Fighting games and the role of execution

My Dawn of War II excursion was severely sidetracked when my repaired Xbox finally returned home and I was able to play the copy of Street Fighter IV I had lying around.  As of the past few months, I’ve been attempting to immerse myself in the culture of 2D fighters.  3D fighters have always been my forte – Soul Calibur and, more recently, Virtua Fighter in particular.  I never “got” 2D fighting games.  The play was always a blurry mishmash of over-the-top animations from which I could never extract any meaningful strategic decisions.  Hit priorities were a mysterious black box.  And inputs were just… weird.  Maybe Virtua Fighter’s input buffering spoiled me – none of this “just-link” business or one-frame input windows.  I never understood why I couldn’t just start buffering my combos during guard stun like “normal” 3D fighters.

However, with the massive popularity of Street Fighter IV, I resolved to get past this mental 2D barrier and see just what all the fuss is about.  I messed around with Guilty Gear X2 #Reload on XBLA.  I geared up for the Street Fighter IV release with Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix.  And finally, after learning the ropes of Street Fighter IV (and unlearning all of my 3D fighting game habits), I started coming to an understanding of what makes the 2D fighting genre special.  After a lot of thought and analysis, I’ve distilled the essence of 2D fighters to one special characteristic: the execution barrier.

Strategy and exection

Fighting games, like many other competitive, real-time games, have two major components – strategy and execution.  Strategy is comprised of the decisions and the mind-games, frame advantage and disadvanatge, the nitakus and okizemes.  Strategy is the “game” part of the fighting game, in which the smarter player wins.  Execution, on the other hand, is where the mind meets the machine.  It is comprised of the physical dexterity and reflexes that are required to carry out the intended strategy.  A player must excel at both of these components in order to be successful.  In Halo, a pure strategist can find the perfect sniping position, but it avails nothing if he can’t get the crosshairs over the opponent’s head.  An adept executioner, conversely, accomplishes nothing if he keeps getting assassinated by someone who’s always thinking one step ahead.

Various games put different amounts of focus on the two elements of play.  Turn-based games are the extreme example of strategic focus, while something like a time-trial mode of a racing game is probably the extreme example of execution focus.  Fighting games are comprised of a healthy mixture of the two, but within the genre, there are distinct differences in focus.  My personal experience has led me to the conclusion that the 2D fighting game has a much greater focus on execution, while the 3D fighting game has a slightly greater focus on strategy.  I’m not really sure why this is the case.  One of my theories is that early incarnations of the popular 3D fighting game franchises didn’t have the system resources to render complex combo animations, forcing them to opt for subtler, more strategic gameplay.  Another theory is that movement in the third dimension might have conflicted to some degree with the genre conventions of quarter-circle and half-circle inputs.  Whatever the case may be, the two types of games diverged into two distinct styles of play.

Comparing dimensions

Let’s take a closer look at the differences between the play styles of 2D and 3D fighters.  3D fighters generally have fewer buttons.  Soul Calibur has four: vertical attack, horizontal attack, kick, and guard.  Tekken has four: left and right punches and kicks.  Virtua Fighter has three: punch, kick, and guard.  Compare this with some popular 2D fighters.  Guilty Gear has 5 buttons: punch, kick, slash, hard slash, and dust; 6 if you count respect.  Street Fighter has 6 buttons: light, medium, and hard punches and kicks.  Marvel vs. Capcom 2 has 6 buttons: weak and hard punches and kicks followed by two assist buttons.

In addition to the extra buttons typically found in 2D fighters, they also tend to have more complex and hard-to-grasp motions.  3D fighter special moves generally consist of single or double directional inputs plus a combination of buttons.  For instance, in Virtua Fighter, the majority of the moves you’ll see look like 6P+K, K+G, 33K, and the like.  On the other hand, 2D fighter special moves are most often executed with complex quarter-circle, half-circle, full-circle, dragon-punch, and charge inputs.  In Street Fighter, a shotokan player stands little chance without having 236P or 623P burned into their muscle memory.  The complexity of inputs is made most apparent when subjected to the “wife test”.  My wife was able to learn and consistently reproduce a good number of Pai’s moves in Virtua Fighter.  But when it came to playing Chun-Li in Street Fighter IV, her consistent move execution was limited to either the lightning legs (repeat K) or her auto-crossup (3HK).  While she was able to do quarter circles and dragon punch inputs after multiple attempts in trial mode, there was no way she could do them on command in the middle of a fight.  And you can forget the half-circles.

