@dharmabum: Please do! The book is focused on Street Fighter with a heavy emphasis on concepts that will apply very easily to KI. Between that and KI's excellent tutorial, you should be set!
@infinitespark: Thanks for reading! I'm hoping for an SSVS revival in 2017.
@machinerebel: Sorry, but my poverty anime game of the year is Koihime Enbu. Waifu Romance of the Three Kingdoms with a heavy focus on footsies is my shiiiiiit.
@wynnduffy: I doubt the UI is getting better. Netcode feels fine to me, definitely prefer it to SF4 or Guilty Gear, but I'll take rollback over input delay 10 times out of 10.
@lively: Honestly, I've tried to get into MK multiple times and it has never stuck. I'm sure there's something there for someone, but I think its strength is really in the single-player.
@wrathofgod: My friend Jeopardy plays Marvel with a 360 pad and hits his lightning loops pretty consistently. No idea how he manages it, but it works pretty well for him!
@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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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