I need much better things to do with my time.
My attempts to justify, or in some cases, dispel all those nostalgic feelings I've had.
Tuesday 29 November 2011
Monday 28 November 2011
The problems with online gaming (notably in fighting games)
History
When I was but a mere child, I tended to play fighting games with my friends from school and my neighbours, however, there were somre problems. We were all into different types of games, I played a lot of Tekken and Soul Blade, one of my neighbours preferred some strange knockoff of Streets of Rage, people at school preferred Mortal Kombat (which scared me because of the first two minutes of the film and Fatalities in general). My only exposure to Street Fighter was playing it once at my neighbour's Khitan and that "the guy with the claw was cheap". Also I was really good at and enjoyed Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo, but in this case, I could only really play against the CPU since I could beat anyone else.
When I entered secondary school (or High School), things quickly picked up as I found a bunch of gamers to play with, among them was a group of really good Super Smash Brothers Melee players, and while I disagreed with their game mode (almost always Final Destination) and I kept getting thrown out because it was technically a room I shouldn't have even been in, I had quite a lot of fun with it and we all somehow fed off each other and improved dramatically. On the other side of the coin was a more casual playing of Tekken 4 and then 5, and after the guy whose PS2 and game it was suggested I just sit there for an hour to get less bad at the game, I quickly learned some basic Asuka combos and became quite good, then arguments were had which quickly becmae racial in nature and resulted in PS2s being switched off in a way that could be called 'angry', eventually we just played Pro Evolution 5 or something and I had fun just watching and having a laugh.
While this was going on, I was starting to play fighting games with a bunch of really good players in an IRC community, I only really joined for Super Puzzle Fighter, but I was quickly introduced to King of Fighters, Garou, Marvel vs Capcom, the first of which we played on something called Poporu. Poporu was a strange Korean client that pretty much tried to mimick an arcade down to the level of inserting coins and having winner stays on and a bunch of avatars, as well as a chat lobby, so you could talk while playing and so on. While I didn't realize it at the time, this was sort of the closest you could get to the arcade experience without actually being there (ignoring lag and lack of voice chat).
Eventually Poporu shut down, the dark age of Kalierra started and then eventually GGPO and 2DF came out and online fighting games were fun again, then the modern console stuff came out with its 'matchmaking' and 'lobbies' and 'ladders' and that's why I decided to write this. However, I suppose what I'm saying with this is that I realised that playing games with people who know the game and with a small crowd is fun and I subconsciously worked this out when I was 15, it doesn't have to be fighting games, I spent a lot of time at university just playing single-player games, or watching people play single-player games and just talking about whatever crossed our mind, whether it was the badness of the game, how fun it was, or anything 'fun' really.
Things that are important and suffer
Hype
Seeing cool shit going down in fighting games is really fun, but it sort of multiplies exponentially with the presence of commentators, other people, the right atmosphere and so on. It's sort of like a really, really positive version of the Two Minutes Hate from 1984. So you get stuff like streams where you're able to get really excited because of those factors, even if it is just listening to Jaha using the word "Swag" to describe literally everything going on and talking with a bunch of stream monsters in the chat.
When you go to an actual tournament, it's even better, even something as simple as pool play or even casuals can draw a crowd of at least 10 people. At the last tournament I went to, a simple winner stays on, pure casual series of matches taking place before registration even began had upwards of 30 people standing and sitting around, chatting, comparing sticks, getting excited over good plays and just generally feeding off the positive energy in the room, it's hard to explain, but the feeling is there. Even an expo I went to in October, where we had no idea there would be old fighting games, was able to get a rotating group of 10 people watching Super Street Fighter 4, not Arcade Edition, but Super. And once again, people were getting excited, comparing stuff.
Now, compare this to playing something online using your 360 or PS3, you're generally going to be by yourself, if you had a friend around, you'd be playing your friend and not some random faceless strange online. Any and all hype would just drain from the room since it's just you versus someone who could quite simply be a hyper intelligent computer, you're not able to feed off excitement or know there's an audience watching because there isn't any. I mean, once you're done, you could upload the replay online, but in all honesty, unless you're playing someone extremely famous or something extremely messed up happens no one is going to watch it, you're not able to draw excitement from the game through just the experience of playing it, which means it just turns into winning. The experience becomes completely binary, where you're either like "Cool I beat a faceless person online :|" or "Oh great I lost to a faceless person online :|" Starcraft 2 also suffers from the same problem, compare tournament hype to playing a ladder match, where when looking at the scoreboard you can't even tell if you won without seeing if your points have changed, and to make it worse, there's a much bigger time investment for what is simply Win/Lose.
