A noob's Guide to Being [Slightly Better than Free]

Mandritti

[09] Warrior
Obvious Things About Fighter Games you Might Not Know; and, Another Attempt to Explain Frames


I have collected this knowledge about Fighter Games, from being an unwilling newb at all of them for many years. I regard these subjects as worth talking about, because I still find the most capable performers at these games to be unglib explainers of their skill and knowledge, and I still find the information that forms the bedrock of FG mechanics, to lie untaught, unknown, and ignored among a score of newcomers and longtime players who take the game semi-seriously. There is plenty of education around, but for some reason, it does not impact a subset of willing students, and I believe this to be the folly of the obvious.

'Obvious' is a dangerous word, because it does not exist. However, the obvious is everywhere. One such obvious fact held guard over my most recent plateau, and its defeat is the reason of writing this guide. This guardian wore the furs of the "obvious", I believe, making it visible in the everyday expectation of those who were my teachers of this game, but invisible for whatever reason to me, and I know, to other players whose play I have seen and seen critiqued. This cloaked animal is a unicorn of education, making the newcomer a tragic victim of an accidental compliment. Perceptions are flawed, but that does not devalue education, hence this guide, and its deliberate grounding in the basic.

As a word of warning, my writing is narrative. These contents flow from start to finish. The sections are merely a guide to portion your consumption of it.

Table of Contents (i.e. Ctrl-F wizard):
Glossary .................. (next)
Frames .................... (xyi)
How to use .............. (xyii)
Winning .................. (xyiii)
Defending
The Answer
Intent to Kill
Mistakes
The Attack
The Pit of the Poke
Confrontation

Glossary of Terms
For this guide I assume as little as possible, even regarding Soul Calibur's bare bones. For education as to the basic ideas - horizontals, verticals, kicks, guard impacts, etc., you may refer to the manual that comes with the disc. Nonetheless, if any reference not clearly explained creeps in, that is only my fault.

"String" - a sequence of commands, indicated in a character's movelist, for which the 2nd and later button presses create an attack dependent on the earlier inputs having been made. This word is also found used in another sense, meaning any sequence of commands at all (for the purpose of describing its tactical and psychological effect and how and whether it has been responded to in some specific game played), but "sequence" will properly be used for that here.

"Attack Level" - the quality of an attack making it either :H:, :M:, or :L:, or any of the other heights.​

(end of Glossary)

(xyi) Game Design, "Frames"
Fighter Games are video games. They specify visual output in the course of play. As it happens, a Fighter Game updates its output to the screen or monitor 60 times per second (for some games, 50 times per second). This divides each second into 60 frames of visual data, output by the game to the players. In addition to reporting its state 60 times per second, the game itself processes inputs and reactions on this same 60 cycle per second (60 Hertz) basis, such that every change of state in the game is at one of these sixtieths of a second. In other words, the game emulates time passing frame-by-frame. Therefore, letting each of these 1/60 s moments be called a 'frame', every event in the game occurs definitively upon some specific frame, not between any two, and lasts for some specific number of frames.
Specifically, attacks begin on a frame, and end on a frame. Their effects begin on a frame, and end on a frame. Any two events or changes of state occur either simultaneously, or one occurs on a previous frame to the other. Insofar as the game is not random, any type of attack is measured in the same such numbers of frames every time it is selected. This is the basis of frame data. This is the basis of saying any one move has the same properties on two occasions of use, at all.

(xyii) How to use this guide
Education is about getting someone to perform better. Rather than telling you a bunch of things to know, I could tell you how to think, or how to do. This would have the advantage of being directly actionable on your part, but it would have the weakness of not being rationally justified. Neither does it have the ability for extension or discussion, or reasoning "by parts" to incrementally reach the good (the truth, the better). Instead, when knowledge is discussed as information - rationally arranged - the reader can absorb it into the place of reason in his own mind, deriving knowledge, and from there, how to meditate on it himself, and then, how to think.

(xyiii) Winning
You win by inflicting 100% damage before the opponent does that to you. Therefore, the means of inflicting damage is what's important.

Defending
To deal damage to an opponent, you have to use an attack command that 1) Collides with your opponent, and 2) Is not guarded or 'diverted'. This is the only way that you are allowed to make your opponent do something - like lose health, or get flung into stage hazards like walls and ring outs.

