"The scrolling shooter wasn't murdered. It was squeezed out of a market by fighting games' greater revenue potential. Why spend your money only to explode on a shooter's second stage when a single coin can carry you for hours so long as you keep winning fights? After all, you're the only Guile in your area who's worked out the double stun off jabs. It's not like anyone's going to know how to air throw you while standing..." - Some Clever Cat, 8/8/21
The "King of the Hill" approach fighting games used to draw big money wasn't the sole reason they dominated the arcades. The arcade is a place of spectacle. If a machine blows feathers around with every turkey shot or flashes bright colourful lights with every beat of a 280bpm Speedcore dance track or provides gigantic buttons that make a satisfying clack with every tap it's trying to catch your attention. High quality, high stakes, risky play also attracts crowds. A single player stepping up to a challenge is exciting but it can become a stale story. Real people forming real rivalries over their play, only for newcomers to completely overturn the local balance of power with a single coin? That's a live soap opera performed for you live every time you walk into the venue.
With a single coin a player could become a character in a local scene's story. With enough skill,a main character. With a bit less and they're the pitiable fodder for a powerful villain. If they're a large enough jerk, they can be the bully a local hero thwarts on their way to the top. Even hanging around the machines in between sets is a role: that of the excited audience. The astonished commentator. Columns on fighting games can easily tell the tale of players as becoming Ryu or Son Goku but those who become the Krillins or Piccolos are as much a part of the tale.
The arcade was not solely the domain of fighting games; players can be as much or as little in the story as they desire. In between intense bouts of action a coin can always go into a shooter. A brawler. A weird challenge game like Bishi Bashi or Numan Athletics. Why not build up some cardio in a set of Dance Dance Revolution? Nor does a coin even need to be spent. If other players are also waiting for shots at a cab, why not talk to them? By standing near a machine, eyeing it off you've already established common ground to start speaking from.
Fighting games were created for and developed in powerfully social spaces. Even as regions are approaching decades away from their arcade birthplace, the broader fandom is still known as the FGC. The Fighting Game Community. Do we talk about the fans of Super Mario Bros. or Sonic The Hedgehog or even juggernauts like Counterstrike: Global Offensive or DotA 2 the same way? Those are fandoms first and communities second.
All this carries over in a post-arcade setting as well. Local offline meetups for fighting games have long outlasted the turn of the century LAN Party. Regional or National major open tournaments are practically conventions for fighting games. Over half the entrants will leave the tournament with zero competition wins so they need reasons to attend anyway. Creating art, contributing to broadcasts, meeting new players and learning new matchups are all incentives to attend. The tournament structure and big closing matches provide easy starting topics for conversation over more private meals shared together. I'm exhausted at the end of every month's Cheese League but after a 10pm round of Pepper Lunch with fellow organisers and the odd remaining attendee I know I can never stop this.
And then there's the worst part of modern fighting games. It's not the programming that all too often can't handle online latency properly. It's the entire matchmaking and lobby structure. It saps my will to ever play one of these games again.
I need to take a step back here. Many online computer games are built around degrees of transience to your time with other players. Gigantic PRESS X TO PLAY messages begin automated matchmaking. Currently popular games like Fall Guys, Fortnite and even most modern first person shooters drop a player into a pile of assorted others, algorithmically determined to have a similar skill level. Varying quantities of in-game emotes allow a quick greeting, a thankful message to the bus driver and maybe a laugh at a mishap or a dance to taunt a defeated opponent. For people who have experienced multiplayer computer games this way all their life, it's fine I suppose. I even enjoy slapping a few surprised Feylyne emoji when I play Monster Hunter myself.
Now think about this sort of experience when applied to a fighting game. Now reduce the player base a few thousand-fold. You are placed in a room of eight other players. The keyboard is too far away to reach with your arcade stick in the way. Console microphone support is still terrible to the point that using your voice is an identifiable category of Guy. Maybe you can kick a soccer ball around. After waiting for the previous match you couldn't spectate while your joining the room to end, you finally play a match.
You lose the match. Back of the line.
Like I mentioned before, at a local meetup or an arcade you can do other things in this time. You can talk to people, play a different game or even grab some food. If you do these things in an online fighting game lobby, you might miss your chance to accept your next match. There's nobody to talk to meaningfully in the default systems. Sure you can use third party communication tools but that won't make you new friends through the process of playing in the lobby. All you have is a barebones menu system, a few emotes to play, a match to watch and your own thoughts to stew in.
Those thoughts are thinking about the loss that put you here. If it's only three players in the lobby you'll be stewing for three minutes. If it's eight, that's closer to twenty. Twenty minutes of processing the stages of grief as you lost. You lose your next match? That's another twenty, restarting the process all over. It's frustrating. It's tiring. It's miserable.
It's all the worst emotional aspects of fighting games with none of the positives.
I haven't written this to demand structural change to fighting game lobbies. There's certainly steps that can be taken to have the things be faster, more social or more uplifting. That doesn't resolve any of the current games with current forms of lobbies. Nor does it change my feelings about them.
I've been playing, competing and talking about fighting games for a long, long time. Yet I've felt a distance from a lot of the current scene for a few years. It's partly me aging, my priorities shifting. It's also because I just can't do the random matchmaking and large lobbies. The time:learning ratio is just not worthwhile when I have so much else going on in my life. To me, the online lobby isn't about community.
It's about atomisation.
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