Fighting Game Design: Gambling and Precognition
This article occupies a somewhat unusual space in the Venn diagram of my interests; The overlap between fighting games, game design and parapsychology.
Recently I have developed a new obsession: fighting games. It began with the release of Tekken 8, and a few months before that my purchase of Street Fighter 3rd Strike.
I was into fighting games when I was younger, but the exact subgenre of fighting games I enjoyed were more on the “simulation” side. So games like Fight Night and UFC. I tried a few arcade fighting games in my youth but mostly bounced off of them because my younger self found them to be extremely difficult and inscrutable. I remember one humiliating defeat to my Stepdad at the time. I’d spent hours mastering Ryu’s hadouken on Street Fighter 4 only to be beaten by blind button mashing. After this I went back to my usual diet of whatever was the most technologically sophisticated 3rd person action game of the time. And for the most part that was Metal Gear.
Later on in life I really started to get curious about how mechanics and levels are designed in games, and particularly good old fashioned arcade game design.
Good old fashioned arcade game design is, for the majority of people, written in invisible ink. But most people can tell if a game doesn't have it. If it’s not there, then the game usually feels shallow or unfair.
For a lot of people who are seriously into game design, systems that rely on guesswork or random chance are frowned upon, because they don’t allow for absolute mastery over the game. You can argue that this could be an intentional design decision which perhaps even reflects real life to some degree, and I would tentatively agree with you, gambling can spice things up. You can also make the argument against games which are entirely mechanically predictable that they run the risk of becoming boring once the player has achieved mastery.
But there is a viable alternative to this which is to make the game capable of such complexity and difficulty that it’s skill ceiling is infinite. An example of this would be a game of Tetris with no upper limit on how fast the blocks can fall.
At this point I thought that I more or less had game design figured out. Games should have depth and clearly convey their challenges to the player in a fair way so that every obstacle can be overcome and eventually the game as a whole can be played perfectly. Additionally, beyond this it would also be great if there was a way to infinitely scale the difficulty in some way so that the player can always reach new heights of ability. A great example of this infinitely high ceiling for mastery would be Devil Daggers and it’s sequel Hyper Demon.
But then along came fighting games.
Initially it was the aesthetic that drew me in. The amazing fidelity of 3rd Strike’s sprite work and the vaguely cyberpunk atmosphere of the older Tekken games. The timeless and immediately recognisable visual of two characters standing across from each other on the left and right side of the screen underneath two hovering life bars…
“Oh, this is a fighting game. There’s no walking around exploring a world, there’s no talking to NPCs, no coins or items to pick up, no solving block puzzles or driving vehicles. These characters are here only to fight. In this universe all there is is fighting. The only button on the controller that doesn’t either attack or move is for taunting. There are no rooms or spaces, only arenas. When you defeat your opponent, you immediately move onto the next one. Your only respite is the training dojo. Where you train… to FIGHT!!! ”
There’s just something incredibly stylistically cool and fascinating about the limitations of this format. Fighting games like Tekken and Street Fighter have their own story lines and cool characters and entire universes, but outside of a few exceptions, fighting games are extremely limited in how they can present their universes to the player.
The only interactive glimpses into the worlds of fighting games are through these small arenas and the occasional cutscene. So many times in a fighting game I have looked off into the background of the stage and wondered what I would be able to find, if only my character wasn’t locked into this small space.
Fighting games can seem to be lacking in content to the uninitiated, but a great deal of work goes into trying to balance them and keep the experience as bug free as possible so that it provides as fair of an experience as possible in a tournament setting. Where a large, real amount of prize money might be on the line.
Where many other games create vast open lands for you to explore and discover secrets within, fighting games are mostly about exploring the character’s move sets and strengths and weaknesses. going through and checking out every move that every character can do in Tekken 8, for instance, would be a little like reading an encyclopaedia from front to back. The content is there, it’s just a really specific type of content. Everything is focused on fighting. Fighting games are just like every other type of action game, but everything has been stripped out, everything except the fighting. And for some reason, I am in love with that on an aesthetic level. Something about it is just really hardcore. And that makes total sense, because the genre of fighting games is arguably the most hardcore game genre that exists.
Fighting games are kinda weird, and usually super hard. The first time you pick one up, you are likely to realise that your opponent’s attacks come out so fast that they are literally impossible to react to, which initially feels unfair. Especially if you’re playing against a computer. This genre can be played single player but is 100% intended for 2 players; another aspect of the genre which is fascinating.
