...And how they can teach you too.

But enough about the genre. What does any of this have to do with learning? Well, it started in the summer of 2020. I and a pair of my friends picked up Street Fighter V. I rapidly improved to start with but ran into a familiar hurdle. Effortless improvement stopped, and I started to feel as though I wasn’t good enough to play these games or enjoy them at a high level. I felt the familiar urge to refund the game and go back to something that didn’t challenge me. But one of my friends took me under his wing and started to show me the ropes.

Not only did he teach me the basics of how to play fighting games, but I believe that what we learned together along the way taught us both valuable lessons about self-improvement, motivation, and life.

Starting the Journey: Taking Your First Steps

The first step is often the hardest. You don’t know a thing about what you’re trying to learn, but you saw someone like Justin Wong win Evo, or you heard Slash lay down one of the greatest guitar solos of all time on November Rain, or maybe you laid eyes on a Van Gogh painting and decided right then and there you want to be an artist. 

No matter how high or low your goals are for a skill or hobby, you’ve got to keep it simple starting out. For fighting games, my friend started me out on what he called “Sweeps & Throws”. We both limited ourselves to the most basic and easy-to-use pair of moves in our characters’ arsenals. These were the long-ranged leg sweep, which if blocked allows your opponent to sweep you risk-free, and the short-range throw, a less risky but shorter-ranged move. This helped me learn the basics of movement, spacing, and risk versus reward: vital concepts that apply to every level of play. With a little bit of thought, you can see how this can apply to more than fighting game beginners.

Set yourself clear starting goals (e.g., “I’m going to punish every blocked sweep.”, “I’m going to commit 3 basic chords to muscle memory”, “I’m going to draw consistent straight lines and clear round circles.”) and try to find ways of practicing that are fun & engaging. Not every beginner exercise is a total bore. Sweeps & Throws was a blast, the Tremolo (look it up!) is a way to practice picking at strings while still sounding musical, and a fun doodle in the margins of a notebook is still valuable art practice.

The Long Road: Going the Distance

If you’ve got the basics down, you’re likely to hit a snag. As you progress with a skill the pace of improvement slows down and the challenges mount up faster. You’re reaching the end of being a beginner, and passing into the stage of “Competence”. According to philosophers Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus in their 1980 model of skill acquisition, concrete experience becomes more vital than following abstract formal rules at this stage. Here you use the fundamentals (or “rules” as Dreyfus puts it) that you’ve learned to throw yourself into bigger challenges to gain experiences. But how do you get meaningful new rules for yourself out of your experiences? That’s where you turn to the PDCA cycle.

Based on the scientific method, PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Adjust) is used worldwide in design, management, and personal development. For fighting games, the cycle is fitting for both moment-to-moment gameplay and the process of improvement. I believe it’s also vital for any other kind of skills development when you’re forming concrete experiences.

For me, the cycle works like this: I plan to play a match a certain way, I try to play in that way (though mechanical execution and my opponent’s play are hurdles), afterwards I go over the replay to see how it went and note what worked and what didn’t, and then I adjust my plans going forward based on my newly-observed strengths and weaknesses. You may be able to see how this is immediately applicable, in deciding to do one thing and going through the cycle in the moment, and broadly applicable, in evaluating your progress over a long time.

Going through this cycle is pretty important, but it won’t do you any good without some good resources. After all, how is an artist going to know if that bicep they drew is accurate without a reference of someone flexing, and how is a pianist going to know if their Moonlight Sonata sounds right without a recording of the original? Here’s where a community can be your best friend. For me, joining a handful of online chat rooms that were all about improving in Street Fighter gave me access to great resources and helpful advice. Not only that, having a community of like-minded people kept me motivated whenever I felt like packing it in.

Once you’re no longer a Beginner, it becomes harder to put you in a defined category for your skill level. Even the Dreyfus model has caught a lot of criticism for not making too much sense at higher levels of skill. How a musician, an artist, or a fighting game player improves past competency is up to the individual. Progress is now based on their personal experiences and opinions than on a guide. So, I want to diverge from giving advice on getting better now and go into something far more important: mentality.

Wisdom From Benner & The Beast

The best of the best in every field have had run-ins with what the FGC calls bad mental. Daigo “The Beast” Umehara is a six-time Evo champion and longest-competing player in the FGC. He runs through some of his mental pitfalls in his 2016 book, The Will to Keep Winning. Inside, he details the life philosophy that has helped him remain a top competitor for more than 20 years.

