People have been drawing analogies between rock-paper-scissors and fighting games since the beginning of recorded time – mainly because it’s easy. This has become an increasingly popular trend, whether for describing move priority (throw beats blocking, DP beats throw, blocking beats DP) or matchups (giant beats pixie, pixie beats beam, beam beats giant).
Truthfully, RPS metaphors are only useful for deconstructing fighting games to illustrate the challenges presented by human competition. RPS models are great if you want to entertain people by translating your successes and failures into academic terms.
It’s much harder to go the other direction – from RPS theory fighter to developing a practical gameplan. Converting game specifics to RPS babble and back to game specifics is so much extra work that you’d be better off sticking with game specifics throughout.
However if you’re new to the competitive aspect of fighting games, it is important to grasp exactly what you’re getting into – and RPS comparisons can be useful in that regard. The rest of this article is a look at fighting game strategy from the familiar perspective of RPS tradeoffs.
While a single round of rock-paper-scissors is indeed a dumb guessing game, it becomes interesting once you play it several times in a row. Both players gradually start to pick up on each other’s tendencies – and more importantly, the thought process behind their decisions.
Fighting games inherently force us to play multiple rounds of RPS in quick succession. Every button that you press (or don’t press) is weighed against an expectation of probable actions.
When you play against any given opponent, you immediately start to gather information about their play style. Your goal is to figure out how to outplay them, so you start to keep track of their patterns and habits. If you’re not trying to read your opponent’s mind based on the information you’re acquiring, then all you’re doing is guessing.
It’s important to treat each individual opponent as a separate entity. Even with pure RPS, some people like rock more, some people like paper more, some people like scissors more. Some people panic when they lose two games in a row. Some people don’t panic until they lose three games in a row. Some people focus when they lose four games. Some people stop caring and become completely unpredictable when they lose three.
There’s inherently a wide range of information to absorb and use against your opponent, because your opponent is an inherently complicated human mind. I think people struggle with this concept because they fail to take into account the immediate complexity this puzzle generates when (indeterminately) many RPS games are being played at once.
Fighting games shine when they support multiple RPS layers simultaneously, by giving players several different variables and scenarios to monitor in every match. In fact, the only way a fighting game could begin to resemble a single game of RPS is if it was a single match, single round, sudden-death fight between identical opponents positioned at point blank range without the ability to move. And they couldn’t be allowed to play each other ever again.
However, in a typical Ryu vs Ryu round between skilled opponents, there are probably something on the order of a few hundred RPS games played out. You see, winning a single game of RPS is a matter of luck, but winning 500 consecutive simultaneous overlapping games played against a single opponent? Now that is a mindgame.
Most people don’t even recognize all the RPS dimensions that are being simultaneously resolved in Street Fighter matches. A lot of people focus on trying to figure out which attack the opponent prefers without paying attention to which range the opponent prefers. Or focus on how often the opponent goes for a throw without paying attention to how much vitality the opponent usually has when he goes for a throw. Or focus on how many fireballs it takes to make the opponent jump without paying attention to how much meter the opponent usually has when he goes for a jump combo.
That’s what makes RPS-based design interesting: The fact that most players aren’t even aware of the majority of RPS instances being played out in any given match.
Here’s a simple example: For many players, the most uncomfortable part of a match is the very beginning. Everything seems risky. If you throw a fireball, the opponent can jump over it. If you try to attack, the opponent’s fireball will knock you down. If you jump, you can get uppercutted and crossed up. If you do nothing, you lose momentum.
The real reason that it’s so annoying is because you enter the round with a blank slate, with (nearly) all of the variables having been reset. It’s almost like going back to that first blind guess. And it sucks, because a single stroke of bad luck can get you killed. But as soon as you start moving, all of the RPS dimensions re-emerge and mindgames once again overpower luck. You just have to survive that first instant.
Similar examples include wakeup situations where neither player has much momentum, or dealing with a nearly dead opponent with access to a Custom Combo, or situations where one player has temporary access to a powerful super move (such as the opponent’s K-Groove meter running out).
These situations cut through the complex ambient mindgames and present a simple glaring instance of RPS. It’s scary, it’s in your face, and in the heat of the moment very few players have the mental clarity to refer back to previous occurances against the same foe.
All of this is further compounded by the setting. Casual play introduces elements of chaos, because there’s nothing more difficult to predict than laziness or distraction. In casual play, people experiment with unorthodox tactics or go for random psychic DP’s or take risks even when their best option is clearly caution. Conversely, money matches and tournaments make players nervous and overly cautious.
Mindgame specialists will factor all of these elements into their RPS deductions. They’ll realize that some risky offense is actually less risky in tournament play because everyone hesistates for an extra split-second. Or they’ll realize that the most conservative attack in a certain situation can become unsafe because their opponent is expecting it.
Another factor is the two players’ past history. For example, gimmicky gambles work best when meeting someone for the first time. However, if two players are accustomed to each other’s play styles due to having an extensive backlog of tournament matches, then it makes sense to go back to fundamentals.
