The fighting game community (FGC) features some of the most dedicated scenes at the cost of many barriers to entry. While some are a result of the skill gap between beginners and more experienced players or the price of DLC, the biggest might come from fans rallying to keep their favorite titles alive.
The FGC wouldn’t be the same without players constantly discovering new tech. Popular titles like Super Smash Bros. Melee seem like completely different games now compared to launch because fans continue to push past what the developers intended. Advanced techniques like wavedashing and frame perfect inputs in fast-paced environments led to more complex conversations, but players needed a way to discuss the intricacies without explaining every move. Enter one of the biggest boons and obstacles to the fighting game scene: an influx of community-created terms.
Phrases like “fuzzy”, “plink”, or “buffer” will probably leave most people wondering if you’re speaking a foreign language instead of commenting on a crazy combo. Learning these expressions only got harder as new titles introduced game-specific lingo. Cracking ‘the code’ typically required either friends in the community or a fighting game wiki, which is far trickier to find than the average Wikipedia article due to niche search terms. This often ends a noob’s entrance into the FGC faster than any crippling set ever could.
Fighting game design specialist Infilament, or Infil, took it into his own hands to rectify that shortcoming with an amazing new tool, “The Fighting Game Glossary.”
Introducing The Fighting Game Glossary. Over 650 terms carefully explained with 200+ video examples and Japanese translations. Easily search by term or game, share links to terms with your friends, and explore related concepts without losing your place.https://t.co/CX98RjD5qd pic.twitter.com/K2z5E6ZA0L
— Infil (@Infilament) May 18, 2021
Thanks again to Infil for taking the time to discuss how the project will impact the community moving forward.
Is fighting game jargon a big barrier for newcomers?
I think complicated jargon is a barrier in pretty much every pursuit in life. Even just limiting the discussion to competitive video games, trying to learn Dota lingo is incredibly difficult for a beginner. Words like ‘blink’ and acronyms like ‘BKB’ mean nothing when you first start out. Even games that are much more straightforward, like Rocket League, have a surprising amount of jargon to learn. You'll hear a RL commentator say ‘he faked the flip reset, and did a wavedash catch into a musty flick.’ For a game as simple as hitting a ball into the net, this is utter nonsense to a person who just turned on a big tournament.
Fighting games have their own challenges of course. Unlike many other competitive genres, we have games made by both Japanese and English developers, so our English slang has a lot of loan words borrowed from Japanese. And a lot of this lingo was developed before the modern internet, in the annals of some arcade and perpetuated on a newsgroup, so the origins are muddy and the definitions have changed over time. Certainly, I have seen people ask ‘what's a fuzzy?’ hundreds of times over the years.
But I don't think this is all bad, really. When used properly, jargon lets us talk about something very specific very quickly, which is an asset to a group of people discussing a complicated concept. It's not unique to fighting games. We just have to make sure that it's easy to learn or research, and that the community is welcoming of questions when you get stuck.
How do you think something like this will help with the fighting game learning process?
While I try to put some nuggets of strategy in some definitions, I don't think my glossary can be a replacement for, say, a strategy guide or a ‘how to play’ for beginners. Those are different projects, which I've also tackled with my Complete Killer Instinct Guide.
I think the main benefit of the glossary is helping bridge the gap in the conversation between an expert and a beginner. My glossary exists so that it's easier to research confusing terms that an expert might use, but you are too nervous to ask them to clarify what they mean. And they might not be a particularly good explainer of the term anyway, so having a carefully constructed definition with a video example helps a lot. I think there will be some ancillary benefits when a person watches my video for, say, Instant Overhead and understands why that would be a good strategy to use in a match, but really, my goal is to make talking about fighting games easier.
Resources like this are few and far between besides forums and wikis that newcomers may be unfamiliar with. Are there any other innovations you'd like to see or even try to tackle that could push the FGC forward like this can?
I think the main reason resources like this are few and far between is because they take an extraordinary amount of work, so not many people are willing to invest (understandably so).
I think when you ask people about innovations in FG learning, most will point you to how developers need to better integrate teaching tools in their games. Most fighting games are notoriously bad at actually teaching useful concepts, although some modern games are trying to make some strides here. But, again, this isn't really that unique to FGs. If you are trying to learn *any* competitive video game, you will frequently find yourself looking up Wikis or Youtube tutorials. Why is this?
It's a long discussion you could have, but I think an interesting reason to discuss is that there is value in the ‘community’ part of community-driven tools. The community tends to be up to date on the ‘actual’ way the game is played, and they are more flexible in terms of what they can make. As an example, in AAA games, your tutorial text might have to go through meetings and be approved by management, translated into multiple languages, have to fit a certain UI or structure mandated by other aspects of the game, and so on.
In my work, I try to make it a point to have a conversational, casual tone of voice (while still not making errors). I try to describe concepts as if you asked your friend a question, not in some dry encyclopedic way approved by a board, and I think that goes a long way to making my resources inviting and fun to read. As a bonus, the concepts tend to stick a bit better too! So while in-game innovations are important, and integrating directly with the game's programming offers benefits that Wikis can't, I think there are downsides to this that will never invalidate fan-made content.
As for new fan projects that could help drive FG learning, there's no shortage of ideas out there that haven't been tried. Tying together a glossary with a game-agnostic approach to teaching (since most FG tutorials are for one specific game, rather than for ‘any game’) is something that would be interesting to me, but a great deal of work both in creation and planning. And I think there should be more ‘next steps’ content for players trying to graduate from beginner to intermediate, while taking special care to not immediately jump into the deep end and lose them. But in the end, I'm always interested in checking out new content to see how I can improve as a teacher and explainer.
How long has the Fighting Game Glossary project been in production?
I started this project in August 2020, so it took me around 9 months of pretty steady work. This includes designing and coding the website (and all the bug fixing and redesigning that goes along with that), trying to think up a list of important fighting game terms, constantly expanding that list, writing all the definitions without errors and with a consistent but entertaining voice, planning and producing the videos, and collaborating with some friends (for the Japanese translations, feedback on my design, some help with the videos, etc).
Is this going to be a constantly updated project?
The plan is to update it for now, yes. After a bit of a break to recharge, I will tackle some of the terms I missed from version 1 and work on some typos and bug fixes. As new games get released and new terms are invented, I will try to keep the site updated as best I can. And if the donation support is there and I can get some help from the community, I may even look into expanding the scope (such as translating the terms to other languages). But I'll have to make those decisions a bit more in the future.
Bookmark this fantastic new resource, especially with the promise of future updates, for convenient access to the best fighting game glossary. Follow @Infilament on Twitter to stay up to date on his latest adventures.