The first pitfall is the desire to be “good”. Now hold on, I don’t mean that wanting to get better is bad. Rather, I’m trying to say that wanting to reach some permanent end state of “good” won’t help you in the long run. The goalposts of “good” are always going to be just out of reach, better than you currently are. Daigo knows this all too well, and instead of struggling to be “good”, strives to be better:

“It should be enough to make little discoveries that indicate growth or progress, even if they come over a short time.”

He continues this sentiment when talking about tournaments. Here, he details how he's motivated himself to stay competing for more than twenty years: 

"Tournaments are a playground for people who practice for growth. [...] Once I made that realisation, I finally started making continued growth my goal, rather than winning."

Here Daigo is saying to make improvement your goal instead of winning a tournament, or painting a masterpiece, or going platinum. If you do, you’re going to stay happier and more motivated as a result. The Beast also knows a thing or two about the importance of self-care; not just mental, but physical as well. Even if you’re not an aspiring athlete or martial artist, keeping healthy and balancing time spent kicking back and time spent on the grind is vital. Daigo had this to say about his early years, during which he neglected self-care entirely:

“Frankly, I pushed myself beyond my limits, I spent more of my waking hours playing, and my body suffered.”

Continuing on from that, I have something to add about mental. It’s all well and good to focus on improvement, to try as much as you can to improve and be better than you were yesterday. But you have to remember why you started the journey in the first place: to enjoy yourself! I got real down about my lack of progress about a year into going hard on Street Fighter. So much so that I almost dropped the genre for good after sinking hundreds of hours into learning the ropes. But then I went and tried some old games with my friends for the sole purpose of messing around. Once I left behind the burden of trying to be better all the time, I remembered to have fun with the videogame.

Artists have got to remember to draw for themselves, not only for the grind. Musicians should take time aside for a casual jam session, solo or with friends. You get the picture, and so does nursing theorist Patricia Benner. Here talking about keeping trainees motivated:

"...unless the trainee stays emotionally involved and accepts the joy of a job well done, as well as the remorse of mistakes, they will not develop further and will eventually burn out"

That brings me to my last point: acknowledging progress. It's tempting, going through your PDCA cycle, to only point out the mistakes. To only see your losses in a tournament bracket, to only hear the bad notes, and only see the wobbly lines. You’ve got to be kinder to yourself from that. Take it from me, you only get better when you take the time to acknowledge that you're improving.

I think that covers how fighting games taught me how to learn. If I've got you interested, I hope they can teach you too.

Which Road?

It’s pretty obvious at this point that I think fighting games kick ass. I also like to think I know a good amount about them, enough to give a good handful of recommendations to anybody looking to get into the genre.

STREET FIGHTER V

The newest entry in the renowned Street Fighter series, Street Fighter V is the most played and accessible title in the series. The game has a huge cast of 46 unique characters, a well-established community, and many great tutorials and guides online.

Available on PC and PlayStation 4.

GUILTY GEAR STRIVE

If Street Fighter is boxing, then Guilty Gear is high-powered nitrous-injected heavy metal MMA. On the moon. With magic. 

GG is a younger franchise than Street Fighter, popping up in ‘98 as opposed to SF’s ‘87. Regardless, it’s got great gameplay, cool characters, and sick music. STRIVE is the newest installment and keeps the series' trademark frantic gameplay, but is far easier to pick up than previous titles.

Available on PC, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.

FIGHTCADE

Okay, you don’t have the dosh to throw down on one of the big new releases. Good news! The combination emulator & online play platform Fightcade is here to help! Fightcade lets you play classics like the legendary Street Fighter III: Third Strike online, free of charge. Not only that, but more obscure and wackier titles like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future or Fist of the North Star are available too. 

Available on the Fightcade website:

https://www.fightcade.com/

Credits

Core-A Gaming's spectacular video "Analysis: Getting Better at Fighting Games" was a big inspiration for this article. Check them out here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT7njg__VOy3n-SvXemDHvg

I reference the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition in this article. You can find a summary of Professors Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus' model here:

https://www.bumc.bu.edu/facdev-medicine/files/2012/03/Dreyfus-skill-level.pdf