« Samādhi Street Fighter »

Super Street Fighter IV drops in less than twenty-four hours. Some of you lucky readers may already have the game. As you count down the hours to the retail release, what's your plan? How do you envision the hours after you get home and break that plastic seal? If you're anything like most tournament players, the first thing you're going to do is play mad scientist and hit the lab. Once you pick that new character, or learn your old character's new tricks, you're going to spend the rest of that time in Training Mode committing all that goodness to muscle memory. Good plan, but is that all there is to this game?

How many times has this happened to you : you're playing a tight match, you're tense, and you go to execute a combo or block string you've done a million times in casuals. Only now, you fumble the link. You feel frustrated. That frustration leads to more tension. You can feel things start to snowball out of control. You try to hit the same combo and again fail to land it correctly. It starts bleeding over, and now you can't execute other combos. Even your Bread and Butter goes dead. Sound familiar?

How about this? You're in a close match, but the final round isn't going as you'd hoped. You played with meticulous execution and patience, but as your opponent's life lead grows, and you start to feel victory slipping out of your grasp, your hands grow a spastic, clumsy life of their own. You're mashing random things, you're throwing out silly wake-up offense. What would have been a challenging, but not impossible, comeback becomes an embarrassing choke as you lose composure. You played five or more rounds of great Street Fighter, only to piss it away in a panic.

Hits a little close to home, doesn't it?

Muscle memory is useful, make no mistake. The premise is that in those pressure moments, you need to be able to take your mind out of the equation and allow your hands to guide the vessel. This sort of approach can help defend against pitfalls like the cascading execution mis-fires from our example above. It keeps your brain from road blocking your execution. 

But what about the second example? What about when your muscles decide to exit stage left?

Sometimes, no matter how many hours you spend in Training Mode locking down that BnB, engraving that two (or one) frame link into the muscles of your hand, repeating the same complicated trick over and over so that you could do it blindfolded... when it gets thick, your muscles betray you. Your left hand is what we jokingly refer to as "Paula Deen" : yanking the stick in circles so fast you may as well be trying to churn butter. Your right hand is pounding buttons in absolutely no order. 

Believe me, I've been there as much or more than most everyone. It's a habitual result that I've put on my short list of pressing concerns I want to improve upon in Super. So far, the results have been somewhat surprising. How have I made my progress? I've taken some of the tenets of Zazen Buddhism and applied them to my game. I try my hardest to play in a state of samādhi every match.

Samādhi, in short, is the word buddhists use to refer to a state of constant, ready attention. When you meditate, you slip into a state of samādhi, letting go of your thoughts and concerns and allowing yourself to manifest fully in that moment. The purpose of samādhi, of meditation, is to achieve prajñā -wisdom. In Zen, the "three trainings" - sīla (moral conduct), samādhi, and prajñā - are all interwoven, relying on one another. 

We won't spend so much time worrying about "moral conduct". What constitutes "moral conduct" for one man may not for another, and it isn't our place to try and define what, exactly, it means to live morally for anyone other than ourselves. In short, if you can go to tournament or to a session at a friend's house and walk away feeling like you were a bud, like you helped the scene and your brothers in arms, or that you simply just weren't a dick? That's probably good enough. As an aside, playing with sīla can have a tangible effect on your Street Fighter "career"; not being a jerk gets you invited to more sessions and helps you make more friends in the community, i.e. training partners.

It's the second of the three trainings which is most interesting here. I had long settled on the notion that there had to be a way to apply the teachings of Zen into my Street Fighter play. With samādhi, I saw a route.

You can take the same physical steps to play in a state of samādhi that you would to achieve the same mindset while meditating. Sit up straight and in a comfortable position. Rest the stick in your lap or on a stool/chair in front of you so that your forearms rest naturally and your hands can work all elements ably and without impediment or discomfort. Breathe in through your nose, hold your breath, and slowly exhale. Most importantly, clear your mind of all thoughts other than what presents itself in the moment before you.

When you start to feel things slipping away from you, take a moment to focus on your breathing in a match. Don't think about the mechanical act of drawing and processing oxygen, feel it. Feel the physical sensation of air moving up your nostrils and past your lips. You'd be amazed at how quickly things can snap back into focus. Take time to internalize, analyze, and then accept the moment.

When we play in the current moment, miraculous things are possible. Think about all the times you kept your composure and engineered a massive clutch comeback, even if it was just on XBox Live with nobody else around to see. You can play in that state at all times. That's the point - instead of sacrificing the result to control, take control to engineer the result. Playing in the moment, in a state of watchful concentration, frees you from those episodes where you lose your center and your muscle memory means nothing. You keep your composure and retain control.

