Execution in Fighting Games

Here's an article about the role of execution in fighting games, by James Chen. I think the title and conclusion are kind of misleading because it does not really discuss the role of exeuction in fighting games, but rather the role of how different move commands affect the game.

Let's start with the good. Every example given is helpful to know, and I think each one is a correct example. In each case, Chen shows how the motion for doing a certain move being one thing rather than another thing affects gameplay and that this is usually for the better. Yes, a dragon punch motion and a reverse dragon punch motion do have different effects, and cause the moves to be used differently. Players should take that into account whether they are playing *as* such a character or *against* one. Good stuff here.

The problem is that that's not really what people mean when they talk about execution in fighting games. It's a very narrow, cherry picked kind of thing that doesn't fairly represent the topic. It also lead Chen to make this conclusion:

"Execution isn’t just about performing your combos. It’s also largely about knowing what your opponent CAN perform in given time frames. That ADDS to the mind games and the gameplay, not detracting from it."

I agree completely that the different motions chosen for moves gives another layer of things to think about and that that kind of variety is interesting relative to a game that had no such variety. The thing is, "execution" in general (not these very specific examples) has the opposite effect and it reduces strategy, relatively speaking. The more a game is about the difficulty of making your character do what you want to do, the necessarily less it is about strategy (that is, making good decisions).

This is why it's not a good idea to make special moves really hard to do. Make them take some *time* so some prediction is needed (even a few frames of prediction), yeah that's great. Make them start at a particular place on the joystick, such as a reverse dragon punch, and that affects how they're used, right. But to have some tiny input window to make them hard to do even when you have decided you want to do them, that's taking away emphasis on strategy. Making a game where the command to throw is secretly an option select tricky thing that you want to do basically always is another way to put more weight on dexterity that necessarily reduces strategy. Choosing commands that overlap too much (for example, ST Cammy's hooligan throw and spinning knuckle) puts more emphasis on dexterity than the decision of choosing the right move. So to increase strategy slightly, it's better to make those not overlap (and in HD Remix, they don't).

Making a game such that bread-and-butter combos require 1-frame linking is another great example of reducing the importance of strategy. In a recent stream, Chen himself said that in SF4, if you can't do Sakura's 1-frame link combo, you shouldn't be playing Sakura. I agree! That goes to show how strongly execution is favored over correct decision making / strategy in the case of SF4 Sakura.

We should really be striving to reduce execution requirements as much as possible while keeping the nature of the game intact. That is, making all dragon punches a single button press would reduce execution, but it would also actually ruin a bunch of strategy stuff by making them too reactive and not predictive enough, so we shouldn't do that. That's not a case where reducing execution helps, so I'm not talking about things like that. I am talking about sequences or moves that are hard apart from any strategic consideration. Like Sakura having 1-frame links as a critical thing, instead of being a character anyone could play. (You don't even need to change the power level of the character or reduce any strategy here, it's just a matter of being more inclusive as to how many players get to participate in that strategy.)

I know there's a lot of execution fetishism going around, and that's unfortunate for a genre that many would like to point to as a strategy genre that happens to have a dexterity requirement to play. Rasing the dexterity requirement above the minimum needed to make it all work just subtracts from the importance of strategy while excluding people. I'd like to see more love for an inclusive approach, as that restores more power to good decisions while inviting even more players to participate in those decisions.

Portal 2 Cooperative Mode and Custom Maps

I wrote about Portal 2's single player mode almost a year ago, here. I said it had great mechanics but was badly in need of some subtractive design, ideally by removing the middle 50% of the game.

Cooperative Mode

I recently picked the game up again, this time playing on Mac rather than Xbox. I played through the entire coop campaign (meaning 2-player), including the "Art Therapy" extra chapter that was added after the game's release. I'm pretty blown away by the quality of the overall experience. Sometimes I give things a semi-joking A+ if I like them, but I think this might be a legitimate A+.

The coop mode doesn't have that long bad middle part that the single player game has, so that means it's just the good stuff left. It's also interesting to see all the puzzles that involve two players (and four portals), as that adds another layer of mind-bendingness to it all. You can do more things with 4 portals, and that means there are even more clever things going on in the level design to make things challenging.

Last year I criticized the single player mode for the suble reason that it seemed to be less about communicating an interesting idea (about whatever new interaction is being showin in that level) than it should have been. Meanwhile, the coop mode seems to have had the design goal of "make the players feel like they are really cooperating." That's a difficult goal, but the game is one of the best examples of coop play that I know. Even the tutorial at the very beginning has you having to give boxes to each other, having to press buttons for the other person to progress, and having you learn gestures to wave at each other or to point to things in the level for the other player to see. It's very much about "helping your friend." The juxtaposition of that design concept with the cold logical nature of puzzle solving makes for quite a mix.

The cooperative nature of the levels runs a little deeper than just having to hand a box to somone, though. In many places, the level design is such that a set of force fields (you can't shoot portals across those) separates one part of the level from another. One player will natural try to figure out what to do on one side of the force field while the other player will try to figure out what to do on the other side. This could very easily be a non-cooperative, 2-player solitaire type thing, but somehow it isn't like that. You can usually see what the other person is doing, and even when you can't, there is AMAZING feature of pressing tab to bring a picture-in-picture view looking out of your friend's eyes. So you can see what they are doing and suggest ideas of what might work. Also, in situations like this you really need an overall understanding of the whole room, not just one half of it. So you have to realize "if only you could get that box in your area over here somehow? Or if had a way of getting one portal on one side of your force field and your other portal on your side somehow, we'd be able to do X thing." There's a lot of planning you are encouraged to do together due to the nature of levels. Valve's A-team was really on this coop mode.

The difficulty of the game seems about right "for mass market consumption," as my friend put it. Kind of hard sometimes, but it never felt like something I couldn't figure out. While I think the difficulty tuning of the puzzle is done well, I do renew my objection from last year that it's unfortunate that the game's overall structure prevents Valve from designing any truly hard puzzles. I wanted there to be some really, really, really challenging puzzles, but that would require them to be something you could skip and still progress past, then come back to later.

Player-Created Levels

For higher difficulty, I looked to the player-created levels. I discovered a map maker named Mathey2009. This guy's work is very, very good. It's ridiculous to see how few ratings his maps have and low rated they are (2.5 out of 5 stars? Give me a break!). Ignore those ratings, they are unjust and mysterious. I recommend you try his map "Cubelessness" first, and when you discover the "interesting use of the game engine," you should know it's not a bug. The map Suspended Animation is also interesting and fleshed out well. His map "The most challenging test chamber in the multiverse" is quite a beast, and intentionally pretty confusing. Finally, "Logic" is his hardest map. Probably it's so low rated because almost no one has finished it. (I finished all those maps, by the way! woot.)

Those maps are all single player. If someone can recommend some good player-created coop maps, that would be great. I have not played any other than Valve's, though I would.

Level Editor

Portal 2 actually has two different level editors. One is a simplified editor, now build into the game itself. The other is the full-featured editor called Hammer (for all Source engine games) that only runs on Windows, so who cares about it (heh). Hopefully they'll make a Mac version of that at some point. Anyway my point here is about the simplified editor inside the game that works on both Mac and PC. It's honestly amazing how simple and elegant the UI for this editor is. Making a Portal 2 level sounds like something only for super geniuses who aren't you, but actually you really can make a map very easily. You can resize the room or parts of it, rotate the camera view, add elements, connect elements, all with just clicking and dragging. No code needed, no numbers, no semi-colons or anything. It's slick.

Making a *good* level would be a different thing entirely from just making *a* level. Because of the nature of Portal 2 as a mindbending puzzle game, it's extremely difficult to make a good level. You have to care about it being solvable without forced-death, about preventing unwinnable states from being possible (dear Mathey2009: you need to work on that one, there are unwinnable states in Cubelessness and The Most Challenging Test Map), and you have to care about a hundred different "exploits" people might use to cheat past the actual difficulty of your map. It's damn hard stuff. But I'm really impressed that if you want to make *a* map, some kind of map that does something, it's easier to do than I would have even imagined because of the well-designed interface of the in-game editor.

Note to map makers: you can't make coop maps in the in-game editor, and there are many other limitations as well. But you can export the maps you make in the in-game editor into Hammer. So you could get pretty far using the awesome UI, then polish it up even more in the full-featured editor (on Windows), if you wanted.

My last thought is that it makes me kind of sad that if somoene made the best Portal 2 map in the entire world, that would be worth about $0. That's too bad! Somehow we gladly pay for stuff a lot worse than the best Portal 2 map in the world.

Sirlin Games Update

Hey everyone, here's what's been going on lately.

Fantasystrike.com

While you can play for free or directly buy any character you want at fantasystrike.com, I just wanted to mention the "STAR member" subscription option that unlocks all characters in all our games. The reason I'm mentioning it is because as an extra perk beyond getting access to all characters, you also get access to the beta stuff we're working on so you can see it ahead of everyone else. Right now, that's the Yomi expansion and Flash Duel online.

The Yomi expansion is in ruleless mode right now, and it won't have rule enforcement for a while because we are changing abilities and stuff all the time. It doesn't have art either, though that will be rolling in over time. If you're interested in doing balance testing or contributing ideas to improve the Yomi expansion, you're welcome to do so. We have all 10 new decks set up right now! For Flash Duel online, the balance and gameplay is already finished, but you could contribute any usability or UI suggestions if you'd like, or tell us about any bugs you find by posting here. We have the 1v1 mode working with rules enforcement (yes!) and the other modes like 2v2 and the Dragon Raid are going up soon (for STAR members I mean, in the beta area).