I don’t play fighting games that much, I mostly watch them. But when I do, I exclusively play them against the computer — a habit which I am keen to get out of and will do so once I improve my gaming set up and get my hands on Tekken 8, SF 6 or whatever is the newest, shiniest fighting game available at the time. This habit of playing by myself makes me feel like I am missing out on a huge part of the appeal of fighting games, which is the social experience. Lessened somewhat by the death of the arcade, but kept alive by online communities and huge in person events such as Evo.
Shifting the focus of this article back to the mechanics: for a long time I have been trying to wrap my head around how someone gets good enough at fighting games to be able to reliably win. Because, when you start to really dive into the mechanics, you discover this little thing called Rock Paper Scissors game design.
As we have already stated, most of the attacks that your opponent throws at you are going to be coming at you so fast that they are impossible to react to. For the most part, there is nothing you can do to ensure that you don’t get hit. In a game like Tekken, a part of you is always open. If you are blocking normally then your legs are vulnerable, and if you block your legs then you are open to mid attacks which are even more dangerous. The only way to completely avoid attacks is to stay out of range, but the advancing opponent usually has the speed advantage which means it’s impossible to escape them. Your only hope of success (without going into character-related specifics) is to charge at them and to EITHER attack the very moment you are in range, which still leaves you open for counters, OR guess correctly what they are going to do and counter accordingly.
“Guess correctly” …
“Guess” …. “Correctly”
Something about this really got to me.
How could a genre with such a hardcore fanbase have guesswork as a core part of it’s design?
Now, I am somewhat exaggerating the importance of guessing correctly here, but also, not really. If one player is vastly more knowledgeable about the properties of each individual fighter’s movesets than another and is vastly more skilled, then very little guessing is going to be done on the part of the more skilled player.
BUT, when you get to the highest level, and you see pro players going up against each other, you expect them to all know the roster pretty well and be pretty confident with the execution of their moves. And if you get two players who are at the same skill level and knowledge level, then what will set them apart is who can pick up more quickly on the other player’s tendencies and exploit them, which essentially means making educated guesses.
In fighting game terminology, this type of successful guess after studying your opponent’s tendencies is called a read. And making good reads is an extremely important, interesting and enigmatic part of fighting game DNA.
It doesn’t matter how well you know the characters or how good you are at executing combos, if someone knows what move you’re going to do or just throws out a wild guess that happens to be correct through SHEER CHANCE… then you get hit… and that hit might be a launcher into a combo which takes away 60% of your health bar…
This sounds a little bit like gambling to me. And it has caused me to wonder if fighting games are capable of triggering similar addictive neurological patterns to gambling games. It would be an interesting thing to study and could possibly account for why there are so many ravenous fighting game addicts who completely forget that other genres even exist.
When it comes to talking about fighting games as a sport though, this aspect of — dare I say — gambling, has made me feel all sorts of conflicting feelings. Obviously fighting games are not pure gambling at all, and any gambling involved is extremely educated and can only work alongside seriously honed skills. But… there is still that aspect of gambling, present in smallish quantities, even at the highest level.
The Fighting Game Community or FGC for short has a term for this, they call it “Casino” Gameplay. It’s a term used to critique certain mechanical design decisions made by fighting game designers which result in the inclusion of too many situations where a player is forced to guess, often in what’s known as a “50/50” situation. If they guess wrong then they can be brutally punished. It’s easy to see why this can seem unfair, unwinnable, and turn people off of the game.
So the philosophy for how to design fighting games in a way which keeps them enjoyable is to make players have to really work for opportunities which could be considered to be putting their opponent in a situation where they have to guess a 50/50.
Technically, you’re always guessing 50/50s, and with the current design format, this is unavoidable. Because a high or a mid or a low could be coming your way at any moment, and you’re not going to be able to react to most of them, but these ususally do not do much damage unless you have exposed yourself to them. (it’s difficult to talk about this without getting mega specific, but you get what I am trying to say)
I have thought a lot about what to do about this. Is there a way to completely remove all guessing from a fighting game? Sure, you could make all of the attacks slow enough to react to. Okay, well now how do two players even hit eachother at all? You could slowly start to increase the movement speed of each subsequent attack as they are traded back and forth, so that the person with the faster reaction times eventually wins. But is this mechanically interesting? I kind of doubt it.
Unless of course you came up with this extremely complicated set of rules, where you needed to react to your opponent’s attacks in a specific kind of way in order to counter them, and there were options for how to react which meant that your opponent had to react specifically to that, and you do this back and forth, reacting to each other and creating mental puzzles for each other which eventually speed up to the point where one person loses the ability to respond correctly and gets hit. This design philosophy essentially puts a puzzle-solving interface between the players which needs to be won before a hit can be landed, and would be 100% completely fair and involve no guessing, until, I guess, things get so fast that you have to guess. But the player who can make mental calculations quick enough so that they don’t have to guess the longest will always have the advantage.
