Patrick Miller’s “The Educated Gentleperson’ s Fighting Game Primer”

Good shit sir.

Time to find some of my more reluctant friends to browbeat into reading this article.

Small extract:

“Odds are, if you’re reading this, you’re probably big into videogames; maybe you’re a devoted enthusiast, maybe you’re a journalist, maybe you’re an academic or amateur scholar of some sort, maybe you even make your own videogames. If you are significantly invested in the production and consumption of videogames as a medium, on a personal or professional level, you ought to know something about competitive fighting games as a matter of basic literacy.

Learning how to beat another person in a fighting game involves understanding elements of game design, psychology, programming and basic machine input/output, human physiology, motivation, and several other serious bodies of human knowledge — and then applying them to go beat down your buddy’s virtual avatar. You must train yourself to understand complicated situations and react to them with complicated physical movements within fractions of a second. Perhaps most importantly, you must learn how to get better at something: How to absorb good behaviors and discard bad ones, how to push yourself, how to practice, how to diagnose problems and fix them. I think it’s a good thing for people to do, period.

To paraphrase MMA legend Renzo Gracie, “Fighting [games] is actually the best thing a man can have in his soul…

Chapter Two : Ryu vs. Ryu (everything you need to know about fighting games)

Ryu is the character that the entire genre of fighting games was designed around. Every fighting game , from King of Fighters to Guilty Gear to Marvel vs. Capcom to Tekken, can trace its design history back right to Ryu. So let’s break Ryu down — and in doing so, break down pretty much every fighting game ever.

As it happens, pretty much everything you need to know about modern fighting games is right here in this exchange:

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