Being a T-Shaped Fighting Game Player
Lessons from the Valve Employee Handbook
I finally found the motivation to put out a video (go check it out!), and I still can’t decide if it makes sense, if anybody will agree with it, or if my analogy between the handbook idea and my thesis holds up to any amount of scrutiny.
Random Caveats
I’m not advocating trying to simultaneously learn multiple games. Any fighting game requires a good amount of dedication/focus to make any headway. I’m just saying over the course of years and years, I think it’s helpful to play more than one game. As an example, I’ve focused on:
Street Fighter IV: 2009-2011
Marvel vs. Capcom 3: 2011-2016
Guilty Gear Xrd: 2014-2019
Dragonball FighterZ: 2018-2023
Guilty Gear Accent Core Plus R: 2020-2021
Vampire Savior: 2022-Present
There is some overlap, and I never truly stopped playing most of these games (I will never turn down a chance to get some MvC3 matches in), but at most, I think I focused on two games at the same time, and that was usually after I’d spent enough time on the earlier game that I had the mental bandwidth to try something new. For example, when I started playing Xrd in 2014, I’d already been grinding MvC3 for ~3 years at that point, so I could stay sharp at MvC3 without it being my full-time job.
Another caveat is I know there are people who are exceptions to this—folks who picked up their first fighting game, played the hell out of it, and managed to get top 8 in a major having only really played that one game. I still those people are the exception rather than the rule.
Why is Being T-Shaped Helpful?
I don’t focus too much on the “why” in the video, aside from surface-level stuff like how different fighting games emphasize and teach different skills.
I do think one important component is learning how to learn. When you pick up your first fighting game, you have no idea what to look for. What makes a move good? What is frame data? What are some standard counterplay options for divekick moves? You’re not going to have easy answers to these questions (because you’re new!), so you have to (slowly) figure things out on your own as you stumble through the game. When you pick up your next game, you’ve already pre-solved a bunch of these problems. You’ll see a divekick and already have two or three options in your head to deal with it. You’ll go through the fighting game learning process much more quickly now that you have a foundation.
A Final Random Aside
I felt like I needed footage of me playing Blanka in Street Fighter IV for this video, and I had exactly one source of footage: the very first YouTube video I ever uploaded. It’s on my old channel, and I uploaded it back in 2010 (I think I am officially a senior citizen now).
I was at a friend’s apartment, and we were taking turns playing online matches against random people online. We ran into Sako, and somehow I managed to get a win, after which he promptly booted us from his lobby. I thought it was funny, so I uploaded it to YouTube with the respectful title of “Sako? More like Sucko! America Redeemed.” Shockingly, everybody thought I was a jerk (it was a joke title, I swear!) Anyway, if you’d like to watch the match in its entirety, here you go: