#mangocoal01

[mangocoal01]

What are the unspoken expectations & rules of fighting games? [Part 2]

People are often most frustrated when expectations aren’t met & information they were given & operating on in good faith is then painfully proven false. In short, people get mad when they lose because of rules they weren’t informed about or couldn’t have reasonably known about ahead of time (from their perspective, at least). Life isn’t fair and games aren’t necessarily fair either but they often try to present themselves as such to varying degrees by their very nature of expecting to be won, completed, or beaten in some fashion, which creates a subsequent audience expectation, of sorts; at least subconsciously, I imagine. A lot of games have this aspect to their play but FGs esp. seem to have this wide variety of mentalities of why folks play; this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, this also means that the “I’m just here to press buttons & have fun seeing cool moves”-type players and the “I’m looking for depth, data, grind, & personal style”-type players are both prone to sharing the same swimming pool so to speak because terms like “beginner” are so vaguely defined & widely vary from person-to-person to the point of being an unhelpful label/categorization in some cases.

And often times, most FGs kinda design around this by either making the pool shallower under the unspoken assumption that everyone that plays FGs want the experience of intense competition, practice, personal growth, & research as their endgame goal. This shared pool of massively differing values & personality types, I personally think, is an environment ripe for conflict & anger that drives people to feel misunderstood and thus more prone to hostility towards each other.

I dunno, if I have a greater point here. I’m not a strong essayist, writer, or debater and even less of a people person. There’s just so much to what constitutes quality teaching & how the human mind processes information that it’s hard to accommodate ideal learning environments for such a large mass of peoples of varying mindsets, temperaments, learning styles, personal goals, & IRL circumstances informing all of those. And yet the teaching methods & prescribed endgoals within common FGC cultures often feel so single-minded, inflexible, & unvaried in their approaches.

I am just sad & frustrated by seeing how sad & frustrated other players are because they don’t know how to frame their experiences in a non-self-destructive way, which often eases people's tendency towards hostile, toxic, & rude behaviors towards others, at least based on what I've seen, heard, & experienced. In short, people are less inclined to be nice when they're always cranky. I just wish there were better ways to effectively help people enjoy themselves more and, maybe, just maybe, they’d find it easier to be a little nicer to each other as a result. Even when the insults aren't aimed towards me, it can be tiring and disheartening to my already cynical & depressed state of mind that was already leaning towards misanthropic feelings towards humanity as a whole, online and offline. I wish kindness, non-judgment, & patience in folks' behaviors & communication was more of an expected norm rather than a shining exception, at least in the large online communities I've been to. (2/2)

[mangocoal01]

What are the unspoken expectations & rules of fighting games? (Serious. No demeaning jokes, please.) [Part 1]

Semi-rhetorical question. Moreso posing this hoping for a conversation starter or reflection prompt in various circles rather than looking for a defined answer and shared conclusion polished through debate & hostile arguments.

Just wrote out a lot of personal opinions, speculations, & unfocused ramblings that were prompted by folks arguing with their frustrations with beginner-level tourney brackets in an online server's tourney (as well as the "fighting games are bad products" article & the surrounding discourse): I think a big issue behind all of this is an underlying the fighting game genre in general is mainly that it doesn’t do a great job clearly establishing the general competitive mindsets & approaches that would help people frame their experiences playing in a less frustrated manner.

Most normal sane adults wouldn’t demand that 4-year old kids with no concept of or interest in strategy, patient waiting, or requiring the reading of multiple books in reading to achieve competency in playing chess. Fighting games don’t demand this either but some people coming into fighting games think that FGs & FGCs demand this. Do you know how common mentality of, “I refuse to play online or with other people until I know X combos/tech?

I think it’s a reasonable ask for players to know the rules before they play a game together; however, the clear & hard rules in FGs only go so far as, “Reduce your opponent’s HP to 0. Here’s a time limit.” Everything else is more specific/niche, harder to find info on, or rooted in important but hard to grasp minutia as a beginner with no context & no idea if they even like the kind of game that entails learning these bits of info. Stuff like frame data, clash levels, combo limits/damage scaling, strategies, how to predict opponents & assess risk/reward quickly, etc.

I think having these nuances is great and part of the fun of FGs but the games themselves don’t really make it clear from the get-go what kind of player effort done outside of the game’s software & explicit lessons is asking from them. Their tutorials, if they even have them, are usually relegated to combo trials, long text boxes, or button prompts to beat a predictable training dummy script.