Finally, to seal the coffin on the casual player’s foray into 2D fighting, 2D fighters generally have an additional factor of input timing complexity.  Again, the reasons for this are completely arbitrary, but as far as I’m aware, input windows are far stricter, and combos are much more difficult to execute consistently because of these strict timing requirements.  2D fighter combos are traditionally based on two concepts that rely on strict timing – cancelling and linking.  Cancelling is the concept of cancelling one move animation into another.  Combos derived from this mechanic involve inputting two moves in very rapid succession.  This cancelling window is generally small, so the player has to be very quick in order for the combo to succeed.  Linking is the concept of inputting a second move between the end of the first move’s animation and the end of the opponent’s hit stun.  In many cases, the input window for linking moves is extremely small – on the order of one or two frames.  These are typically what make Street Fighter IV’s hard trials… well… hard.  3D fighters, on the other hand, seem to have very lenient timing in comparison, where a player can buffer a second move anytime during the first move’s entire animation, and it’ll follow immediately after the first move ends.

It’s become quite clear that, for whatever reason, the 2D fighting game has a stronger focus on complex execution than its 3D counterpart.  This gives us the opportunity to examine the role of execution in fighting games by taking a closer look at 2D fighters and the characteristics that set them apart from their more strategic peers.  This is not to say that 2D fighters are inherently unique.  The evolution of the genre just happened to put them in that unique position of possessing complex and more difficult execution schemes.

Many people decry difficulty in execution as the biggest “problem” with fighting games.  David Sirlin, famed Street Fighter tournament player and game designer, wrote a widely circulated rant about Street Fighter IV’s “impenetrable wall of execution”.  I’ve also made mention in the past about my disdain for unnecessarily difficult inputs.  But I’m starting to question whether this “execution barrier” is really a problem at all.

Execution and risk

Fighting games with simple inputs rapidly descend into strategic territory, where one player is trying to out-guess the other player and counter the next anticipated move.  If you really wanted to, you could probably create a huge and complex game-theory-style payout table (a la Prisoner’s Dilemma) for various situations in the game. At its lowest level, fighting game strategy ultimately comes down to picking a choice on this table to maximize your damage payout based on the choices available to your opponent.  I highly recommend looking into Sirlin’s Flash card game Kongai on Kongregate.  The game is an interpretation of fighting game strategy and the mind games that can ensue when the various payouts are quantified and unobscured by layers of input strings and timing.

Now, looking at the execution barrier strictly from a theoretical point of view, one can consider the difficulty of executing a move or a series of moves as a risk – a risk with percentage chances of success and failure that depend on the particular player’s skill level.  At low- and mid-level play, the difficulty of execution introduces a significant percentage chance of failure – especially with things like linked combo strings.  In fact, I’ve even seen recent Street Fighter IV tournament videos of high-level players missing those links on occasion.  When that kind of combo string fails (i.e. is blocked), momentum turns to the other player and will typically give them frame advantage and higher potential payouts.  The execution risk just boils down to a probabilistic entry in the payout table (or tree, if you want to account for successive choices).  It’s true that, by taking some of the determinism away, the randomness violates the supposed “purity” of the theoretical game.  However, coverting the random outcomes into expected values allows a player to analyze the payouts in much the same way as he would with deterministic outcomes.

That might have sounded like gibberish.  Here’s the translation: just as randomness does not break a game, risk can also be analyzed and optimized.  But there’s an interesting and key difference between risk in fighting games and strictly random events: while random events have fixed probabilities, the probabilities associated with risk change as the player becomes more skilled in execution.  In fact, at the highest levels of play, the difficulty of execution starts melting away and the probability of successful execution begins to approach 100%, reducing the game yet again to one purely composed of strategy and mind games.

So as long as this probability of successful execution is factored in, fighting games, regardless of the difficulty of their moves, still boil down to the same concepts.  A barrier to execution, however, ensures that the strategy and options evolve as the player does.

Execution and discovery

Enough with the theory.  2D fighters are, after all, more than a subgenre of games – they’re the subject of an entire culture.  This culture has thrived on a number of things, and among them is the aspect of discovery and experimentation.

