Cognitive Dissonance: F for Fake

Over the last several years, two expressions have become popular insults when referring to players: fraud and exposed. Both show a clear lack of respect for the target, suggesting that player's skill is merely an illusion. It also showcases an increasing belief in the objectivity of skill in fighting games, an idea for which the measure is becoming increasingly ignored.

The idea of frauds or fakes in fighting games is often rooted most in a player's own grandiose opinion of themselves. If a player believes themselves good, but still loses, then clearly the rules of the game were broken or something altered those rules. A common modern excuse is to blame the tournament format for allowing “randomness.” This is where claims of “scrubby” play occur, where unexpected strategy throws a player off their game causing them to lose. Instead of admitting a lack of preparation or total understanding of the possible situations they could be put into, the losing player blames their opponent for being bad, of not playing with established methods of success, or claims they would succeed in a different format. The assertion amounts to little because the only true measure fighting games have for skill in a player-versus-player environment is wins and every player agreed to the format when they entered the event.

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Cognitive Dissonance: Wants and Needs

This head-to-head setup at Northeast Championships 16 was used for 3rd Strike and Super Turbo tournaments. The new year is always a time of false bravado and resolve: people make promises they won't keep, whether to themselves or others. It's hardly just a question of will or intent, because as the old adage goes “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” People are too easily sidetracked by that thing called life, which is quick to pull them out of their dreams and aspirations and send them back to mediocrity and drudgery in the workaday world. Many times what people want just doesn't mesh with the things they need.

Comprised of those very people, the fighting game community often finds itself in the same predicament. People have ideas or complaints they think will boost the popularity of a game or help the scene, but what players want to happen is not always grounded in the reality of what the FGC needs in order to function on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis. The argument of head-to-head play versus side-by-side play is one such debate, but while h2h may make some players happy it's not so easy to say there's a need for its adoption.

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Cognitive Dissonance: Reports of my Death...

On Dec. 16, 2014, the U.S. Persona 4 Arena Ultimax scene will die. It will join the likes of Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late and BlazBlue Chronophantasma as another game tossed aside to make room for the new game of the moment, Guilty Gear Xrd -Sign-. Or at least that is what a lot of people would have readers believe.

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Cognitive Dissonance: Subjectivity

The debate to ban Kokonoe rages online and her game is still two months away from its North American release. BlazBlue: ChronoPhantasma launches in the United States on March 25, but by then it's likely that the DLC character who is causing such a fuss will be deemed unplayable in U.S. tournaments. It has already been a long and somewhat annoying road, but make no mistake banning characters from tournament play is something that is never done lightly. Tournament organizers want to have enough evidence that they can be sure they aren't simply removing one top-tier character so another can take its place. They need to be sure that the character in question is “breaking” the game.

Sadly, this is something that can never be proven. This is because, as a decentralized body of small scenes and tournament groups, there is no objective set of rules that determines when a character has indeed overstepped the bounds of simply being high tier into broken territory; every decision people make is subjective. Even when Damien “Damdai” Dailidenas convinced the HD Remix community that Akuma needed to be banned, some people still argued against it. Looking back on that decision now, it seems that banning HDR Akuma was the right decision for the game's lifespan, but that's about as close as anyone can get to saying it was objectively the right choice.

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Cognitive Dissonance: An Open Letter to the Street Fighter IV Generation

To the members of today's fighting game community,

We screwed up. We were all given the ball by the forefathers of this community, and instead of running with it we dropped it, kicked it into a gutter and left it there. And there it sat until people like Alex Valle, Mike Watson, Henry Cen and others begrudgingly came back, picked up our disheveled community and took control of it again. To them you owe everything; to us, a swift kick in the ass has been due for too many years.

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Cognitive Dissonance: The Little Engine That...

Photo courtesy of AvoidingThePuddle.comWhen I locked the doors at 1106 East Broadway in Columbia, Missouri, on May 13, 2007, Gunther's Games ceased to exist. It was simply another casualty in what had become a long line of arcade closures in much of Missouri, but it was home to the several fighting game players of that college town. I had learned to play Guilty Gear there, and improved at Super Street Fighter II Turbo. We had a small, dedicated community, but it was not enough to make up for the lack of customers that had once filled the shotgun-style arcade. The only reassurance left after the demise of Gunther's was that there was nothing left for us to lose anymore.

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Cognitive Dissonance: A Lack of Perspective

The fighting game scene has changed tremendously since the release of Street Fighter 4 in 2008. Where once gamers were struggling to fill 32-man brackets, now there is hardly enough room for all the entrants at many venues. Players are regularly able to not only pay for their tournament expenses by winning, but also pay some bills or make a profit. And as the flood of games has increased, niche scenes have been able to reemerge and grab some of the spotlight. However, a disconnect is growing between the mindset before the fighting game revival and after. Veteran players, unable to remember the old days, and new players who only know a post-Street Fighter 4 era are placing expectations on a gaming community that never before had them. In doing so, they are creating an environment that is becoming hostile for smaller games in the very scene they wish to promote and expand.

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Cognitive Dissonance: Fighting Against the Tide

I don't like the modern fighting game community.

I grew up in arcades, where people waited to play and you never knew if the older guys behind you might take a swing if you actually beat them. People yelled, punched cabinets and generally let their emotions run wild as they took a break from class, skipped school or even had the day off from work. It sounds intense, and it was, but it was also what motivated me to become a better player. Beating the older guys was an idea so euphoric it was worth being a little scared every time. I learned to talk shit, hold losses and even how to socialize with fellow players in the arcades of St. Louis, Missouri. And that was before I knew that fighting games had organized tournaments.

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