Most of the things I learned about adapting, learning, detailed self-analysis, & mental priorities was learned outside of the game from other players. Again, that’s not a bad thing and moreso a testament to the various FGCs but I can’t help but feel like FGs are kinda being hard carried by those teaching types sometimes, which lets them get away with providing lackluster info and kinda being secretive about how their game actually works. I feel like, in an ideal world, we wouldn’t need websites like Dustloop to exist to find out the details of how a move works in a convenient fashion. I’m inclined to agree with the sentiment that it would probably help if the games themselves, without the need of player mentors or 3rd party guides, could explain in detail why they are losing & what they can do about it. And video games are in a unique position to provide instant feedback as electronic software media that analog or physical sports games can’t. But unfortunately, it seems the most info FGs care to notify you about in real-time is if you landed/got-hit-with a counterhit or punish. I imagine “Lab it out” is much more appealing advice when people know what questions to ask and know what the aforementioned “it” is without needing to go through menus to get to a replay they may not even have the knowledge base to analyze alone.

People play hard games with obfuscated & complex mechanics all of the time. Clearly not every complex or difficult game genre needs to provide such frequent & detailed feedback. But also most game genres aren’t regularly seeing immediately applicable benefits in play by knowing animation frame data & collision boxes ahead of time. (1/2)

[mangocoal01]

But when I see players at the top or amongst the most active & skilled, almost all of the ones I've seen & met online are upset & irritable on a regular basis. I rarely see them enjoying the game and they often seem to resent the game & the communities they play with but they keep playing anyway. It's not true in all cases, but I feel like in a lot of the higher skill level players I've seen, you have 3 options but you can only pick two: A. You are a happy player who is having fun playing the game. B. You are a very good player with strong skills & learning capacity. C. You are a player who is active online & socializes with folks there regularly. There are only a handful of individuals I've personally seen/know who have had all 3. Others have insisted I'm wrong about this but they only listed a handful of specific examples and didn't deny that bitterness & anger are the default sentiment and "that's just how games are in competitive communities". My issues is that bitterness & anger are the default and "that's just how games are in competitive communities" is expected and normal. That disdain, insults, name-calling, dismissive sarcasm, & rage are the norm and you either get with the program or you're seen as "weak-minded" or "oversensitive". Maybe I am. Maybe fighting games and competitive communities in general are something I should avoid for the sake of my mental health & safety. I like the games but I dislike a lot of the people. I often find myself more & more exhausted by most of the online FGC to the point of misanthropic & cynical thoughts about the future of humanity resurfacing in the back of my mind, to be honest. Maybe it'd be better if I had easier access to local FGCs but considering my history & feelings on socializing with folks in-person esp. in loud, crowded, competitive, high-energy environments, I'm not optimistic about being sold on people there either. I get how nice complaining can feel & I get the need to vent, I'm doing it right now. I understand how excessive positivity can feel cruel, isolating, & dismissive in larger community contexts sometimes. But the common acceptance of the smothering atmosphere of rage, bitterness, resentment, and vitriol I see players express towards each other, to devs, to pros, to casuals, to newbies, to long-time players...Seeing that in every online FGC space I've been to makes me really sad & exhausted. It's making me bitter & angry too, but for different reasons than them. As someone who is already naturally pessimistic, anxious & has depression on top of that, it has made me weary of communities and maybe just humans in general esp. in online spaces. I've already had rough experiences socializing in-person and out in the real world, "touching grass" and all that. In the past, I felt the problem was that I had a hard time talking with folks because I was shy & couldn't discuss my interests with people. Well, I've spoken up about my feelings in earnest IRL & online with groups that focus on specific things relevant to me, i.e. mental health, autism, depression, video games, art, writing, etc. And y'know what? I still feel lonely and struggle to relate to people. I know I like and can care about individuals, people I can talk to 1-on-1 or maybe in a group of 4 people or less. I'm not sure I have it in me to care about large-scale groups, teams, tribes, & communities anymore. (2/2)

[mangocoal01]

"Cool Idea, Bad Execution" and How Sometimes Secondhand Descriptions of Stories Can Be More Exciting Than the Actual Stories Themselves

Y'know, I was listening to a podcast called "Lore Dump" a while ago, where the host would summarize the story of a video game to his two friend/co-hosts who haven't played those games by reading out dialogue in a dramatic fashion, giving vivid descriptions of the environments/scenery to set up the atmosphere, describe the characters' feelings, answer the questions of his friends about missing context or plotholes, etc. He condenses a lot of the narrative by leaving out most sidequest storylines and selectively skips out on a lot of characterization/lore/sub-plot details. Although, I didn't agree with some certain omissions as I felt it kinda misled his co-hosts' understanding of how the scenes actually played out but I think that actually ties into a point I found interesting.

