Learning pt. 1

“When you’re a teacher, you have a front row seat to learning, which is the most beautiful thing to watch”

- Brennan Lee Mulligan

A couple of years ago I really wanted to learn how to play guilty gear strive. It was the new and shiny fighting game from an established franchise now opening up to the rest of the gaming community by being less complex than it’s previous entries and less daunting than other fighting games. I played about 50 hours of it. Most of my time was spent in the online ranked mode. Every game I have learned I taught myself by SIMPLY PLAYING THE GAME. But in Strive I could simply not figure out what was going on. In the beginning I found the most success in spamming slash and specials, which can very easily overwhelm newbies.

However, when I progressed into the medium ranks, people would just block and crush my every attempt at starting a combo. Fair enough. I had very little knowledge and only a little experience, so I turned to the training mode where I played through the training missions over and over. I also taught myself a few combos in the training mode and read up on some guides on my character (Giovanna).

After listening to Joe Esposito’s “You’re the Best Around” and a short training montage, I was ready. Finally, with both experience and knowledge on my side, I was ready to face the Chipp mains and unemployed Zato-1 players.

I don’t remember the matches I played at that time, but I remember having VERY little fun. I felt awful when playing Strive. I should have gotten decent, I had done my reading! And I was practicing against real players, putting my knowledge to the test! But alas, without any sense of progression and learning, I gave up. Maybe fighting games aren’t for me. I should stick to RTS games and Smash Bros. And thus that came to be.

“Video games provide external, continuous, 100% consequences for interacting with it and the homework does nothing. When a problem is solved on a piece of paper, nothing happens”

A few days ago I got the urge to play fighting games again. I’ve been playing a lot of Deadlock, which i’ve been doing quite well in and which has that same technical maneuvering and ability based pvp feel that I like about fighting games. Unfortunately, the matches are SO LONG. 30-50 minutes is a huge time investment, and sometimes I just want to play a quick goopy instinct based game that’ll satisfy my brain. I’ve been shit-talking Strive ever since I stopped playing it, as I had such a bad experience. HOWEVER. It looks SO GOOD. The artstyle and animation in that game is cracked. I am more excited for “Two Times Knockout”, but that game isn’t out yet :(. I mustered all my courage and pushed down every part of me that didn’t believe I could have fun in Strive and I clicked to download. (after deleting monster hunter world so that i had space on my pc).

But I had to do something DIFFERENT this time. How, HOW can I learn this game?? The reason why I stopped last time was that I didn’t have fun. So. How? Do you have fun. In a game that you’re bad at? Think about it. How do you have fun doing something you’re bad at?

I HAVE to have fun to get good. People say “Just push through! Don’t give up, even when it sucks and you feel like shit!” Bullshit. BULLSHIT i say. Maybe that’s how they work. Maybe that’s how YOU work. That is not how I work.

“The consequences are delayed and therein lies the trouble. So the corollary of this is, if you want to see an adhd person fail, you put them in any environment where there are no consequences. The work will not get done, because the person cannot self motivate.”

I am a decent guitar player. Because I had fun, when I was bad! I’m pretty good at roleplaying and improv, because those things are hilarious and goofy, especially when you suck at it.

I played golf for a little bit, but that was VERY unfun to be bad at. So I stopped. I tried to learn how to play guitar with a slide once, but suddenly my otherwise decent playing became extremely terrible and sour unless I held it in exactly the right spot. Not fun, so I stopped. I have found that it IS possible to find joy in something you’re bad at. However, there are only two fun things about it:

1. Progression

Seeing yourself change. The overhead you fell for a minute ago doesn’t catch you off guard anymore. The D-chord is ingrained in your fingers, you don’t even think about it, and you remember. You remember how it used to hurt, you’d feel the string pressing into your skin even after you’ve let go. When doing 40 pushups in the span of an hour used to leave you exhausted. Now you can do 100 in 20 minutes. You’ve changed. You CAN change. You can do it. That feels amazing.

2. Interaction

We’re like kids stacking blocks. Building towers and seeing them tumble. Pressing a piano key and hearing a clear tone, or smashing your hands down to make a cacophony. Placing down hundreds of TNT in creative minecraft and blowing up a village. This causes learning, but the fun part isn’t necessarily the learning itself. Sometimes it’s seeing the effect of our actions. My cousins daughter once stared directly at her mom as she touched the stove. It was fun seeing her mom’s reaction, but learning that stoves can be hot wasn’t fun at all.

It turns out, when you play ranked Strive as a newbie, you’re getting neither of these benefits. You’re not learning anything, since you have no clue what’s going on. There’s way too many things happening at once, so even if you do SOMETHING right, you won’t know what it was. So you can’t learn from it. An inexperienced player won’t be able to see the effect of what they’re doing. They will spam attack buttons, which will either;

A: Deal damage

B: Not deal damage

There is no direct correlation between the spamming and the desired effect, so there is no fun to be had, even when you deal damage. “Why did it work last time, but not this time?” your dopamine production manager asks.

So how. Can you get. Both sources of fun? Well. First of all, you need to be able to TELL what’s happening. And by watching tutorials and guides you can do that. To a certain extent. However, it won’t get you all the way there. Not even halfway. In a game like this there is WAY too much stuff going on, at quite ridiculous speeds. So. You either need to:

A: Reduce the speed at which the stuff is the happening (This is how you learn to play an instrument!! You play the riff really really slow until you’ve got it).

or

B: Reduce the amount of stuff that is the happening

A is a good method when you’re learning a combo. You’re learning the order of operations slowly, and memorizing. I needed to learn to play in neutral before that (where you can’t reduce the speed of what’s happening) so I could actually START a combo. Therefore I went with option B. I got my brother to play with me (who is an avid fighting game player). And I applied method B. I reduced the amount of things that could happen and would happen.

Starting by limiting our attacks to only the punch button.

Holy hell, it took a long time to kill each other with only punch, and it was extremely ineffective compared to other buttons like slash. But it was…. Fun? I had fun. I could tell what was happening. I could tell why his hits connected. Because I missed my punch and he blocked. And I was learning, how to block a normal punch. I was learning why you shouldn’t just use punch lol. I wasn’t winning, but that didn’t matter. Because I could tell why I was losing. So it seemed fair. It also very quickly got very repetitive. Apparently there is a reason why the game doesn’t work this way. So we moved on to the other buttons, one by one.

The one thing that became really really apparent was that I stopped spamming. I have spammed buttons in most games I have played, but now I was experiencing the consequences of doing so very, very quickly. It was also extremely helpful that I didn’t get combo’d for 45 seconds every time I made a mistake. When you don’t have access to your entire arsenal, the combos don’t last as long and don’t deal as much damage. Therefore, I was given the opportunity to put what I learned into use right then and there.

I’m still practicing, we’ll see how far I get!

“And this is not a choice, and this is not willful, and this is not a child who just could if they wished wake up tomorrow and smell the coffee and get busy and do the work. They cannot. This is an internal, neurogenetic executive failure. You can’t self motivate like other people. So it doesn’t matter what your goals are, you won’t get there”

- Dr Russell Barkley