This is how I would design a fighting game, personally, although it is still a very rough outline of a concept and it kinda takes the “jazz” out of the genre and replaces it with fast calculations. The idea is to replace guesswork and random chance with complexity. In a fighting game, your opponent’s mind is a black box. (unless you have telepathy or precognition…) So you are forced to guess what they are going to do because they have access to moves that come out too quickly for you to be able to react to. If, instead of this guessing, we had slower moves which required you to recognise what they are and input a specific combination in order to block and then counter with your own attack, and there were rules governing what you can counter with based on things like what your opponent’s previous move was and perhaps where you are in the arena, it would become this back and forth rally of who can read and respond the quickest to the data on the screen which follows clear rules and requires no guesswork.
Okay so that’s enough about a mechanical redesign approach to eliminating guesswork, let’s try something more esoteric now, and something that could perhaps be retroactively applied to all existing fighting games which follow the established, tried and tested formulae of pattern recognition and educated guesswork (again, I have to stress that this guessing is really only an important thing for players of the same input skill and knowledge level)
Firstly, let’s talk about telepathy. There is a type of experiment in parapsychology known as the Ganzfeld experiment, where a participant labelled as a “receiver” sits in a room with halved pingpong balls on their eyes and headphones on their ears which play white noise. The balls and the headphones are both used in this situation to create completely undifferentiated fields of stimulus for both the eyes and the ears. This is to help the participant to clear their mind of all sensory distractions, so that they can pay extra careful attention to any “stimulus” which might be coming from an external source and projecting into their thoughts… Shpooky!
Outside of the room with the receiver who is wearing the pinpong balls and headphones, there is a “sender” who concentrates intensely on mentally conveying a randomly selected image to the receiver through telepathy.
Surprisingly, there have been many highly successful replications of this type of experiment performed by very serious scientists at very legit institutions. One of these successful experiments even involved a woman named Jessica Utts, who in this case was the sender and her father was the receiver.
Jessica Utts is a parapsychologist and statistics professor at the University of California, Irvine. She is known for her textbooks on statistics and her investigation into remote viewing. If anyone is going to be able to tell you if an experiment is methodologically sound, it’s probably going to be a professor of statistics.
So, perhaps, on some level, professionals at the highest level of esports within the fighting game scene might be tapping into each other's thoughts unknowingly, and this might be giving them an edge. Sometimes when you see a competent fighting game player make successful read after successful read, it does seem like they are reading their opponent’s mind. Or perhaps they are seeing the future…?
Experiments have been done which test the phenomenon of precognition. An example of these experiments is an experiment where participants are sat in front of a computer which is running a specially designed application. This application shows the participant two blank boxes. Clicking on one of the boxes will reveal either of two separate pictures which have been placed using a true random number generator. Various devices are attached to the participant which measure various physiological metrics, indicating the participant’s state of arousal.
As far as I am aware, this experiment has been successfully replicated and has demonstrated a peculiar type of precognition, where participants are more likely to click on the blank boxes which have rewarding (erotic) images behind them. On top of this, the physiological metrics of the participants have been shown to spike pre-emptively to their observation of the highly stimulating images. But this only happens before they click on the box with a stimulating image behind it. Their physiological metrics remain normal before and after the picture is revealed if they are clicking on a box with an unstimulating image behind it.
To put it in a more simple way. If you are about to click on a box which will reveal an arousing image, your body gets aroused before the image is shown even though you have no idea what image is about to be shown. And if the image is not arousing, then noting happens before you click on it. Obviously the boxes with and without the arousing images both look the same and are always in different places, so there is no way for the participant to be able to know what image will show up, yet something inside their body does know, and does react — precognitively.
This experiment suggests that the human organism seems to be partly entangled with the future in some way, and that we are capable of successfully seeking out and selecting future opportunities which are more rewarding in some sense than others.
Perhaps fighting game players could tap into this? Perhaps part of what can trigger a successful read in a fighting game is a player’s unconscious, instinctive attraction to a precognitive hit of a gambler’s high that they will receive if they pick the correct move to play at a certain moment in time? Stranger things have been known…
Maybe someday someone will dedicate themselves to this idea and become the first blindfolded Evo winner? That definitely sounds like something a Yoshimitsu player would try and do…