There are other things you can do to influence your focus and help yourself slip into and maintain samādhi with less difficulty. Get plenty of rest before a big tournament or any "crack session" that you feel is important. Make sure you get some protein the days you're playing - the closer to start time, the better. Packing some protein bars or chugging some chocolate milk is a great idea; protein is an excellent source of energy and increases your brain's ability to concentrate. Avoid empty carbohydrates, like most sugary snacks and soda/juice drinks. Caffeine in small amounts is fine, and it may even steady your focus, but too much can have the opposite effect. As a problem that is ubiquitous to the Street Fighter scene, too much drinking the night before a tournament can lead to dehydration, which in turn decreases your ability to get into and stay in the moment, so if you intend on chugging some beers in the evening before, chug some Gatorade in there somewhere. And finally, if the only exercise your body sees is your hands and wrists working the stick, then maybe think about going for a jog the morning of a tournament? Exercise works wonders for your mental state.

When you can enter a focused state of mindful contemplation of the present - the real present, the moment you're playing in - then you can make your peace with your emotional state and how it transfixes itself onto your game. How many times have you lost your cool playing? How many times have you taken the time to analyze why that is? Most of the time, the answer is a little more complicated than, "Losing pisses me off." Maybe you're upset when you play someone that makes you look foolish because they're exploiting your weaknesses and you're frustrated with your inability to counter their gameplan. Instead of assessing your situation and moving forward in that moment, you're giving in to frustration and sticking the game on autopilot, focusing more on being upset than what's going on in the here and now. Try, instead, to take a brief moment between rounds to breathe, try to regain that focus, and say to yourself, "This person is throwing me a lot. I need to tech more throws." Breathe a little more, and then before the round begins again, simply say, to yourself, "I am losing." Don't make excuses and don't qualify the statement. Don't say, "I am losing because I suck at teching." Part of being in the moment is having unbiased awareness of the truth that presents itself before us. When that occurs, we can accept it and move forward, instead of being obsessed and distracted.

In the end, the ultimate goal of Zen is to cultivate mindfulness in order to achieve true wisdom, true enlightenment. Not unlike what we're striving for when we push those six buttons. The best route for both is the same : remain calm, remain focused, remain mindful. Zen teaches us to begin to let go and simply live. Every moment is neutral, and we miss so much of life trying our hardest to engineer outcomes, or worrying about how to improve what's happening in our present lives, or a million other things that are truly beyond our control.

Much is made in the community of playing the game in a state of "yomi", the idea that you attempt to do the things that counter-act what you expect your opponent to do. At first glance, it may seem like the tenets of samādhi stand in stark contrast to yomi, but in actuality, they gracefully meld. Yomi isn't about worrying about the future. It's about engineering the present to affect the future. Think about those times when you felt so certain that your opponent was about to do something, only to get surprised and pay the price. You were playing in the future, not in the moment before you. If you had had a better handle of the current moment, instead of focusing on how you intended to punish the action you were so certain was coming, you may not have met that end. With samādhi, we can start to employ and see results from yomi - which bears more than a passing resemblance to prajñā.

There comes a time when you have to simply accept and live. And the same goes for Street Fighter. It's one thing to set goals and strive for success, but the narrow-minded focus on winning above all else can be the biggest obstacle to achieving those goals. You're going to lose. There's no way around it. Either you lose rounds, or a match, or two matches. You may lose 30 casual matches. It's going to happen. So what do you gain from working so hard to stop it from coming? Focus instead on this hadoken, this poke, this zoning. That's what's happening now. The highest level of play may very well be coming to the point where it no longer matters whether you win or lose. All that matters is playing. Of course you play the game to win. Hell, the guy that designed HD Remix wrote a book called "Playing to Win". However, the struggle to stop what is sometimes, sadly, just going to happen can keep us from learning from our experiences, from accepting what just happened. We hop up hot-headed, muttering about cow feces, and we miss the valuable lesson that just sat, literally, in our lap. That, in turn, increases the chances of it happening again later.

Playing in a state of samādhi, of mindful awareness, is different than the over-thinking than can sometimes sabotage us. Samādhi is why we cultivate muscle memory to begin with; muscle memory is a tool that allows us to play at that level of focus. Sometimes, though, you can go too far in the other direction, playing purely on instinct, ignoring conditions as they develop. You see this sort of behavior most often in great players that never seem to break into the upper echelon of tournament winners because they always seem to have a hard time adapting to what's happening in front of them. They do the same combos, the same set-ups, the same patterns that work 95% of the time. In the excess 5%, though, they run into trouble. They aren't aware.

This sort of approach is modular. You needn't throw yourself into tie dye and yogi chanting to simply make an effort to pay more attention. Samādhi isn't a mystical code to unlock. It's something you can incorporate into your game. Zen and Street Fighter are a natural mix. Even if you just take the time to breathe a little more during your match-ups, I think you'll be surprised to see the results you can achieve when you play with higher focus.