Tom Brady vs Sol Badguy: Watching Fighting Games as a Sport Can Be Fun
Being the massive sports fanatic you are, Jonathan, you know that the Super Bowl is one of the biggest media events in the U.S and quite possibly the world. On February 2, 2020, Super Bowl LIV (54 for those who don’t feel like trying to remember their Roman numerals) premiered to approximately 148 million viewers across the U.S alone. The event has so many people watching, if a company wants to have their funny commercial featured between ad breaks, its gonna cost them a whopping 5 million dollars just for a 30 second ad.
These numbers are imposing figures for sure and with the big game approaching this Sunday (today, actually, if all goes according to plan), I began to think about how many of those 148 million or more viewers are avid fans of the sport and how many are simply spectators who showed up to the annual party for some friends, laughs, and food. While it’s been estimated that good ol’ American football might be the country’s favorite sport, it doesn’t mean that everybody is parading around the office with a jersey of their favorite team on.
And I know the more apathetic football fans exist because…I’m one of them.
Despite this though, it’s still exciting to get together in a living room, bar, or backyard and watch the big game. I’m not referring to the dozens and dozens of funny commercials or the overblown halftime shows, I’m talking about the actual game that’s being played by two teams competing to see who goes back to their city carrying the trophy. Even when people don’t necessarily care about who wins, they still want to see an exciting competition. So long as you understand that scoring points via touchdowns is good and letting the opposing team gain points is bad, also where the bowl of chips is at, you have enough knowledge to generally enjoy Super Bowl Sunday.
So naturally I started wondering how this all can relate to fighting games (much like you are as you read this Jon). Lots of people don’t understand all the rules, strategies, or even necessarily what’s happening in lots of different sports, but they can still find enjoyment in the most exciting moments of that sport. Thus, I wondered if I could entice people to watch and enjoy fighting games, even if they don’t necessarily play or understand them. To do this, I’m gonna need to start with what happens when we tell a normal person, for this purpose we’ll call him Average Joe, that they should boot up Twitch and start watching Tekken 7 matches.
“Why Should I Watch a Bunch of Fake People Fight?”
Let’s start here, because I think this is actually a great question that looks and sounds like a snobby jab at nerds for being more interested in fighting with pixels instead of IRL punches. The world of combat sports like UFC and WBA have always had legendary status and are still growing and thriving as we speak and for many reasons. These sports have lots of determined and flashy fighters ready to get in the ring, lots of world famous celebrities in the stadium’s best seats, and lots of people wanting to see some poor bastard get knocked the hell out by an uppercut. There is a palpable excitement in the rawness and ferocity of these combat sports that harkens back to the days of coliseums and fights to the death that humanity used to love back in the “good” old days. After all, who doesn’t want to see Jake Paul get knocked out?
Yet when you glance at these battles as a sport, things can get confusing for casual spectators. I mean, other than knocking the other guy unconscious, how do you win in this game? The only people who can truly tell you which fighter is at an advantage are the people who understand the sport on a deeper level than Average Joe. The victor of most fights is decided by judges with criteria that is alien to average viewers since all they see is two bloodied and bruised people who don’t exactly look like winners in the end. In fact, this process of judges deciding the winner can be so vague that even the fighters themselves don’t know who won in the end and can be caught completely off guard when it isn’t their fist being held in the air by the referee!
Let’s drift away from the violence of punching and kicking and instead move into the more civilized realm of war and murder. Let’s talk about chess. Chess is one of the oldest games ever played and has essentially been refined to near mathematical perfection. Much like the more brutal combat sports we just discussed, the goal of chess is to knock out the opponent’s most important piece: the king. To accomplish that seemingly simple task, you must position your pieces in such a way that makes the king incapable of escaping his demise; otherwise called: checkmate. When you watch a chess match, you aren’t just watching someone play a board game really well, you’re actually watching two experts who have studied literal centuries worth of strategies and moves that demonstrate their memory, tact, and ability to analyze a given scenario and respond decisively. That’s pretty amazing and it can be very exciting to watch.