Going one step further, if the two players are regular training partners, then the most effective approach would probably be playing in a wild unorthodox style – because it’s the only way to offset the mountain of information in the other player’s possession.
Player archetypes impact the overall scheme as well. In general, technical players tend to excel right away because their success is least dependent on knowledge of the opposing player. They can win on game knowledge and matchup strategy alone. On the other hand, mindgame specialists may require a few rounds or encounters to absorb an opposing player’s style, but they can transfer this knowledge from one game to another (SSF4 to MvC3).
Then it becomes a contest of whether the technical player can impose sufficiently complicated hurdles or whether the mindgame specialist can see through to the opponent’s basic intentions and adapt accordingly.
As long as the core RPS structure of the game holds up, players will construct enormously complex data matrices. The truth is, nobody can keep track of all that information flawlessly. You really have to choose which RPS sequences to monitor and which to abandon.
After all, your opponent could feed you a ton of subtle background information about a specific scenario they never intend to revisit. Imagine running into some HF Blanka player who spends the entire first match jumping straight up and down, then never goes back to that tactic again. All that time and energy you spent studying his vertical jumping patterns, rhythms, and ranges wouldn’t help you at all – at least not until the next tournament.
Believe it or not, most top players have an excellent memory when it comes to these things. Even when we haven’t played for a year, Valle still remembers a lot of my gameplay tendencies and he draws upon that information anytime we meet in a tournament.
Regardless of whether i represent a serious threat to him, he still pays attention to how i play. I don’t know about you, but i certainly don’t bother to remember the play styles of 90% of the people i’ve beaten. That’s why Valle’s so consistent whenever he’s at the top of his game.
In any good fighting game, the winner of a match is decided by how many critical RPS strands each player can remember and analyze, not by how well they process a short linear sequence. The RPS matrix of a good fighting game should be intricate enough to force players to choose which sequences to focus on and to struggle with keeping track of important long-term patterns. Since neither player can fully visualize and grasp the entire thing, being able to pinpoint the essential strands is just as important as having a good memory.
I’m finally done! Let’s never do this again.
(Thanks to Tarnish for the ST Zangief vs Dee Jay match suggestion though.)
One way that I see it is that if you were to classify each game into an overall hierarchy, like the tree of life does for animals ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(science) ) then fighting games and RPS would belong to the same family. They’re both competitive, head-to-head 2player games comprised of multiple decisions that ultimately decide the winner.
I don’t like running analogies into the ground, so I’ll stop there, but you get the idea.
what i dislike about the RPS aspect of fighters is that some games take it too far. use DOA as an example, attacks beat throws, throws beat counters, counters beat attacks. thats all well and good, except once that first attack is landed you’re still playing RPS, they can still counter your attack. the offensive character is at a disadvantage because the game is, literally, RPS at all times.
I think you’re missing some key elements in these “RPS” matches in fighting games. It’s the fact that the outcome of one RPS match is affected by those before it.
For example, winning a RPS match can lead to better positioning.
The other thing is, a “losing” outcome doesn’t always happen… for example, lets do something like a safe jump-in or a meaty attempt on a knocked-down opponent.
we’re all human, the spacing can be off, the timing can be off, and the supposed “losing” outcome wins. A mistimed Safe jumpin leads you to getting hit. A meaty attack misses the active frame and you get DPed.
and the final scenario…
Lets say you’re facing someone with less than perfect execution. (I play Super turbo, apparently Reversals are super easy in SF4?) A meaty attack will beat a reversal attempt lets say 60% of the time.
When the other player is ready for it. suddenly the meaty attack will only work 20% of the time…
Simply put. and RPS analogy is insufficient to represent a deep fighting game. it works for certain situations, but not an entire game.
KarinNoPapa: If someone drew up a heirarchy like that, i’d probably think it was kind of cool, but it’s not something i’d be interested in writing myself.
Unessential: No i’m aware of all that stuff, but you’re right, RPS can’t hope to be a complete analogy for fighting games. I regretted writing last week’s article so i reorganized all the useful parts into this one, and i’d be happy to never write another RPS article again.
Wouldn’t work too well since just about any competitive game can be broken down into RPS, from Street Fighter, to StarCraft, to Chess.
Good article, I like these kinds of articles, makes me see things in a way I wouldn’t have otherwise and that’s always appreciated.
I liked the rps analogy at first because it breaks fighting games down into a simple easy to grasp concept. Hell when I first started playing I thought it was a great way to look at it, after a while though with all the concepts in fighting games the rps analogy becomes insuffient.
Also I like footsies(thanks for the handbook maj) and it’s hard to factor something like that in to a simple rps analogy.
Guess what I’m trying to say is factoring a fighting game down to rps is oversimplifying it and that just doesn’t sit right with me. Lol
Nonsense, I’m expecting a 3-part mini series on Rock, Paper and Scissors in the vein of your footsies articles.