Anyway, I didn't really like the podcast too much but what I noticed is that some games and certain scenes as the main host described them, made those scenes seem a lot more emotionally resonant and effective than how they are within the context of the games they were originally from. And I've noticed this a lot in other things is that a lot of narratives can conceptually sound great in what kind of themes and questions they'd like to explore but the framing, dialogue/prose, pacing, and presentation of these concepts cause the final product to feel bland, boring, trite, confusing, emotionally ineffective, etc. In short, the ages-old problem of "cool idea, bad execution" is always at play.

The host would leave out certain character moments or describe inner thoughts/feelings running through a character's head even if that was never explicitly shown or explored within the game itself. I'm not really sure if it's embellishing and rewriting history, mixing up interpretation with fact, or improving the narrative. Though I get why he does it since the host knows, most of the time, his friends aren't actually gonna bother giving these games a chance outside of his show's summary of them.

[mangocoal01]

Creative Projects I Wish I Could Love, Part 2

I'm sure there were ways to be creative and add spice to the CMV regardless of the set limitations but I had too many bitter feelings toward the current moderator team, I wasn't fond of 95% of the community in general, I disagreed with the judges' point assignments to the combo submissions, and I was also more depressed than ever from IRL circumstances. I was NOT in a mood to be creative for the sake of working around other people's pedantic bullshit. The mod had multiple editors willing to work but he didn't bother gathering the clips and putting them into one archive, dividing up the work properly, and didn't give the editors fully free reign over the work like before either. I dunno how much that bothered anyone else but it bothered me. And for experimentation's sake and for trying to get *something* done, I did eventually try to work on the CMV as if there were no rules or mandates but even then, I couldn't bring myself to get excited or want to flex my creative muscles for the sake of this CMV; it was asked for by a moderator whose approach to the server & team projects I felt was worse to work with than the last, for a community I mostly disliked now, a game I'm still burnt out on, for a combo event premise I think is boring, and for footage submissions I also thought were mostly unexciting due to a lack of visual flair or catharsis in a lot of their endings. But deep down, there was a still a part of me that wanted to finish this, to give the people who submitted those combos their flowers & time in the sun, to satisfy the few people who asked/joked/waited on a CMV that traditionally followed every combo event, and to pay my last dues to a game & community I used to love being around. But I don't think I can do even that anymore. So I think I'm just gonna detach myself emotionally from this project and take it off the backlog permanently. Drop it for good and abandon the hope that I'll feel differently one day and finish it properly. The person who could've finished this properly and made something good out of it, the community he would've loved making it for, the type of passion and creativity he'd have wanted to exercise for this project, it's all gone now. Anything I'd make now, would be a half-assed and shallow effort that I'd be ashamed to submit and offer. Even looking at the "highlights" I saved, it's just recycled concepts & ideas I had done before but worse. I'd rather drop a project and leave it permanently unfinished than submit a creative work I know was made lazily, bitterly, and insincerely on my part. (2/2)

[mangocoal01]

Creative Projects I Wish I Could Love, Part 1

This is a rambley post with no big central takeaway. Read or ignore as you please: Y'know, I've been dabbling in photo/image editing & video editing for a few years now, at this point. I initially learned how to do the former because I wanted to make my own memes with more precision & I did the latter because I wanted to make my own AMV. I like making visual gags and in-jokes for my friends that'll make them laugh. And I liked video editing because I liked videos that made action/fight scene choreography visuals match the pace & beat of the song playing during it. I wanted to make something like that myself. And I did, with my GGST music video that had Jack-O's theme, "Perfection Can't Please Me" played over various super moves, taunt animations, combos, clashes, etc. The end product was very cool and as difficult and time-consuming as it was to meticulously match visuals to the music for many moments, the process was fun & felt rewarding to get right. I still rewatch that video sometimes and I'm proud of what I did, considering it was my first project for a hobby/skill I never tried before. There's a lot I'd probably do different now if I were to do that idea again but I liked what I made and I liked putting it together. I also did this also for the three BlazBlue Centralfiction Combo Music Videos I contributed to for a server I was in. I was using other people's combo submissions this time and the dynamic was very different since I didn't have to record my own footage and instead had to work with/work around others'. It was difficult but I still enjoyed working on them. The moderator who collected the clips, made them easy to download in one Google Drive archive, and properly assigned which editors got which clips so no one stepped on each others' toes was helpful, not to mention, he was also a friend I liked working with. Eventually, that moderator & friend left and as time went on, I stopped enjoying my time with that BlazBlue community. Moderators' approach changed when my friend passed down admin rights and left the server, regulars I liked talking to stopped showing up as often, and I kinda just got sick of the repetitive conversations & unpleasant normality of regulars' crude humor and rude treatment of each other. Anyway, I left and came back to the server back-and-forth, each time hoping that maybe things got better in-between the months I was absent. They did not. I couldn't feel comfortable, enjoy the vibe, or be excited by the company even when a few people I liked returned. Maybe because I changed too much as a person and what I wanted and liked back then isn't what I what I care for now. Regardless of hindsight, I wanted to try and be of service again and try to make a CMV out of a server combo event because all of the editors couldn't get around to putting together a music video out of the video submissions. I arrogantly thought I could finish what they couldn't and pick up the slack or something. But maybe I should've realized there was more to their lack of participation than simple IRL circumstances taking away their time. I mean, the premise of that Server Combo Event was to challenge players to perform cool combos but they weren't allowed to use super moves. And I'll be honest, that shit was boring as fuck. Not to mention, the moderator mandated that the video must be ordered from combo submissions that got the least points to the most. That's a big restriction and extremely unfun to work with as an editor. Working within that framework proved unfruitful and I didn't get far. You might as well have put all of the raw untrimmed clips back-to-back and put your Spotify playlist over it. (1/2)

