 Path dependence is the idea that the past constrains what the future can be, like how the fact that early video games were about action verbs and direct mechanics makes fighting games almost inevitable. This is also true of individuals, I suspect, and because of this, I am terrible at 2D fighters. The first fighting game I played was Tekken. I learned the language of the fighting game in three dimensions, so every time I tried to learn a 2D fighter, my brain just did not compute. But because of this, 3D fighters I understand almost intuitively. I can play Tekken, Virtual Fighter, and Soul Calibur, not particularly well, but well enough. However, I suspect this story illustrates something about fighting games, in that even my shallow level of expertise probably puts me in the minority. The only chauhism about fighting games is that they are hard, like really hard. I presume that they are more like a language than conventional games. If you don't learn them early, you're kinda screwed. The fighting game had humble beginnings, with two identical characters. Then game designers discovered something interesting, asymmetry. Perfect balance is not an ideal in itself. The introduction of asymmetry actually increases depth, and so Street Fighter 2's roster imbalanced the game, but added depth, variety, and well, character. Another thing was discovered though, also by accident, the combo. It came out of a bug, but moves could be linked together to create devastating sequences of action. A bug has now become a feature of fighting games. The purity of the fighting game is something only seen in games like chess. It's simply you versus another in a game of absurd skill. In principle, the mechanics of 2D and 3D fighters are similar. Hit your opponent to deplete their life bar. You can hit, block, and throw, and these exist in a rock, paper, scissor cycle that creates a non-nash equilibrium game. There is no dominant solution. Hit beats throw, which beats block, which beats hit. Also, there are highs, lows, and mids that exist in a similar cycle. Highs can be ducked. Fights can hit people who are crouching, and lows are always annoying. Add movement and you have the fighting game. Games about positioning, reacting, and reading your opponents. Anyone even remotely adept at even one fighting game probably has a story about the joyful pain of learning them. Learning fighting games is like meditation combined with endless drills, except most fighting games don't really have tutorials that are any good. It's funny, it's sort of like getting people to play Go without telling them the rules first. Here's an example. Do you know what frame data is? Because I didn't about until ten years into playing fighting games. Frame data is the number of frames a move takes, how quick or slow or impactful it is. In Virtua Fighter, most punches are twelve frames, so a twelve frame punch will beat a fourteen frame mid, if they start at the same time. Well, except if that mid has a longer range, or has properties that make the character duck when it is activated. But you get the point. This is what fighting games really are, they are complex math. To get good at any fighting game, frame data must be memorized, and now there are dozens of characters in games. In his book on game design, Keith Bergen outlines the exponential creep of increasing fighting game characters. Every time you add a character, it multiplies exponentially the number of things you need to memorize. Tekken 7 started with less than thirty characters, and now it has bloated to somewhere near fifty. How on earth are you supposed to learn every permutation here? At the very least, this is better than Tekken Tag 2, which has even more characters, but is played in pairs, expanding the permutation field even more. Each character has unique combos with each other character, and requires different strategies for different teams, and yeah. So fighting games are hard because they require memorization, but chess requires much more. No, what makes fighting games hard is that it is like playing chess using chopsticks, while driving a McLaren. The word is execution. In Street Fighter, we all know the quarter circle inputs to do Hadukens and Shoryukens, but this only gets harder as you have to perfectly time combos in the heat of battle. It's like Finger Ballet, literally, as your hand gets tied in knots as you play. Some argue execution is arbitrary difficulty, that it detracts from what makes fighting games interesting, but many vehemently deny this. Street Fighter V made execution much easier, but this alienated many hardcore players because supposedly it lowered the skill ceiling. A counterpoint in this GDC talk is that when execution is low, it actually both lowers the skill ceiling and raises the floor. Because low execution creates a lower cognitive load, expert players can learn the entire system and completely trance new players. It's like how chess masters will always beat people of low elo when given enough time. It's just statistical inevitability. But speed chess can even the playing field a little more. Here's an ideal scenario, a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling, an easy barrier to entry and endless death. How you get to this is up to you, but fighting games seriously struggle with this. My favorite fighting game is Virtual Fighter. I prefer it because it has very elegant and precise rules. But it's not very popular, at least not now. Why this is the case is up for dispute. It looks kinda generic, the sound effects are weird, its characters have no story, at least none to write home about. It was the pioneer of the 3D fighting game, it revolutionized the genre and weighs others have not. But it's popularity was usurped by games like Tekken, Soul Calibur and Dead or Alive. Why is this? Tekken and Soul Calibur look cool. At least they make you look cool for scribbling buttons. Virtual Fighter doesn't look as cool, it can but not for beginners. We can argue that it's less popular because it's even harder to learn. It perhaps takes years to get even remotely good, but this is true of every fighting game. And when you get good, when you beat your friends, you take the game online only to realize your delusions of grandeur were just that. Ironically, the first great tutorial I came across in fighting games was in Virtual Fighter 4 Evolution. It taught me not only when to hit, side step and