Actually, chess is not like RPS at all since it’s a game of complete information.
Suppose i only had an hour a day to practice at SF4…instead of using the whole hour to practice combos in the training room, i could literally spend 30 mins reading the articles on this site, and the other half hour trying to put into practice what I learnt and i would be a far better player than i would have been had i just focused on combos and even perfecting execution. Your articles are that good Maj…they are that good…
Thank you sir, but i wouldn’t go that far. Practice is important and it’s tough to come up with anything more critical to helping you improve. If you only have an hour, you’re better off practicing. (And it’s usually better to practice against human opponents rather than alone in Training Mode.)
But around the 2-3 hour mark, that’s when you start hitting diminishing returns. If you can feel your focus fading and notice you’re starting to play on autopilot, it might be a good time to take a break and do a little reading.
its tough to find anything more critical to improve?…you do it all the time!..lol..
I know practice is important, especially execution. I’ve lost close matches because of execution, but much more often, I’ve lost because I didn’t know what to do or what strategy to use.
Your quote is priceless.
“When you play against any given opponent, you immediately start to gather information about their play style. Your goal is to figure out how to outplay them, so you start to keep track of their patterns and habits. If you’re not trying to read your opponent’s mind based on the information you’re acquiring, then all you’re doing is guessing.”
I’ve played countless Ryu’s (tends to be Ryu because of Daigo) who can nail difficult combos consistently but they try to imitate Daigo’s aggressive play style and they become predictable. They focus for no reason etc. They forget that Daigo reads opponents. They don’t try to see what I’m doing, they just want to combo. Against quite a few people they get away with it. But if ever they are on the back foot, they become lost. They literally don’t know what to do.
Hence my analogy about the training room. Its obvious that they spent significant time perfecting combos but if they spent less time doing that and more time actually trying to read their opponent, they would be so much better. My greatest challenges are not even players who do huge combos, but those who are actually thinking about what I’m doing and adjusting. They just chip chip chip, and then all of a sudden you find yourself down, with 20 secs left and he’s on the other side of the screen…:S..
For me personally its better to read good articles first, because they frame the way I approach the game which ultimately determines how far I go. If I approach it in a typical manner, looking for a combo fest or flashy play, I’ll only go so far. If i approach it looking to pick my opponent apart by taking advantage of his weaknesses, and tendencies, and basically having a tactics mindset to it, I’ll go much further much faster. Your articles definitely provide that mindset.
The time spent changing the way I see the game, will be invaluable when it comes to playing it.
I think this stuff is automatic to you, so you see it as common sense, but from what I’ve seen online, its anything but.
Don’t be too modest, your articles show people how to approach the game/begin correctly, and that’s priceless. If I start correctly, I’ll end correctly!
Well, okay, i guess doing a little reading is important too. It just depends on where you’re at along the learning curve. The problem is, it’s very hard to make significant progress with only an hour of practice.
If you’re already an expert player, then an hour may be enough to maintain that level. But if you’re starting out, it takes a lot of playing time just to grow familiar with the game and gain experience with matchups and play styles.
I don’t know, it’s tough to say what the exact breakdown should be. It probably varies quite a bit based on personality too.
Yeah you’re right, it definitely depends on where you are along the learning curve. The hour time period wasn’t too literal. For me an hour is the shortest significant time period, so I just used it to stress that no matter how little time you have for training, you have to make time to take in quality material to change your mindset and change the way you play and approach the game.
Maybe not half an hour, out of the theoretical hour, 15 mins maybe, but there is so much useful material on and connected to this site that you won’t pick up unless you’re constantly playing with top players.
For example, you linked to John Choi’s top player tips, and he expanded on the cross cut uppercut, basically dragon punching people who try to cross you up. Some people call it an auto-correct dp, but Choi says that’s incorrect..but right.
No.1 I didn’t even know he had a series :S…and wouldn’t have had i not popped on to your site
No.2 I had seen that uppercut done several times, but I never knew there was a specific technique for it, i thought it was more a timing/speed of input issue. So that new tip translates directly to improved game play, because people cross up all the time and it was very unlikely that I was figuring that technique out on my own.
Your site makes a difference for sure. The breakdown on how much time you need to spend will vary as you said, but for me at least, there’s too much stuff to figure out on my own,without getting quality input from other sources. I’m no expert so I could use the tips!
I guess the better you are the less tips you need, but for me, your site is good stuff Maj!
Veterans generally need less practice time than newcomers, so veterans actually have more free time to browse forums and read random articles. You’re right, it is kind of a messed up lose-lose situation for newcomers to walk into. Then again it only emphasizes the importance of experience in skill-based competition, which isn’t particularly surprising.
Last week i wrote that enthusiasm can trump experience but unfortunately that definition of enthusiasm basically assumes that the newcomer will grind harder than the veteran. Of course pure talent is a factor too. Sometimes newcomers show up and become experts in a matter of weeks or months, but they’re the exception to the rule.