So how does a spectator know who is winning a match of chess? Much like combat sports, it’s actually also fairly difficult to tell if you’re Average Joe. Believe it or not, it doesn’t matter how many of the opponent’s pieces a player removes from the board, he could still be loosing and not even realize it until he’s in checkmate. In these cases, Average Joe is not able to fully enjoy these two games as a spectator. While Average Joe may love watching Jake Paul get punched over and over and love seeing how fast chess players can respond with moves and strategies, he still may be somewhat disappointed when he realizes that he actually doesn’t know as much as he thought about the game. and unlike other sports or games, he can’t just ask “what’s the score?” here.
So then, Average Joe, why should you watch a bunch of fake people fight? Simple. Fighting games are combat sports and chess: combined. You want to see violent brawls until one of the flashy fighters drops? Almost every match of a fighting game ends in a KO and even if it doesn’t, it’s usually very easy to tell who wins because the health bars indicate just who is at the advantage. And just in case it still wasn’t obvious who won, Mortal Kombat will be sure to let you know by letting you watch the loser die a gruesome death at the hands of the victor. You want to see 1000 IQ moves that turn the tides like in chess? How about watching a player defend themselves against an onslaught of attacks, with no health left to spare, and finally managing to find the perfect opportunity to seal the victory despite the overwhelming odds? Fighting games have all the ingredients that Average Joe likes in his competitive spectatorship along with being easier to understand and read than some other sports and competitive games.
However, just because you can see the score and who is winning, doesn’t mean you understand how they’re doing it.
“But I Don’t Know How to Play!”
As I mentioned previously, you don’t need to understand too much about American football to appreciate it and enjoy a well played game of the sport. Super Bowl Sunday and the Olympics more or less prove that most spectators are simply looking for some good ol’ fashioned competition even if they don’t really understand how the sport works. Most games and sports, when boiled down to their most basic elements, are pretty simple. Unless you’re playing golf, having more points is great and making sure the other team has less points than you is also great. This idea is more commonly called: offense and defense. In soccer, kicking the ball towards the opponents goal to get a point is an offensive move and trying to prevent the ball from going into your goal is a defensive move. The constant shifting between offense and defense is what makes sports and games exciting to play and to watch.
So how does that translate to fighting games? Well, hitting your opponent with your punches, kicks, or laser blasts will cause damage to you opponent’s character and deplete their health bar. This is a form of scoring. The more damage you do, the less (health) points your opponent will have. Hit them enough and K.O., you win! As for defense, you and your opponent have a secret maneuver called blocking. When blocking, you take less damage from attacks and might actually cause your opponent to attack with a move that leaves them wide open for a counter attack, and now it’s the other players turn to be on offense.
Simplified, this is the “game” side of fighting games. Two players constantly shifting between states of offense and states of defense, just like in American football. At the core, this is all Average Joe needs to understand to enjoy watching an exciting match of Guilty Gear. Even still, Joe might think it’s boring watching fake people slap each other over and over to deplete an imaginary health bar; especially if there is no “real” athleticism going on like sprinting or tackling.
So where does the excitement really kick in for fighting game spectators?
Combos and comebacks.
Combos in fighting games are a chain of attacks that happen one after the other in such a way that the person being hit by the combo cannot escape (unless the game gives them a special move that allows them to). It should go without saying that the longer a combo is, the more damage it will do and it should also go without saying that taking damage is bad and doing more damage is good. Don’t be fooled by that simple description however, Average Joe, because combos are far more than what they seem. You cannot just hit any random assortment of buttons and have the moves your character does on screen magically connect and form a combo. The player performing the combo has to know what moves they can and cannot do, the same way a chess player must know what strategies will get them out of a checkmate situation. These combos also require execution and timing to pull off. When a combo should have worked, but the player missed the timing, spacing, or input, it is most often called “a dropped combo”. Dropping a combo when you really needed it to land can result in you losing the entire match. Combos are exciting to watch because they represent that beautiful blending of mind power and physical execution.
In fact, combos are so exciting to watch that professional commentator and fighting game streamer Stephen “Sajam” Lyon has developed a monthly game show centered solely around them. Calling it “Will it Kill?”, Sajam gathers clips of combos from across the internet and asks his audience to guess/bet if they believe the combo will finish the fight with a K.O. The show’s audience has grown larger and larger since its inception and even non-fighting game enthusiasts have dropped by the stream or watched the show on Youtube just to see some amazing combos in games new and old.
I don’t think I need to dive too deep into the concept of comebacks, since everybody loves them. There’s nothing more inspiring and exciting than watching somebody on the edge of defeat, underestimated, and outnumbered fighting their way to victory. It’s a tale as old as time and in the world of fighting games, comebacks are a hallmark of the genre. Some games even have mechanics that allow comebacks to happen at just about any moment. Watching a match of Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 can be an exhilarating experience because you truly don’t know what will happen next to change the tides of success especially when X-Factor is in stock.
What is X-Factor? X-factor is a mechanic in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 where upon activation, your character’s attacks will do much more damage to your opponent, your health will gradualy refill and undo some of the damage done to you, and can be used to cancel certain moves into other moves when that wouldn’t normally be possible. Basically it makes you really, really dangerous. Of course this burst of power is only temporary and if you have all three characters on your team, it lasts even shorter. Nonetheless it’s a very powerful tool, and fighting games are no stranger to providing players with incredibly powerful options that can easily ruin someone’s day.
some examples include: abilities that break those cool combos I just mentioned, abilities that let you teleport behind your opponent instantly and attack them, moves that can’t be blocked at all regardless of how strong your defense is, moves that have real invincibility and can do absurd damage, and (my personal favorite) T.O.Ds. What is a T.O.D and what does it stand for? T.O.D stands for Touch of Death and it is exactly what it sounds like. One touch…and you’re dead.
After seeing even one of these sorts of situations take place in a match, I’m sure Average Joe has another question brewing…
“Wait…This is Utter Nonsense! Why in the World Would I Want to Watch Something So Unbalanced and Crazy?!
Well, Average Joe, here is a better question: Why not?
“Mankind knew that they could not change society.
So instead of reflecting on themselves, they blamed the beasts.
Heaven or Hell”
What I just quoted is not a poem from the 19th century, it’s actually just Guilty Gear Strive letting the players know…it’s Round 1. Fighting games are built to be absurd in so many different ways, from the characters and their designs, the special moves they do, the stages and worlds they fight in, and even in the way the game announces when a round is about to start. The absurdity of these games and their characters and mechanics is what makes each one special and worth playing, and in this case, what makes them worth watching on your big screen at home.
Your TV will light up with flashy beams and hadokens, your speakers will shake from the screaming coming from the fighters or the commentators, and everybody watching will be wondering what the heck is going on, all while having a clear understanding of who is winning and losing and why. What’s even better is that you don’t have to wait for Sundays to watch all the absurd action. New tournaments are being run as we speak on Twitch and classic tournaments and matches are available on Youtube for pretty much every single game you wanna watch.
While other sports and games are still incredibly fun to watch and enjoy with friends and family, I think fighting games deserve the same treatment and have a lot to offer even to spectators who don’t know everything about a game. While boxing may have lots of celebrities in the front row seats, chess may have some of the most intelligent minds across the globe, and the NFL has (or had, I guess) Tom Brady; fighting games have Sol Badguy, the protagonist of Guilty Gear and one of the most powerful characters of his world bent on destroying every Gear he comes across.
He can also do this:
I’d like to see Jake Paul try and land that.
Have a good Superbowl Sunday Jonathan.
You friend, your rival,
Blake