There's also a beta tournament for Flash Duel starting in about 4 hours, by the way. I'm sure there will be others if you miss it, but if you're around then go for it.

Special thanks to pixel artist "BT" for doing 8-bit animations of movement and attacks for Flash Duel online. Very cool! (Pre-emptive note: those 8-bit animations are currently showing up blurry and slightly stretched in the game engine. We know and will fix that!)

GenCon and PAX Prime

There will be events for my games and demos too at the Game Salute booth at both GenCon and PAX Prime. You're encouraged to enter, and maybe even take pictures. If you'd like to help run events for any of my games, or to demo them, you can sign up here and get some bonuses from Game Salute for doing so.

Puzzle Strike's Kickstarter

There isn't much news here, but that's good actually. There a bunch of things could possibly delay the ship date, and so far we've avoided all those things. Still on track to ship as expected in September, though there are still more things out of my control that could delay it. Current status though: smooth sailing. When the ship date gets closer, you'll get an e-mail asking for your shipping address, so if you moved between when the kickstarter ended and now, don't worry, you can give your correct address when you get that e-mail in August or September.

Oh and about the randomizer cards that kickstarter supporters will get. They will also include 20 character cards so you can pick random characters too if you want. There was some question about whether these would be included or not, and it turns out they are.

Sirlin Games at Origins Game Fair

Origins is this coming week in Columbus, Ohio. It's a huge gaming event with about 35,000 attendees. I won't be there, but my games will have a presence there in the Game Salute area. They have a huge 18-booth area, right up at the front of the hall, starting with Booth 100. There's an section in there carved out for Sirlin Games.

There will be tournaments for all three of my games at Origins. I think the times will be: Puzzle Strike on Friday at noon, Yomi on Saturday at noon, and Flash Duel on Sunday at noon.

Good luck to all who attend!

The Neuroscience of Zen

Dr. Philippe Goldin and Ryushin Paul Haller spoke tonight as part of the California Academy of Sciences lecture series in San Francisco, at the packed Herbst Theater. This was the last lecture of this season, and we learned tonight that every lecture of this season was sold out, including this one.

Goldin has a Ph.D. in neuroscience and spent 6 years in India and Nepal serving as an interpreter to Tibetan Buddhist lamas. He now works at Stanford. Haller is a Buddhist monk and Abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center.

Goldin opened by saying that now is a time of convergence, a meeting of East and West. The East has had centuries of Zen Buddhist traditions that seem to draw upon some ancient wisdom, and the West has rigorous scientific methodology and study and it excites him that these things are now untied. We now know that zen practices stimulate the brain in a very measurable way, and have tangible, positive effects.

Haller pointed out that both neuroscience and zen are "amoral," meaning they are not attempting to prescribe any sort of moral rightness or wrongness. Instead they seek to illuminate and explain "what is." Incidentally, I found Haller's mannerisms and way of speaking interesting. On the one hand, he's an old man that one might be mistaken for a crazy person or something. But he's actually very thoughtful in his speaking. Also he's Irish and has a bit of an Irish accent, though he's also lived in Russia, Afghanistan, Japan, and Thailand. His appearance and accent don't really match the stereotype of the kind of wiseman that he is.

Meditation Exercise

Haller said he'd like us to do an exercise with him, and that we might find it silly but that it might help us. He asked us to imagine for the next two or three minutes, that we "are not ourselves." Meaning we have no concept of what it's like to be who we are, and instead we are just experiencing the present moment.

He then apologized for asking this, but he said we should all stand up. I thought this moment alone said a lot about him. His apology was sincere in that he was acknowledging that he is kind of invading our personal space by asking us to do anything at all. And we didn't even have some terrible forced interaction with strangers, like Jane McGonigal's disaster thumb wrestling thing. Anyway, after standing up, he asked us to sit down, but in a different way than usual. He demonstrated the method, and said we should imagine that we are not familiar with our chairs, that perhaps they won't be able to hold our weight. So sit down very carefully, and with much attention to whether the chair can take the weight, and what it feels like as we sit down. He then asked us to close our eyes as he suggested we think about our breathing, the feeling of our feet on the floor, the feeling of the muscles on our face, and so on.

This is, of course, meditation. It's something I know a fair amount about from reading science about it, but not something I know of first-hand. Somewhat ironically, he got my attention here. (The irony is that meditation all about the direction of attention.) It's actually very difficult to just think about those things he's saying without thinking about anything else. The mind is whirring and buzzing with thoughts about every kind of thing, and meditation is an attempt to clear the mind of those things. Think of it as trying to balance on one leg. A master of balance is actually someone who, when a slight imbalance begins, can very quickly correct it and return to a balanced stance. Likewise, an expert at meditation can return to an empty mind very quickly when stray thoughts enter.

I am no master. I have written

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