Learning
Most people do things to get better, fighting games aren't an exception, unless you're playing at such a low level or are completely and utterly uninvested in the game. While there is training mode and so on for practising the technical side of play (Execution, perfecting combos etc) you're not going to learn much about actual fundamentals and what to do in the right time and matchup information. So you play against better people, you'll learn what beats what, how to improve, the moves you should be using, different playstyles, and most importantly of all, you're able to actually talk to the person you're playing, get their opinions, and hopefully you go away having learned something, and maybe even directly improved as a player.
On the other hand, when you're playing ranked online, you'll just face someone, and they'll either be terrible and die, completely crush you, or you might, somehow, have a close and interesting match (but you'll still feel not as excited because of point 1), but you can't talk to them about it, because voice chat is bad and you both need it on and so on, you have to send them a message using the terrible service you're given, and even then you need to remember his gamertag and get down to it quickly and want to play more games with them and it's just a terrible, annoying mess, especially when compared to "talk to guy 2 feet away from you while still playing the game" And then to make matters even worse, unless you're quick on the ball, you'll never see this guy again.
Also, I know you're meant to play fighting games to win, this isn't some sort of scrub thing. But when you're playing online, winning is all you have (especially when you keep in mind you're not even able to get hype due to factor 1), whenever you lose it directly impacts your ranking, so you want to win every game, even the most casual ones. You can't lose 20 times in a row and at least learn something, because good luck playing the same person that many times in a row short of player matches, and even then you can't really talk to them.
The social paradox
The internet is a great place, it allows you to communicate with anyone else with just a few clicks of your mouse (hypothetically) and find anyone with similar interests with just a simple search on Google with the word 'forums' attached as well. You'd think that playing games would be intense, fun and extremely social, since after all, you could play with anyone in the world. However, what ends up happening is you end up treating it just as a minor hobby, you just log on, play a games or so, and then log off for days, if not weeks. There is no investment to make you carry on playing outside of the cost of buying the game.
Compare this once again, to a tournament ,you know that literally every single person at the venue cares about games, has an opinion one way or another, or is a friend or companion of someone who does. You can talk to anyone about video games, you can get to know people, you can constantly mingle. They've spent money getting to this place, entering, and while they do want to win, they also want to have as good of a time as possible.
What this essentially boils down to is that there is the paradox of when there's an increasing ease of finding people with similar interests, albeit with the penalty of anonymity, it's harder to actually form lasting relationships with them, leading you to feel even lonelier when you're literally surrounded by people.
How would I fix this?
When dealing with something as fundamentally flawed as online gaming for fighting games, I think that the best way to deal with it would be to try and have it replicate the arcade experience as much as possible, so I'd put in the following features:
1) Remove ranked 1v1 online play almost entirely, replace them with a series of "ranked lobbies" that contain 3-8 players using winner stays on format, with matchmaking creating the lobbies at first, have some level of unanimous voting put in so a higher level player can be 'promoted' if they win in excess of X matches, with the number of votes needed decreasing with the number of additional games they win. Have lower level players be able to demote themselves if they experience a massive losing streak. Think Starcraft 2 Divisions but with more leagues at the higher ends
2) Make voicechat always on, or at the very least, much easier to use, better hardware would probably be required than the joke of a headset you get. PC games would have the advantage of you being able to use text during downtime as well. Both ways would encourage the same sort of mingling that you experience in arcades, though to a much lesser degree, also obviously allow ignoring if someone abuses it, as well as cool titles/avatars if someone is helpful and kind.
3) Daily or weekly tournaments for each 8 or so brackets of ranked lobbies, winners get automatic promotion and a nice avatar or icon or something, allow observing, stagger the games so they can easily be watched and so on.
I know these would be really open to abuse, but I think it would be infinitely more fun than what is currently in place, and I'd love to hear what ideas you have!
