Learning fighting games through teaching
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The book bounty delivers again! Frankie is getting up there in years (I think he’s like, 11 now?) so he’s mostly just hanging out napping and bumming snacks. What a handsome boy! I’ll try to get a Kinako video for next week, so buy a copy of From Masher to Master 2 and I’ll provide.
Anyway, for today’s post I thought I’d write a little bit more about my teaching practice; for all the teaching I’ve done over the years, I haven’t actually written much about it, but I think it’s a pretty important part of my own growth as a player. Fighting games are kind of an oddity when it comes to the learning process, because their curve is closer to what you’d expect from a sport or a musical instrument or a language instead of a video game, but you’re mostly given a couple limited tutorial software flows, and a couple tools like combo trials and training mode, and you’re kind of left to fend for yourself. Since it’s a game, people want to learn through playing, but the nature of the activity itself is complicated enough that it’s closer to other activities that usually involve some kind of coaching or personal instruction.
Learning a fighting game is thus not only learning how to play the game itself, but also learning to navigate your own learning process. You are your own coach, responsible for figuring out what to work on and how to do it, but without the experience and hindsight to actually make educated decisions. This is often where a lot of enthusiastic fighting game players get stuck and churn out; it’s not that they’re unwilling to do the work, it’s that they get lost in the ambiguity of trying to figure out what the work is. It’s also the source of a very specific kind of fighting game player swag. “If I could learn how to do this by myself,” we think, “Well, I could learn how to do anything.”
This stands in stark contrast to martial arts, of course, where self-study rarely gets anyone very far, and the existence of schools and teachers and classes go a long way in making it easier for people to practice a martial art without having to think too hard about how to practice that art. As long as a novice keeps showing up, they’ll get better, and while eventually they hit the point where they have to take their learning into their own hands and determine the direction of their practice, the early steps, at least, are simple. However, the practice of teaching others comes into play fairly early on, usually out of the necessity of class sizes; a single teacher cannot instruct each person individually, so they’ll usually just explain the technique and demonstrate for the class, then pair everyone up to practice it in turn, and it’s up to each pair of practice partners to help guide the other through the move or drill.
Each different rank will understand the art at a different level of detail, and so your variety of training partners, across a wide range of levels of experience and proficiency, all become different learning resources that can offer guidance from slightly different perspectives. Casually catching a fellow student up on yesterday’s class, for example, gives us a chance to review what we learned, and re-articulate the concepts we remember in our own words and concepts, forcing us to process the information in a way that is both easily memorable to ourselves and understandable by whoever we’re showing it to. As we progress through the art, we’ll often start taking up more responsibility for helping with the teaching; as a practice dummy, and then maybe running the warmups, teaching techniques, and eventually teaching whole classes. While my early fighting game teaching was mostly limited to showing my college roommates the basics of a couple games, I worked as a youth assistant boxing coach for a year, and later did another year teaching one or two BJJ classes every week to give a friend a day off, and so when I finally did get into fighting game teaching, I had a lot of tools and concepts that crossed over easily.
Now, having spent the last several years doing a lot of fighting game teaching — through writing and videos, but also teaching classes and 1:1 personal training sessions, I’ve been able to see firsthand that, just like martial arts, the process of teaching others how to play fighting games helps me develop my own play as well. Since fighting game learning is mostly self-driven, any given player only needs to understand something well enough to learn it to their own satisfaction, but when teaching others, the teaching player needs to understand it well enough to communicate it to a completely different human, with a different body and brain and connection between the two, and doing that entails digging far deeper into both the game and the people playing it.
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For example: As a kid, learning to do a quarter-circle forward and punch to hit the Hadouken was simply a matter of doing it until I got it consistently, but as an adult, teaching it to my not-fighting-game friend during his bachelor party getaway pushed me to relate it to his experience as a musician, using the controller’s audible feedback to guide his timing. When I taught myself to do UMVC3 Zero’s Lightning Loops, I muted the game entirely and focused solely on the inputs of my own buttons to guide my own timing. Reviewing replays with my students to look for habit patterns that need breaking up, or identifying common recurring issues with execution or observation, gives me the chance to dig into their head a little bit and see how their experience of the game differs from my own. I can take the insights derived there and apply them to my own study, to better understand how both myself and my opponents are thinking and processing the game as we play it, and look for similar patterns and issues to fix in myself, and exploit in others.
Interestingly enough, while you might expect that teaching stronger players would be more valuable than teaching weaker players, I’ve found them both to be comparably valuable in different ways. Stronger players have deeper skill and broader experience, so the task at hand is less about developing new capabilities and more about finding ways to refine the applications of their existing skillsets, but if you’re at a reasonably high level of play then you probably have most of your bases covered, and it’s just about finding all the small subtle things to improve further. Weaker players, however, vary widely in their specific strengths and weaknesses, and so the work is often to expose the (quite large) gaps in their understanding of how to play these games, gaps which most self-taught players learned so early on that they didn’t even realize that it was a thing they had to learn at all, until they started working with someone who never did. Stuff like “Most lows are unreactable, so hold down-back and react to the high attacks” is knowledge so common for hold-back-to-block games that I don’t think I ever heard someone else explain it until SF4. So while working with stronger players does often help build my specific understanding of the game, it’s the weaker players who I can credit with building my understanding of the genre as a whole.
I also find additional motivation in the accountability factor that teaching creates in both the teacher and the student. If you are merely a player, you are responsible for your own play and progress, and whether you advance or not is dependent on your own will and discipline alone. Teaching others, however, creates a mutually beneficial social motivation for both the student and the teacher: When the student improves, they validate the teacher’s methods and expertise, and when the teacher improves, the student feels that they too are improving, as their teacher’s experience and capability are tested and validated at higher and higher levels of play. And, hell, if I’m going to spend my time reviewing someone else’s replays, I damn sure better make the time to review my own as well.
I think this probably deserves a deeper dive than a Friday post, so I’ll find another excuse to talk about it soon, but I’ll end this with a hearty recommendation to try teaching if you want to get better at learning. Not character infodumping in Discord, not delivering pages of post-set criticism on everything they’re doing wrong, but actually sitting down with someone and helping them learn how to push the buttons better. It’ll make you better, too.
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