Gameism: The Doctrine of Judging Others Based on Their Gaming Practices

How often have you basked in the all-encompassing, reflected light from a new gaming disc?  To whom do you listen during such great, historical events such as E3 or the GDC?  What are the games in which you are most interested?  Forget those questions for now; they don't matter.  What does matter is how what you do -- how you act -- reflects on you.  If I go around punching children and stealing from blind people, chances are I am not a good person.  If I have a gaming blog and look forward to reading other gaming blogs, I would say it's a safe bet I also play videogames.  Maybe something just as likely is that spend large amounts of time playing these games and forgo anything else.  This is all fine and good, but what about the types of games you buy?  Well, that probably says something about you too.  How about the consoles?  Do you think each console defines who that gamer is?  I hope not.  Don't be a Gameist.

One day, I will punch these children.

Let's begin with real life in a generic sense: type of console.  I have a Wii.  I do not have an Xbox 360 nor a PS3.  Since I have a Wii, maybe you can assume I'm a casual gamer and that I love playing games like Wii Sports or Farmville.  Or that I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to gaming since anyone who owns a Wii is either 73 or 7. If you think these things, you are one of the flawed Gameists.  Similar to Sexists and not as traditional as Racists, Gameists have their own preconceived stereotypes for different kinds of gamers.  For my own sake, I hate games like Farmville.  I could never stand to play any Facebook game and I only play Wii Sports after being dragged into it by the actual casual gamers.  I have Team Fortress 2 and Mass Effect 2 on my PC hard drive.  I love those games.  But there are some people out there who willingly accept Wii gamers as childish and it's almost to the point of defining them as not actually gamers.  Personally, I have not been a victim of this prejudice, but the victims are out there.  Do what you can to help the less fortunate.

When it comes to the PS3, you may guess these gamers are skinny Asians -- or people who wish they were skinny Asians -- who spend most of their time playing expansive and vastly time consuming JRPGs like the Final Fantasy series.  And, of course, these people always have some new JPOP going in the background, right?  Well Think Again!  I have friends who own a PS3; one is white, one is Jewish and another is Mexican.  None of them take more pleasure in Japan than is appropriate.  What is wrong in the minds of these Gameists that such prejudices exist?  Do they just listen to the representatives of the products they own and never hear anything from the other sides of the aisle?  Are these people set on categorizing everyone into these narrow stereotypes that limit other gamers?  It seems like it sometimes, it seems like it indeed.

 One of these people own a PS3, the other owns a Wii.  You Decide.

And what about the Xbox 360 owners?  Are they all shooter-obsessed bros, who buy cases of "amp" and insist every time they die is a lucky shot?  Does each Xbox 360 gamer yell into their headset, swearing and hypothesizing about another's sexual orientation?  Well...  Well, Okay, some are more true than others, but you get the idea.  What console one owns does not, for the most part, determine what kind of a person one is.  But those damn Gameists and their Gameism.  How do they think they can lump so many people together and make them faceless embodiments of a specific type of gamer?  Let the gamer community unite under one flag and realize that, even though we are all different on the outside, we are all the same on the inside.  Every gamer is a gamer because of their love for videogames.  Let us extend that love to one another and Stop this senseless Gameism.  Is this the dream of which Dr. King spoke?  Is this what the honored Veterans have fought and died for?  I can honestly tell you, without a doubt in my mind, that answer is no.  Thank you, everyone, and don't forget to do what's best for the gaming community.

Pacifism over Pugilism – Why You Suck at Fighting Games

You're arrived at a friends house that you haven't seen in a while to pass some time. After 30 minutes of watching hilarious YouTube videos, you guys decide to move on to playing some video games. “That's fine,” you thought, because both of you are avid gamers.

After a couple minutes of back-and-forth indecision, your friend finally pulls out a copy of Super Street Fighter 4 for the PS3. “You don't mind if we play some rounds? Are you good at this?”

“Oh cool. Uh, yeah, I've played” you say somewhat optimistically.

However, this is a lie. You haven't played a Street Fighter game since Street Fighter II on the SNES. “Street Fighter was mad fun. I wonder if I can still do Rye-you's fireball. This shouldn't be any different, right?” as your naive, little mind reassures you as you put your hands on the PS3 Dualshock while your friend pulls out a huge, $150 arcade stick that looks bigger than the damn PS3 itself.

To me, the fighting game world is perfect. Nothing to rearrange.

“Whatever. I guess I'll give you a quick tutorial. I already put in the game so might as well get this over with,” your friend says dejectedly.

As you play, you furiously start to mash buttons, thinking you're playing a side-scrolling beat-em-up like the X-Men Arcade game, as well as your thumb consistently doing the down-to-forward motion on the analog stick (the “Rye-you's fireball” motion that you happened to forget and were recently reminded). As you're doing this, your friend is only pushing one button – the Medium Kick button - and topples you with a perfect victory.

You sit there, puzzled. Thirty minutes and a 14 – 0 record later (6 of them being perfects), you tell your friend you don't feel like playing Street Fighter anymore. Several thoughts go through your head: Why isn't this the same fun as your childhood? Why couldn't you grasp the game as quick as playing a multiplayer shooter or action game? Why is every fiber of your being terrible?

“I thought you played this before? I was hoping you did. Not many of my friends play, so I was hoping for competition, but instead all I got was your scrubby @$$,” he says as he turns off the game, puts the arcade stick away, and puts on Gigli to pass the time.

Your friend is a dick. But it's not his fault. Not entirely, at least.

Fighting games are seemingly built from the ground up to steer casual players away from playing them for more than an hour. At first, the games seem simple enough: two people fight, one person lowers the other dude's life bar to empty (once, twice, maybe thrice), you do a cool victory pose, you tack on a win and another guy tries to beat you up. Rinse and repeat.

However, once you start observing the details further, there are those aspects of fighting games that frighten gamers to pacification.

First and foremost are the controls. A game like Halo is simple: Press a button/trigger to shoot, press a button to jump, move around with two analog sticks, shoot people, call yourself a gamer. Easy to understand, and applicable to a competitive level.

A game like Street Fighter, however, has basic movement like jumping and moving forward, but has SIX buttons for attacks (Light, Medium, Hard for Punches and Kicks). Each of those “normal moves” has a different function standing far away from the opponent, standing close to the opponent, jumping toward/away from the opponent, jumping in a neutral state, and crouching. And guess what? They differ from character to character. Your mental bucket was already full from the concept of six buttons being used in a game.

Not only are there various normal moves, but “special” moves are quite daunting for the casual player (i.e. Ryu's “Hadouken,” Chun-Li's “Lightning Legs,” Blanka's “Being Ugly as Hell”). A Quarter Circle Forward motion (QCF, where you press down, down-forward, then forward in a smooth motion) can take minutes to learn, while a Dragon Punch (or “DP” motion – forward, down, down-forward) can take dozens of minutes, or even an hour, or even never because, dammit, all you wanted to do is make Ken from Street Fighter do a cool flaming uppercut with the power of blonde anglo-saxon karate fighting in your palms.

The guy on the right (Geese Howard from Fatal Fury) is doing "Raging Storm," which is performed by inputting down-back, forward, down-forward, down, down-back, back, down-foward + two punches in one motion. kill me now

Mechanics of fighting games create a steep learning curve. For example, defense: not only do you have to attack, but you have to (gasp) DEFEND. Defense differs from game to game – some games require you to press a direction away from your opponent and some require you to press a button for Guard (a la Soul Calibur). Some attacks hit high, some attacks hit low; sometimes you can guard in the air, sometimes you can parry an attack. The only way to beat a guard outright, sometimes, is to throw. How do you beat a throw? You “tech” a throw by canceling it out with your own throw input. How do you beat a tech? Yomi.

Casual gamers also hear things about “framedata” from “pro” players, and that you have to “count frames during the game in order to be good.” This is heavily misconstrued. You have to count frames before you start playing the game, and if you don't memorize frame charts for all the characters moves, you basically have no chance at learning the game.

Just kidding! But seriously, you don't have to learn frame data to learn a fighting game. Frame data is completely referential, and while it's helpful to know that Balrog's jab has 3 startup frames, it's not absolutely necessary. The more you play fighting games, the more you know what moves beat which moves, what moves are fast or slow, and which moves are able to get you hate messages on PSN or XBL calling you a “spamming scrub” or telling you “u suk at this game, Chun Li is ovrpoweres dawg.”

The key is to keep playing, but there is such a pronounced skill gap between new and seasoned players that, generally, newer players get turned off by it. If a person sucks at Modern Warfare 2, he's able to at least get a few cheap kills from someone who wasn't looking and learn from there. However, fighting games aren't that rewarding. One must grind, loss after depressing loss against someone that's good, in order to learn the game. They eventually have to ask a good player what their own flaws are, and work on those in order to succeed. They have to put effort in a game, which by all means is very undesirable for the casual crowd.

The fighting game community doesn't really help the casual presence. They like to see new blood, of course, but it's a steep road to be competitive in fighting games. Game mechanics in newer fighting games, such as in Street Fighter 4, have been shunned by fighting game enthusiasts because they appeal to casual gamers (such as lenient special move motions, “Ultra” combos with low risk/high reward, etc).

This guy (Rufus) is considered one of the top (if not the top) tiered characters in Super Street Fighter 4 because of his easy damage combos and easy Ultra combo setups. But mostly because he's fat as hell and so is the USA (he's American)!!!!

Nostalgia (like for Super Street Fighter 4) can create initial burst in sales but can't create a large a group of new, lasting players like the FPS genre or even RTS genre can. There will always be a huge divide between causal and seasoned fighting game players, much bigger than any genre out there. If you want a fighting game with a much smaller gap of skill, there's always Super Smash Bros Brawl, right?

(By the way, the “friend” at the beginning of the article was me. The Gigli thing wasn't a joke.)