Some game systems make this condition simple, and some make it complex. The mechanism that resolves an attack's interaction with the opponent can range from as complex as: priority, the spatial relationships of hitboxes and hurtboxes, timing, attack level, and guardpoint qualities; to as simple as frames (speed). This depends on the game.
Collision is mostly intuitive, and the guard is universal, but subsystems of games can define their own mechanisms for "diversion" ad infinitum. Every game starts that list with 'interruption', a tool we will cover soon enough. Soul Calibur's V's subsystems are: attack level, clash, guard impact, guard, and three-dimensional positioning. To land an attack in Soul Calibur V, you must attack at the proper attack level, aligned to the opponent, and in range, and not be interrupted, clashed, guard impacted, or guarded. These terms will be defined later.

When you attack, the opponent will not want to suffer damage, since he is Playing to Win. Thus, he will falsify (1) or (2) if he can. The only reason he would not is that he did not have the options to prevent (1) or (2) available, or that he makes a mistake. Let's examine first why a player might not have the option to prevent your attack command from working.

Your opponent (like you) has all Options in the game in the Neutral Stance, where he initially finds himself at match start. He surrenders those options once making a selection. When you select an option, you surrender all the others until your choice is resolved. This first form of losing options is called Commitment. A second is Hitstun. Being struck places a player in Hitstun, a stance from which no option is available. Both commitment and hitstun are forms of Disadvantage, which we'll come to in a while, but right now they have a key difference. One of them is the result of the players' influence over each other, but the other is up to each player's free will. Commitment is not like any other disadvantage; you cannot make your opponent undergo it.
*Do not confuse hitstun with Stun, a special condition with its own meaning in each Fighting Game, typically signalling a special susceptibility to combos.

None of these deprivations will happen spontaneously. Let us presume the player will have the option to prevent your attacks for a while.

The Answer
Your opponent may have any option available, and there is not given a tool that can make a player commit. The options your opponent retains make their danger apparent when considering that every command has an Answer.

Every Fighting Game promises there exists some Answer option for a given command, which yields profit for the answerer and less than a bargain for the attacker. This profit is either damage, or something that makes damage easier, which is what we call Advantage. Since we know what damage is, the identity of Advantage can only be one thing: the removal of options. That is, Advantage is the opposite of Disadvantage, which we may now define. Disadvantage is the condition of having less than the game manual of tools available. Advantage is the oppression of an opponent in Disadvantage.
Disadvantage lasts for a certain amount of time, meaning a certain number of frames. Many forms of disadvantage are "Lag," a penalty period during which nothing is possible but gawking at your screen. Throw systems include the ability to break throws, making throws the creators of "throw lag", out of which only throw break attempts are possible (depending on the game). Soul Calibur has one special form of lag which is Impact Lag, the disadvantage of being Guard Impacted, during which you are allowed to Guard Impact, but do nothing else. Otherwise, all Disadvantage is some form of lag, recovery, or hitstun, which simply removes all options. See Further Reading.

The Answer promised by the game is only guaranteed to exist in the initial position, Neutral, before Commitments that surrender Options. In Disadvantage, answers may be less plentiful, or not exist.

So to win, you must attack, but to attack is to forfeit some or all of the precious options that answer the opponent's attacks. In this mathematics is the meaning of the game. You must attack, and defend with less than everything available. Although failing to ever attack is a sure way to lose, there is no one path to a promise of victory, for the reasons initially stated. The opponent will oppose you, unless the option does not exist, or he makes a mistake.

Intent to Kill
If you attack and the opponent performs the defensive response, you lose out. But if the opponent attacks and you perform the defensive response, he will lose out. This profit and loss is meaningless unless damage occurs, which is why all attention goes to attack priority or Priority - the system governing attacks used as options against attacks. An effective answer ends in an attack, and therefore the simplest answer begins and ends with a single attack action. The primary form of that is Interruption.

Every command has startup time, and therefore, every chance to damage the opponent has the potential to be spotted, and its answer, selected. This is the commitment disadvantage. If the answer consists of hitting you with an attack before yours even strikes, this is Interruption, the most robust form of answering attacks, for one simple reason: it stops an attack and grants damage. It does everything an answer can hope to be.

Soul Calibur V has a simple priority system with one quirk. As a brief primer, if two attacks strike their target at the same time, one, both, or neither of them may deal damage. Such an attack is said to have been beaten in a Clash. A horizontal weapon attack will fail if it meets a vertical weapon attack at the same frame. For two weapon attacks of the same orientation (horizontal/vertical) at the same frame, the players' inputs are checked. If either player has inputted a string followup, the other player's attack is Clashed. He deals no damage. If this applies to both players, they continue their strings unfazed. Any player whose attack is nullified goes through clash lag (and is often immediately hit). A player who is struck before his attack would strike, as described before, is put in hitstun, meaning his attack will not complete. A player who wins damage, having stubbed the attack of his opponent either with a Clash or an Interrupt, is said to have Outprioritized the opposing attack.