When I was but a mere child, I tended to play fighting games with my friends from school and my neighbours, however, there were somre problems. We were all into different types of games, I played a lot of Tekken and Soul Blade, one of my neighbours preferred some strange knockoff of Streets of Rage, people at school preferred Mortal Kombat (which scared me because of the first two minutes of the film and Fatalities in general). My only exposure to Street Fighter was playing it once at my neighbour's Khitan and that "the guy with the claw was cheap". Also I was really good at and enjoyed Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo, but in this case, I could only really play against the CPU since I could beat anyone else.
When I entered secondary school (or High School), things quickly picked up as I found a bunch of gamers to play with, among them was a group of really good Super Smash Brothers Melee players, and while I disagreed with their game mode (almost always Final Destination) and I kept getting thrown out because it was technically a room I shouldn't have even been in, I had quite a lot of fun with it and we all somehow fed off each other and improved dramatically. On the other side of the coin was a more casual playing of Tekken 4 and then 5, and after the guy whose PS2 and game it was suggested I just sit there for an hour to get less bad at the game, I quickly learned some basic Asuka combos and became quite good, then arguments were had which quickly becmae racial in nature and resulted in PS2s being switched off in a way that could be called 'angry', eventually we just played Pro Evolution 5 or something and I had fun just watching and having a laugh.
While this was going on, I was starting to play fighting games with a bunch of really good players in an IRC community, I only really joined for Super Puzzle Fighter, but I was quickly introduced to King of Fighters, Garou, Marvel vs Capcom, the first of which we played on something called Poporu. Poporu was a strange Korean client that pretty much tried to mimick an arcade down to the level of inserting coins and having winner stays on and a bunch of avatars, as well as a chat lobby, so you could talk while playing and so on. While I didn't realize it at the time, this was sort of the closest you could get to the arcade experience without actually being there (ignoring lag and lack of voice chat).
Eventually Poporu shut down, the dark age of Kalierra started and then eventually GGPO and 2DF came out and online fighting games were fun again, then the modern console stuff came out with its 'matchmaking' and 'lobbies' and 'ladders' and that's why I decided to write this. However, I suppose what I'm saying with this is that I realised that playing games with people who know the game and with a small crowd is fun and I subconsciously worked this out when I was 15, it doesn't have to be fighting games, I spent a lot of time at university just playing single-player games, or watching people play single-player games and just talking about whatever crossed our mind, whether it was the badness of the game, how fun it was, or anything 'fun' really.
Things that are important and suffer
Hype
Seeing cool shit going down in fighting games is really fun, but it sort of multiplies exponentially with the presence of commentators, other people, the right atmosphere and so on. It's sort of like a really, really positive version of the Two Minutes Hate from 1984. So you get stuff like streams where you're able to get really excited because of those factors, even if it is just listening to Jaha using the word "Swag" to describe literally everything going on and talking with a bunch of stream monsters in the chat.
When you go to an actual tournament, it's even better, even something as simple as pool play or even casuals can draw a crowd of at least 10 people. At the last tournament I went to, a simple winner stays on, pure casual series of matches taking place before registration even began had upwards of 30 people standing and sitting around, chatting, comparing sticks, getting excited over good plays and just generally feeding off the positive energy in the room, it's hard to explain, but the feeling is there. Even an expo I went to in October, where we had no idea there would be old fighting games, was able to get a rotating group of 10 people watching Super Street Fighter 4, not Arcade Edition, but Super. And once again, people were getting excited, comparing stuff.
Now, compare this to playing something online using your 360 or PS3, you're generally going to be by yourself, if you had a friend around, you'd be playing your friend and not some random faceless strange online. Any and all hype would just drain from the room since it's just you versus someone who could quite simply be a hyper intelligent computer, you're not able to feed off excitement or know there's an audience watching because there isn't any. I mean, once you're done, you could upload the replay online, but in all honesty, unless you're playing someone extremely famous or something extremely messed up happens no one is going to watch it, you're not able to draw excitement from the game through just the experience of playing it, which means it just turns into winning. The experience becomes completely binary, where you're either like "Cool I beat a faceless person online :|" or "Oh great I lost to a faceless person online :|" Starcraft 2 also suffers from the same problem, compare tournament hype to playing a ladder match, where when looking at the scoreboard you can't even tell if you won without seeing if your points have changed, and to make it worse, there's a much bigger time investment for what is simply Win/Lose.
