The Reason to Never Give Up

Before you ask, yes, it is a slow news day. That's why I wanted to highlight a post from a few days ago that serves as a perfect example of what makes fighting games great, or rather, what makes them special.

If you have ever gotten truly serious about improving in a fighting game, I can almost guarantee that you had an incredibly long set with your friend who is great at fighting games and then proceeded to absolutely clobber you.

Sets like that should feel awful, at least in theory, right? Nobody likes losing, so why would be we keep on playing and trying again and again and again? The copout answer would be to say that it's just more fun to play with friends, but I think it's more than that.

These sets are basically baptism by fire for fighting games. You simply can't do a FT100 without rejecting the idea of playing to win in favor of playing to improve. By the time the score hits something like 0-10 you forget about winning the set and start to focus on small improvements.

Suddenly the performance anxiety goes away, humility comes in, and you start to think on a more macro level. What am I losing to? Can I do something about it? What options do I have? The analysis and adaptation kick in hard, and your set turns into a boss fight of sorts, not too different from bashing your head again Malenia, Emerald Weapon, or Lavos.

You could win hundreds of FT2, but I would bet anything that few of them would come close to the sheer catharsis of taking a single match off of the person who beat just beat you over 100 times in a row.

This is not to say that everyone must do this, but I'm very much a long set advocate, so if you never experienced something like this, I recommend that you do give it a try. If it's not for you, that's fine, but you could also come out the other side having learned a lot of new things.