Think, Don’t Mash! Part 3: An Elephant in the Room: Picking the Right Buttons
Starting with a simple base strategy and slowly adding to it over time is all well and good, but I have to admit we skipped a (big!) step or two. You may be smartly wondering, “That approach makes sense and everything, but how the hell do you know what strategy to start with in the first place?”
The Dunning-Kruger effect sort of vaguely applies here, and I just generally like to talk about the Dunning-Kruger effect, and this is my blog, so you can’t stop me. Scholarly journal Wikipedia defines the Dunning-Kruger effect as,
“…a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority comes from the metacognitive inability of low-ability people to recognize their lack of ability.” Wikipedia Britannica
I think it’s best to put things in terms understandable by actual humans, so my personal definition is:
"If you’re bad at a thing, you don’t know you’re bad at the thing, and you think you’re actually pretty great at the thing. The skills you need to be good at something are the same skills you need to properly judge whether you’re any good at it." My dumb self
The Dunning-Kruger effect doesn’t exactly align with what I’m trying to get at, but it’s getting to the same idea. If you don’t know how to play Street Fighter, then you don’t know what fundamentals (your core strategy) should be. You don’t know what moves to pick because you don’t have the skill yet to evaluate their usefulness. Even if you ask somebody else for advice, that same lack of Street Fighter knowledge means you have no way to know whether they have any idea what they’re talking about. How can you evaluate the advice of an expert until you yourself understand the topic at hand? It’s a Catch-22.
Obviously, there are ways around this paradox because people do manage to get good at things all the time. Luckily, in fighting games, it’s extremely easy to know how you’re doing. If you lose, your plan didn’t work. If you win, it did. It’s hard to pretend you’re employing a genius invincible strategy when somebody perfects you.
Whether you’re figuring things out on your own or getting information from others, you need to look for evidence of efficacy. Don’t trust somebody’s advice unless they can show that it works. I don’t want anyone to blindly trust that my videos are giving good information. This is why I put in match footage of me putting my ideas to the test against actual human opponents throughout the entire video series. Showing is better than telling.
I do believe there is a clear general framework for working out fundamental strategy in Street Fighter V. This same framework applies to other fighting games as well. In part three of this series, we take a closer look at figuring out what a basic game plan should look like and why.