We have discussed the most direct form of answer logically possible. While leaving the form of other answers aside, let us table our discussion of option removal and address Mistakes.

Mistakes
A mistake is either a competence error or a performance error. A competence error is a lack of knowledge. If the opponent does not know what the answer is, the game becomes very simple, since his selection of a command will tend only randomly (at best) toward countering your nonrandom, deliberate selection of your attack command. The attacker is, as they say, free to "rinse, repeat" until victory screen, while the defender struggles to choose a defense without knowledge.

Such a lack of knowledge as a competence error is not very likely, because almost all Fighter Games have two things: a multitude of answers, and among them, a block button. Block/Guard answers a lot of things, by design. However, it is not an attack command and never deals damage. What blocking does afford is an Advantage: The advantage of preventing hitstun. By design, receiving an attack through the Block/Guard incurs a Disadvantage called Blockstun, but tends to return the defender to Neutral Stance before the attack does so for the attacker. Note, however, that the Guard is subject to what was earlier said, that its selection means the surrender of all the other options. The Guard also depends on Attack Level.
Guard is a stance that permits only the ability to crouch down or up, and end itself (by releasing the button), but it absorbs attacks. Guard negates damage, swallowing what would have been hitstun disadvantage, and turning it into blockstun disadvantage - usually less. An attack which is successful usually puts the attacker in the reverse position, returning to Neutral before his victim. His fate is unfavorable when his attack is blocked, helpless for a time as his opponent recovers earlier.

Guard must be performed at the level to match an attack's level (Attack Level): Standing guard for :M: s, and crouching guard for :L: s. Other Attack Levels may be guarded either standing or crouching.
To emphasize the implied arithmetic here: The return to neutral stance, which is later for the attacker, is another form of Disadvantage, a subset of commitment sometimes called "lag". In the case of a blocked attack, the time that the attacker is in lag but the blocker is not in blockstun is called negative frames. (If the attacker escapes his lag first, it is positive frames or "plus frames").

A performance error is what is more commonly called a Mistake in theoretical craft and commentary of high-level play. A player knows the defense, but has failed to implement it because of distraction, reflexes, sight, nerves, or some other fault. At the level of competition where there are no competence errors, the meaning of the game is transformed from a mathematical struggle (described earlier) to a mental struggle, to exhaust the opponent's resolve, stamina, and wits through repeated, fast-paced strain and test. In this circumstance, the rapid manipulation of available defenses, as a result of Disadvantage, decides who is going to win and who is going to lose.

The Mixup is this flaunt of expectation, a manipulation of defenses that juxtaposes the unexpected with the dangerous. It is a selection of that which answers an opponent's performance in expectation of an alternative choice on your part. It is an option that has been wormed into the defenses of the opponent, one that uniquely depends on the opponent's possession of knowledge rather than ignorance of it. The Mixup has infiltrated the enemy's wits and made an enemy of his own hands at the controller. The mixup is not only the high vs. low ( :M: vs. :L: ), it is the creative force at play in any occasion that the opponent's concentration has slipped, and he has or -will- commit to an option that the aggressor can counter, in reaction or prediction.

Why is a player susceptible to this, though? In truth, there are so many forms of attack, that the freedom not to commit is itself a noose on which a player hangs himself. If a player never commits, in the end he is reckoned only by his reaction time, a pitfall which I call the "pit of the poke." The reaction times of two players form a level of interplay above mutual knowledge, true, but no player ought to debase himself willingly of higher options.

The Attack
As we discussed when more or less dismissing competence errors, because of the Guard, every newcomer is almost immediately an 'expert', who can answer just about anything - a contender in the interplay of knowledge versus knowledge. However, he is still a novice in reality, because he has given up the game's true meaning: to deliberately lower one's (figurative) guard (as little as possible!), and attack. He is not at all playing the exhaustive, witted game of the theoretical master, not to mention that Guard has its own shortcomings.

We said early on (in an expandable box), that the resolution of an attack command can be simple or complex. In addition to the universal block/guard, attacks can answer other attacks, as we discussed with Priority, which includes clashing and interruption. In a third category, some attacks enable evasion, to prevent collision. These attacks are the Tech Jump, the Tech Crouch, and the Tech Step. Each one of the tech properties (TJ, TC, and TS) incorporates an element of the game's movement system into the startup of an attack. In this way, attacks which strike later than the opposing attack may still win out, because they evade the incoming blow the same way a normal movement would.