Complex input systems have driven players to search out shortcuts and tricks to simplify execution or to allow players to do things that are otherwise considered impossible.  In essence, the execution barrier acts as an often ambiguous gray area of input processing – one that many players dedicate copious amounts of time deconstructing.  The result of these efforts are the various tricks and shortcuts that litter the lexicon of the fighting game culture.  Instant-air dashing, instant-air attacks, jump-installing, and kara throws are just a few of the terms you might hear.  It’s not hard to find entire forum threads and tutorial videos specifically dedicated to unconventional inputs.

In addition, with the extravagance of special moves that characterizes the majority of 2D fighters, discussions on various move properties are abundant.  Many players enjoy exploring and dissecting the myriad combinations of moves and potential counters.  And there are always those moments of memorable incredulity when something that shouldn’t have happened, for some quirky reason, did.  Many players end up devoting time to determining exactly why the strange thing happened, and whether that particular phenomenon can be exploited to their advantage.

And then there are the combo fiends.  When you combine the complex mechanics of a 2D fighter with the subgenre’s liberal use of frame-advantage-on-hit mechanics and aerial moves, you end up with the potential for insanely long (and insanely difficult) combos.  There is a significant subset of players dedicated to executing and sharing these meticulously constructed and carefully executed combos with the world at large.  Every 2D fighter fan has probably watched a combo video at one point or another.  Street Fighter IV’s infinite combos were even reported by several major gaming sites.  Squeezing in that extra hit has always been an integral part of the 2D fighting game culture.

None of these things would exist, of course, if the 2D fighting game was robbed of its twitchy, wrist-wrecking input schemes and distilled down to its strategy alone.  There’s an undeniable appeal in exploring the unknown, in probing and penetrating that black box of computation, in mastering that which was once mystery, and doing what most might consider impossible.  And that leads us to my final point.

Execution and distinction

Although the difficulty of execution in a fighting game serves the aforementioned roles very well, I’ve found that its best function – one that truly elevates the culture of 2D fighters above their 3D counterparts – is in establishing the renown of its genre’s experts.  The 2D fighting scene has legends of such magnitude that I can think of no 3D fighter equivalent.  Alex Valle.  Daigo Umehara.  John Choi.  Justin Wong.  I’m already intimately familiar with the weight behind these names and I’ve only been getting into 2D fighters for a few months.  I’ve played far more Soul Calibur and Virtua Fighter over the past few years, and I can’t think of a single player with the same kind of recognition as those aforementioned 2D fighting gods.

Why are these people so distinguished among their peers?  It is exactly because 2D fighters have higher execution barriers.  Mind games are an acquired taste.  They require deep understanding of a system to really be appreciated.  It doesn’t, on the other hand, take much understanding at all to stare awe-struck as an opponent gets 75% of his life depleted without any chance for retaliation.  It doesn’t take careful, calculated analysis to admire a combo that just doesn’t seem to end.  You don’t have to play Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike to know that this is epic.  These kinds of easily acknowledged accomplishments cannot be achieved unless the player possesses inhuman amounts of dexterity and reflexes.  It’s this perception of a player’s robotically precise control of a game that really sets the 2D fighter legend apart from someone playing a glorified game of paper-scissors-rock.

This is not unlike the general population’s recognition of highly skilled martial artists.  I think it’s easier to see and appreciate their talent than it is to appreciate that of the world’s chess grandmasters.  Most people know the name of Jet Li, Bruce Lee, Tony Jaa, and the like not because of their ability to get into the mind of their opponent – they’re famous because of their demonstrations of extremely quick, precise, and difficult martial arts techniques and maneuvers.  They do things we only dream of doing.  That same kind of distant admiration most certainly applies to the electronic counterpart.  I mean, isn’t it only appropriate that art (or, in this case, game) imitates life?

Conclusion

Execution is obviously an integral part of the fighting game genre, and as I’ve explored here, making the execution more difficult is not necessarily a detriment to the game.  Now I wouldn’t go so far as to say that more difficulty = better game.  There’s definitely a balance to strike between fulfilling the roles I’ve mentioned and making the game accessible.  And I completely understand the mindset of people like Sirlin, who prefer to linger as much as possible on the strategic elements of the fighting game.  I’ve been there.  But I have to admit that I’ve reconsidered my adamant and unwavering preference for strategy, and in doing so, I’ve come to a newfound appreciation for the fighting game genre as a whole.

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