a miss those days when we were equally skilled. We do play fighting games still now and then, but not seriously. We just play for fun. I do still try and get better at fighting games, but not as same extent when I was learning new things. Even thou I enjoy online play I do not find it as fun as playing on same couch.

I have really subscribed to the not caring about losing as long as you've learned something mentality mentioned in the write up. Now if only I can connect to the SFV servers!

Exactly:

Put another way: If I took you aside and told you I'd give you $1,000,000 if you could beat me in Capcom vs. SNK 2, what would you do to get that money? How would you practice? Where would you find help, and what kind of help would you ask for? How would you identify your weak spots and patch them? How would you identify my weak spots and exploit them? How would you evaluate your performance? How would you validate your training methods to make sure you're using your time as efficiently as possible? These are all problems that we tackle on the regular in any competitive game, and since there isn't an established practice of amateur coaching in video games, it means we're trying to learn this stuff on our own or with peers, which means that we learn to become our own teachers and coaches as well. As we learn and test all these things, we invariably fail a whole lot, which means that we have to embrace failure (even publicly-broadcasted-on-stream-in-front-of-a-lot-of-people failure) as a necessary step of getting better.

Don't be the dead weight. Ignore Capcom; don't let great efforts from Sega, Revenge Labs, and Iron Galaxy go to waste.

Teach yourself to learn like we did. Only then will all that work put in by anyone to help you not just roll right off you like water off a duck's back.

I have a big issue this statement. Not only it is very arrogant but it is also not applicable to the majority anymore.

Times change and not everyone grew up with the same things.

Back in the starting days of fighting games it was all about arcades and getting together to play on the console. If you had that kind of stuff it probably was amazing but not everyone had that. Nowdays the majority is done online with people maybe on the other side of the world.

Let's look at a personal standpoint here. I grew up and still live in a small village in Belgium. Arcades don't exist here and none of my friends is even remotely interested in fighting games. I cannot discuss tactics with friends or see my weak spots since i currently know NOTHING and the game itself refuses to teach me the very basics. I have to say, it is getting increasingly obvious the fighting game community does not even want casuals to join in and check the game out with blanket statements like this.

I won't deny being too lazy to get good at fighting games, but I feel like my 400+ Hours in Monster Hunter, including a years-long ragequit, gives my some say in this matter, and that's that this stuff isn't solely applicable to competitive games. All you need is a game where improvement is tangible, and the belief that you're never as good as you could be.

I'm not an athlete, I'm a musician, so I relate this stuff less to sports and competition than I do to learning an instrument and personal expression. I'm not the best guitar player that ever lived, not even close, but it's so removed from the point that it doesn't matter. I just keep striving to improve because the better I get, the more I get out of it on a personal level.

If there's a game that you already love, or a game that you love the idea of but find the barrier to entry too intimidating, that's all you need. Make it a competition with yourself, against your own previous personal best. All you need to do is purge the words "good enough" from your vocabulary.

@assirra: I do think there is value to learning "on your own," but I also think there's value in learning to teach. Personally, I've realized that learning to teach fighting games is the next step in my path to improvement as a player; it forces me to figure out the reasons why I do stuff the way that I do, and dig into my own performance to identify opportunities for further improvement.

Rising Thunder was the first time I actually tried to get into a fighting game. I heard it was beginner friendly, which is almost true. It certainly helps that you don't have to practice button inputs, but I quickly realized I had to start thinking a lot more about my style of play.

It was really exciting. I had tons of fun playing against random people on the internet, even though I didn't win a single round. Until I did. Then, I won my first match and OH MY GOD THIS IS THE GREATEST FEELING EVER!

After that match, I didn't play RT again for a few days. I was sure that I couldn't have another experience like that again with the same game. And while it is true that nothing quite measures up to that first win, I did eventually go back to it and didn't regret it.

I eventually stopped playing. Like most competitive games, the part where you have to memorize a ton of stuff bores me. But now I know why people like fighting games so much, and I was happy to be a part of that for that brief time.

No you dont. And therein lies the problem: this very energetic protesting and labeling. Cuz if one merely says what comes after, all that effort put forth does not exist. Right? Wrong.

Instead of countering my actual arguments you decided try off topic about a single part of 1 sentence. But thanks for once again proving my point. I cannot believe you are actually defending no tutorial on the notion of "we did it ourselves" tough. Maybe you need a reminder of WHY there never was a tutorial back in the days. These games were made for arcade first and intended to get as much money from you as possible hence you had sometimes unforgiving difficulty and never a decent tutorial. You don't want to let players to learn without spending coin after all. What is the excuse nowdays exactly? Especially when the others like Skullgirls and Guilty gear doing it?

At least here are people in the community that actually help newbies like me. You can thank those for not scaring people away.

I want to continue with my music analogy for a moment. Because when I learned to play the guitar, it was rough. Even though I was only 13, some of the other kids had already been playing for years, and their talent intimidated me. For the first couple months, practicing was painful. Like, literally painful (you show me a guitarist, and I'll show you someone who has no longer has any feeling in the fingertips on their fretting hand), remembering chords and scales was tough, and my music teacher insisted I not look at my hands, which seemed absurd.

And this was followed by months and years of being holed up in my room while other kids my age were out partying and having social lives. I pretty much stopped playing video games for about six or seven years (save some Tetris here and there) to focus on music. I read about music, I watched shows about music, I would even have dreams about music. I would try to start a band with my friends, and they'd eventually quit because they couldn't keep up with me. I tried starting a band with strangers, and that usually just meant sitting in some guy's basement while he and his friends got stoned and badmouthed whoever it was cool to hate at the time. I would eventually try to learn how to do everything myself, so as not to need a band, and I'd lose my goddamned mind when it didn't sound the way it did in my head.

And after all the work, all the study, all the sacrifices, all the crises of confidence, all the obsessing, and I'm still a C-tier guitarist on the best of days. I like to think I have other strengths that make up for it, but that could just as easily be self-delusion for all I know.

So yeah, I see a lot of people try to pick up an instrument, only to put it back down again after a couple months when they realize what actually goes into learning how to play, and I don't begrudge a single one of them for not wanting to do it.

So yes, believe me when I tell you I'm familiar with the concept of applied effort, and getting out of something what you put into it. And the belittling attitude the FGC can have towards players who are permanently stuck in the scrub-league irritates the shit out of me.

What a lovely article. I could rap about this topic all day and the meta of fighting games. Thanks for the r/StreetFighter subreddit plug on the introductory podcast. SFV was supposed to be an easy game for new players to get into but Capcom kinda bungled the launch and haven't made it very friendly for people who "don't-yet-know-how-to-learn-how-to-play-fighting-games." By this I mean, anyone can be shown how all the pieces move in Chess but this bit of knowledge doesn't teach you why you would want to move any one piece at any point. Anyway, overall great article.