 |
| A rough comparison between the number of people watching you offline and online (respectively), also the dog will never ever be this cool. |
Learning
Most people do things to get better, fighting games aren't an exception, unless you're playing at such a low level or are completely and utterly uninvested in the game. While there is training mode and so on for practising the technical side of play (Execution, perfecting combos etc) you're not going to learn much about actual fundamentals and what to do in the right time and matchup information. So you play against better people, you'll learn what beats what, how to improve, the moves you should be using, different playstyles, and most importantly of all, you're able to actually talk to the person you're playing, get their opinions, and hopefully you go away having learned something, and maybe even directly improved as a player.
On the other hand, when you're playing ranked online, you'll just face someone, and they'll either be terrible and die, completely crush you, or you might, somehow, have a close and interesting match (but you'll still feel not as excited because of point 1), but you can't talk to them about it, because voice chat is bad and you both need it on and so on, you have to send them a message using the terrible service you're given, and even then you need to remember his gamertag and get down to it quickly and want to play more games with them and it's just a terrible, annoying mess, especially when compared to "talk to guy 2 feet away from you while still playing the game" And then to make matters even worse, unless you're quick on the ball, you'll never see this guy again.
Also, I know you're meant to play fighting games to win, this isn't some sort of scrub thing. But when you're playing online, winning is all you have (especially when you keep in mind you're not even able to get hype due to factor 1), whenever you lose it directly impacts your ranking, so you want to win every game, even the most casual ones. You can't lose 20 times in a row and at least learn something, because good luck playing the same person that many times in a row short of player matches, and even then you can't really talk to them.
The social paradox
The internet is a great place, it allows you to communicate with anyone else with just a few clicks of your mouse (hypothetically) and find anyone with similar interests with just a simple search on Google with the word 'forums' attached as well. You'd think that playing games would be intense, fun and extremely social, since after all, you could play with anyone in the world. However, what ends up happening is you end up treating it just as a minor hobby, you just log on, play a games or so, and then log off for days, if not weeks. There is no investment to make you carry on playing outside of the cost of buying the game.
Compare this once again, to a tournament ,you know that literally every single person at the venue cares about games, has an opinion one way or another, or is a friend or companion of someone who does. You can talk to anyone about video games, you can get to know people, you can constantly mingle. They've spent money getting to this place, entering, and while they do want to win, they also want to have as good of a time as possible.
What this essentially boils down to is that there is the paradox of when there's an increasing ease of finding people with similar interests, albeit with the penalty of anonymity, it's harder to actually form lasting relationships with them, leading you to feel even lonelier when you're literally surrounded by people.
How would I fix this?
When dealing with something as fundamentally flawed as online gaming for fighting games, I think that the best way to deal with it would be to try and have it replicate the arcade experience as much as possible, so I'd put in the following features:
1) Remove ranked 1v1 online play almost entirely, replace them with a series of "ranked lobbies" that contain 3-8 players using winner stays on format, with matchmaking creating the lobbies at first, have some level of unanimous voting put in so a higher level player can be 'promoted' if they win in excess of X matches, with the number of votes needed decreasing with the number of additional games they win. Have lower level players be able to demote themselves if they experience a massive losing streak. Think Starcraft 2 Divisions but with more leagues at the higher ends
2) Make voicechat always on, or at the very least, much easier to use, better hardware would probably be required than the joke of a headset you get. PC games would have the advantage of you being able to use text during downtime as well. Both ways would encourage the same sort of mingling that you experience in arcades, though to a much lesser degree, also obviously allow ignoring if someone abuses it, as well as cool titles/avatars if someone is helpful and kind.
3) Daily or weekly tournaments for each 8 or so brackets of ranked lobbies, winners get automatic promotion and a nice avatar or icon or something, allow observing, stagger the games so they can easily be watched and so on.
I know these would be really open to abuse, but I think it would be infinitely more fun than what is currently in place, and I'd love to hear what ideas you have!
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