[mangocoal01]

How Series Start vs. What They Evolve Into

Been reading the original Dragon Ball manga recently which means it's ripe for edits and shitposts! That aside, it's also just a pleasant read and it's interesting to see how different the series was at the start compared with its more fantastical adventures & bizarre humor/gags to what it became later around around the DBZ-era and onwards with its emphasis on battles, world/universe-ending stakes, and emotional power-ups. Context: I read some of it and the Z-era of the manga volume collections as a kid so I've never experienced the whole story of Dragon Ball in one medium; I skipped around alot since I didn't have many full collections of DVDs & manga nor did I have cable TV for a while so I couldn't catch the story in one consistent airing. So alot of my understanding of the story is scattered across the Nicktoons censored DBZ Kai airing, the manga, DVDs of the films (usually in pairs of two like Fusion Reborn & Wrath of the Dragon being in one box), Youtube clips, and cultural osmosis from peers/the internet.

Funny how that works for so many long-running series in various mediums. For example, Batman Arkham Asylum feels so much more atmospheric, grim, and almost horror-like in some parts; Batman felt strong and capable but it still felt like he was an underdog against the overwhelming physical threat of the inmates & the psychological toll of just being at this rundown asylum that most definitely made the patients even more crazy. Contrast that with City, Origins, and Knight which take it to a much more action-focused angle. And the fantasy of "Batman is so cool and badass! He beats his whole rogue's gallery in one evening! He's literally HIM!" gets upped to 110% (not necessarily a bad thing, just a different vibe).

Or another example, Star Wars (1977) feels pretty different tonally, in my opinion, compared to how the rest of the series ended up being once it started iterating upon itself from Empire Strikes Back and onwards, esp. after the prequel films. From Flash Gordon/older sci-fi serials homage to its own brand and flavor of cultural mega-giant.

[mangocoal01]

I Like Talking to Myself Out Loud

Y'know, sometimes I feel like I've been around familiar people for so long that I get too used to how I habitually act around them. From that sense of routine and over-familiarity, I lose sight of myself and my inner voice. I forget what's "me" reacting to something and what's me performing a translated visible reaction & communicable thought to people in a performed fashion that I know they'll understand & give the general gist even if it's not totally accurate.

I went on a long walk today, as I tend to do when I'm (di)stressed, sometimes even when I don't realized I'm feeling that overwhelmed. It was about 3 to 4 hours in the hot sun. Really gross, sweaty, and tiring. Kinda bland too if it weren't for me browsing the internet on my phone. And in getting engrossed in that and the physical activity without checking social media or coming across many pedestrians, I realized I was talking to myself a lot, both internally & aloud. And I realized that I actually enjoy doing that. Talking to myself verbally or out loud, is comforting to me.

Whining and self-loathing feels sad and gross in my head but when I can just vent it to myself out loud with no prying ears to judge me, the self-awareness is just more prominent and it becomes more funny & light-hearted. The complaints and lack of self-respect feels less like an acid searing through my self-esteem and more just like a self-deprecating comedic bit & ribbing in good fun that's just for me, myself, and I. Not to mention, I feel as though TV shows are much more entertaining and engaging when I can just feel, think, predict, and chatter to myself rather than need to visibly comment and react to spark conversation.

I guess this is just my long-winded and kind of self-absorbed way of saying, I liked being by myself and hearing myself talk. Thoughts & feelings didn't feel overwhelming or feel like "overthinking" for once. I was just existing and it felt pleasant. I'm not jumping for joy and suddenly not depressed or anything but for a brief period, in hindsight, I actually liked being me for a little while. Not for actions, impact, words, work, or ethics. Just unapologetically existing without being prompted felt nice.