Whether by means of an explicit Tech category, or in virtue of speed and priority factors, or simply as the cause of dreaded Hitstun, attacks carry the potential to both grant safety and cause damage. For this reason, attacks are the most represented options in all play, at many levels of skill, and the most discussed. Their status can also be expressed as a cycle: Attacks instantiate Disadvantage, which implies Advantage, which gives rise to Attacks.
fightingGameCycle.GIF
(Figure 1: Attacks and Advantage)

It is a given, an assumption, an obvious, that Fighting Games will involve attack commands butting horns with each other, and the novice will simply learn this and figure it out as he acquires the knowledge described above. Not so in all cases.

In some cases, the appetite for mastery in the player, confuses his perception of the game and himself - (as appetites, unlike our rationality, tend to do) - and he mistakes the simplicity of his first concept of a Fighting Game match, for an expertise. He believes he has a real shot at the big leagues, if only he can master his reactions, but he is in the trap of the cult of the Block, or sometimes, the pit of the poke.

The Pit of the Poke
The poke is a secondary stage of delusion for the newcomer. It is the fault of ending one's knowledge of the game at the same point we have so far brought our discussion of options - at the single attack answer. Answers include all of the tools of the game, from movement to guarding to priority, and combinations of the three. It is merely the fact that an Answer must end in an attack to accomplish something, which led us to treat a single attack as worth analysing. In truth, attacks are far from the only options - offensive or defensive - and to fail to read the opponent's selections as consisting of sequences of options, will result in defeat time after time.

"Every command has startup time," we agreed, "and therefore, every chance to damage the opponent has the potential to be spotted, and its answer, selected." Not to see the Options being used is to forfeit the applicability of your own.

We have come this far in order, now, to say this: To select the Answer to your opponent's Option, you must have enough time within your Advantage, the good sense not to make a mistake, and the care to perform a sequence which in fact protects you from the opponent's attack. You must, further, use the circumstance as you can to attempt an attack yourself. Since there is a nonzero threshold for reaction time, we can see the profit of understanding this principle in reverse, which brings us to the final section.

Confrontation
The selection of an option is a contest to get to damage, not to answer the opponent's selection, win frames of advantage, or perform clean maneuvers. Although the contest requires an adeptness and discernment at each moment about the various forms of profit granted by the options available, the player's only prize is the damage of a successful attack.

To deal damage to an opponent, you have to use an attack command that 1) Collides with your opponent, and 2) Is not guarded or diverted (clashed, interrupted, or impacted).

To land a hit, you have to work around not what your opponent can do, but what he will do.

In striving to anticipate what your opponent will do, a player must allow his mind the ability to recognize and understand the player across from him. In adapting to the selections of his opponent, it will serve him to have a place in his mind to model the tendencies and nature of his opponent, and it will not serve him to have a disorganized space in his mind, or any contents of that space incompatible with what he sees before his eyes. Therefore, the skilled and good player is one who has arranged a room in his mind for the sort of thing that a Fighting Game player can be, which, like any box, must have a shape for all the parts of the thing inside it, and elbow room, to manipulate, remove, or assemble parts inside it as needed.

The novice of the Block has already been bamboozled, surrendering movement and interruption until he has marched with total unwitting obedience to the point of total Disadvantage, entirely open to whatever his opponent chooses to do with him. He gifts his opponent these chances all for "free" (as far as his opponent is concerned).

The novice of the pit of the poke sees no structure in the actions of the play, parceling out threats and intimidation in the movements and selections leading up to the attack. He sees his opponent with all his moving parts, but does not reach for him with the right hand (or mind) to grasp it. He sees only an attack setup, not the pages of possibilities flipped over each moment of pause in the opponent's selections (and silences). When he chooses his tool, he may wisely match it to the opponent's selection here and there, but his mind has no place to put the concept of being tricked and feinted, and when he is caught by surprise, his mind will not properly sort this event, and he will fall as he is overwhelmed by plays he cannot adapt to.

The actual challenge, of the Fighting Game match, unlike the novice's concept, is to choose an option, or sequence of options, which can so bamboozle the opponent that he reacts not correctly to a single step of it, concluding with a successful attack. Where the winner will have time, the loser will not. Where the winner will know and perform the move, the loser will ignore or fumble the response. Where the winner will repeat and press his offense, the loser will flounder and delay in his initiative. And in reverse, where the winner will dissemble his agility, the loser will be an inert stone. Where the winner will hop spryly between ambiguous scenarios, the loser will curmudgeonly stack move upon predictable move. And where the winner will eke out every last vulnerability in the onslaught of his opponent, the loser will obligingly transform himself into the puppet his opponent desires to bully.
 
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