block, but also longer term strategies and execution requirements. Step by step, block by block. I was learning the grammar of a language I already spoke. Virtual Fighter is viewed as very deep, but it is also simple and elegant. There are 3 buttons, punch, kick and guard. That's it. It's very much like chess and go. It is high depth but low complexity. This is often viewed as elegance in game design. Most fighting games share this, with varying degrees of bloat. Different fighting games emphasize different aspects of depth though. Tekken is a much more movement oriented game, and Soul Calibur is a weapon based game with vertical and horizontal attacks. Their aesthetics are also very coherent and appealing. Tekken has a cast of memorable characters that mixes anime with an electric sheen, and Soul Calibur has a historical weight that lends fights to poignancy. The beauty and depth of Virtual Fighter though, is in how it is predominantly about Yomi. In his book, Playing to Win, David Sirland dedicates a chapter to Yomi, the art of reading an opponent in a game. Yomi is that thing we have all experienced when we ask, does he know, and then does he know that I know? It is fundamentally about information. For example, if my opponent knows I block a lot, he will use more throws, obviously. But, if I know he knows this about me, I might stop blocking and start hitting. To you know, beat his throws. When we get to high level games of fighting games, the game is not just happening on the screen, but in the player's head. They are existing in a Yomi mediated play space, where they are trying to anticipate an opponent's move based on present and prior information. And so a very good strategy in most fighting games is to be unpredictable, to not have a play style or strategy that others can train against, or employ counter picking four. This is another problem with fighting games. I'm sure you have all heard of tier lists. Some characters are just better than others. Creating a good fighting game requires you not only narrow the gap between asymmetrical entities, but also ensure there are different types of characters on a power curve. Some characters need to be easy to use, but have a ceiling of effectiveness. Whereas others should have execution requirements, but be rewarded with extreme death. The Maschimas in the Tekken series are a prime example of this. Simply executing their signature move, the Electric, is a feat of dexterity that can take months. But it is rewarded, at least some of the time. But what is this depth fighting games attain, and how can we measure it? Disputes are still going on in the academic study of games, the state space. Go is deeper than chess under this view. Or do we need to consider the players playing? Much of the depth of a game is emergent, not beholden to its rules, but its possibility space. No amateur or even expert at one fighting game can know the full depth one game has over another. I don't comment on this. I have no idea if Virtua Fighter is deeper than Tekken. Fighting games are now even doing storytelling, not just end level cutscenes, but fully integrated stories like in Mortal Kombat. This helps add context, add character, add a weight to the proceedings of the game. But fighting games illustrate how narrative is created during play and outside of it. We have all heard of Moment 37 by Daigo, where the crowd went up in uproarious applause because of some impossible execution. In one of the recent evos, a player from a country not known for fighting games at all, Pakistan's Arslan Ash, came out of nowhere to win Tekken's EVO. This was literally like an anime arc, a mysterious place of expert practitioners no one knew of. But there is more embedded storytelling as well. Jin Kazama was introduced in Tekken 3, the son of Kazuya and grandson of Ayachi. He has inherited the devil gene and was trained in their arts, and so has a similar fighting style. But when he learns of the evos of his legacy, he renounces not only his father and grandfather, but their fighting style as well. He shifted to karate in Tekken 4, a more measured and deliberate and classical style to reflect his character's transformation. The real question here is how the hell to learn them? Given that good tutorials are few and far between, the only real way to learn these games is through community. Websites, forums, YouTube channels and organized events all come together to teach. Learning these games requires intense dedication and practice, but also strangely seems to generate community. The fighting game community is small, but a tightly knit one. They're like monks practicing their craft and seclusion in the arcane art of finger dancing. But the joy of learning fighting games is directly proportional to the pain it requires to learn them. At least for me, something as simple as back dashing in Tekken requires a lot of execution. But when you get it, it's a badge of honor. It's a lifetime of learning waiting to happen. However, I suspect what really speaks to the beauty of fighting games is an ethic, an ethic for perseverance, for dedication and of arbitrary ascension. Benjamin Franklin spoke about the morality of chess, how it forces you to be deliberate, to be conscious, to have humility. However, it also teaches you that there are good and bad ways to play a game. There are ways to play the game to get others to say the now pervasive term, GG or a good game. GG means you played hard, but fair, that you tried your best, but even if you don't succeed, you congratulate your opponent. It means a lifetime of dedication to a craft can be swept away with lag, with overpowered characters, with some amateur scribbling buttons. But you still accept your fate and acknowledge your opponent as Victor. People who choose overpowered characters are seen as having less honor. In Evo Japan for Tekken, a ridiculously overpowered character named Leroy was available for play. It broke the game. There were hundreds of Leroy's. All the champions fell. People use terms like going to the dark side because we recognize the virtues of fair play. But for me, fighting games are a beautiful system to explore. They are a puzzle that keeps on giving. I play fighting games not because they are necessarily always fun, but because they are ciphers into our own mind of how we learn, how we compete, what we value, and how to cultivate virtues through the playing of games.