Mindgames 101 – Pavlov’s Holiday in Wisconsin January 21, 2010
Posted by Weng in Psychology, Street Fighter, Tekken.Tags: gaming, plagiarism, pretentious wankery, Psychology, Street Fighter 4, tekken 6
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NB: This blog entry is essentially common knowledge to anyone who plays ANY fighting game at any competitive level. However, in typical Me fashion, it’s distilled into a long, overly-verbose, text-wank form. Also, I’m not a national champion/demi-god so Your Mileage May Vary in terms of how useful this will be.
In previous entries (which were written yesterday), I alluded to the multi-faceted and onion-like depth and layers behind a decent fighting game, or Real Time Rock-Paper-Scissors Chess on Crack. This entry is a brief glimpse into the Rock-Paper-Scissors portion of the equation.
How is throwing a Shoryuken akin to RPS? A key goal in any fighter, whether it be Tekken, Street Fighter, Marvel vs Capcom, arguably even something like the WWE series, are mixups. Mixups are situations where the offensive player has the ability to force the defending player to guess correctly, if they guess wrong and choose the wrong option, they take damage, and generally stay in a negative position.
On a very basic level in Tekken, for example – you have the dynamic between throws and high, low and mid attacks.
If the attacker does a throw – the defender can counter by ducking/crouching, or otherwise, teching (escaping) the throw. The throw-tech itself is another guessing game, as the defender has to input the correct button to escape the throw which can be one of 3 different inputs depending on which throw the attacker uses, and the window is generally quite small so you may only have time to input one ‘guess’.
High attacks can be ducked/crouched under, or blocked standing. But if blocked standing, they generally leave the attacker relatively safe from counter attacks.
Mids will hit crouch-blocking opponents, but can be blocked standing.
Lows hit standing opponents and have to be crouch-blocked.
This in itself is a form of RPS with stand-blocking beating mids, tying with highs/throws and losing to lows. Crouching beats highs, throws and lows but loses to mids (generally the attacks that start the large juggle combos).
So, essentially, existing inbuilt move-strings in Tekken often include some form of a high/low mixup which forces a correct guess/reaction. Then by stringing together various attack strings (2 strings, one sentence, great construction), you can eventually land an attack that allows you to land your larger combos.
The old Latin maxim of scientia potentia est – For also knowledge itself is power – is amazingly relevant to the domain of fighting games (or arguably any competitive game). If you understand your character’s moveset but your opponent doesn’t, you are in an amazingly advantageous position.
One way in which I personally like to abuse this is very similar to two concepts in Psychology – Pavlovian/Classical Conditioning and the Wisconsin Card Sort (hence the pretentious title of this entry).
To give a heavily abridged explanation of both concepts:
Pavlov was a dick who, through rewarding good behaviour, and punishing bad behaviour in dogs, found they could be trained to react in a particular manner through this method of positive reinforcement/negative punishment.
The WCST is a test used in clinical neuropsychology to diagnose mental illnesses. It involves sorting cards via various rules which are suddenly changed mid-way through the task with measurement of how long it takes before the subject picks up on the rule.
To translate this to a fighting game, essentially, you ‘train’ your opponent in a certain way. Repeat a particular offensive pattern a few times, see how they react. This is essentially the ‘training’ component, if they aren’t using whatever tool their character has to get out of your offense (which you SHOULD understand if you have character knowledge), continue to abuse it. When they eventually catch on, change the rules.
One example of this I’d almost a person signature of my game is what I dub Stomp-Slide Shenannigans, with M.Bison in Street Fighter 4, the dude with the pimpin’ hat.
Curb-Stomping - For Real Men
Basically, it starts with Bison’s headstomp, where he flies up and stomps on your head (hence the name) that has to be blocked high. After that, Bison can fly to either side of the opponent and land, or do a flying punch followup thing if he’s close to them, that also has to be blocked high. Alternatively, he can land either side of the opponent and THEN do something.
The Stomp-Slide is named as it involves mixing up his EX Head Stomp, which has high priority, knocks down the opponent, but costs super-bar and his Slide. His slide, which has to be blocked low, is basically him magically sliding across the ground and knocking down the opponent if it lands. But if it’s blocked, it’s generally very punishable since it takes a fair while to recover.
The magic of the Stomp-Slide revolves around the fact that the other person may have no clue what you’re doing and otherwise, you’ve got a craptonne of options anyway.
1: Start with an EX Headstomp, preferably after they’re already knocked down so it’s much harder to avoid, if it connects, they’re knocked down again and you can then do ANOTHER EX Headstomp, repeating the loop. (Now I think about it, this really would be easier to explain with a diagram)
2: If it is blocked, you can then fly to either side of the opponent and land, or do the hands followup. Most are probably aware Bison has the hands followup. This is the OPPOSITE of mind-fucking with the fact that they don’t know what’s going on. You want to be playing RPS with rules they don’t understand as yet.
I generally fly to the OPPOSITE side of the opponent, thereby forcing them to switch the side they are blocking on. You hold back from your opponent to block, so if they blocked left, they’d now block the next attack right.
3: THEN, from the opposite side of the opponent you slide, which forces them to block low AND on the opposite side to where they were previously. Thus, they’ve had to both change blocking height AND direction. If the slide connects, you get ANOTHER knockdown and can potentially start the loop back at 1.
#3 is helped a lot by the fact that people often try to do a counter attack AFTER the headstomp to catch you and the slide generally catches that.
The thing that ‘makes’ the trick, is the fact that the slide has different recovery depending on the distance you do it from. Hence, people generally attempt to counter-attack AFTER it’s been blocked, however, if you do the slide from it’s maximum range, you actually recover before the opposing character, something you’d only really know if you played the character, and definitely not know with little experience against Bison, and if you were getting destroyed by stomp-slides (which DO take off large chunks of health)
Assuming they learn to block the stomp/slide crossup, LET them start a block string on you or throw out an attack after your slide, block that a few times, REWARD their behaviour by letting them out of the offensive situation. Then, when there’s a clear pattern that they ARE attempting to counter-attack after a safe slide, Take it to Wisconsin.
Change the rules, react in a different way and punish their followup with an attack with invincibility or a very fast normal attack. Bison’s EX Psycho Crusher and EX Scissor Kick are both perfect for this as they have invincibility on startup and the charge requirement can be buffered into his slide. Or, if you want to be mega-risky, do his Ultra attack which starts up much slower and is VERY punishable if blocked but also does a craptonne of damage.
Or instead of sliding, do the punch follow up, which is safe if blocked and has to be blocked high (and does good damage if it DOES connect). Essentially, you’ve got a million and one options that your opponent may not even comprehend, and that’s JUST off the one move.
To give a brief-ish Tekken example to kind of show the relative transferability of the concept, Julia Chang, a relatively-boring-character-designed American-Indian chick has a jab string that can end in a mid, a low or a delayed mid.
Julia Chang: Non-Descript to the Max
People generally in Tekken block high due to the fact that launchers that lead to large damage combos GENERALLY come from mid attacks that are unsafe on block. So, abusing that with Julia’s block chain, end it in a low which should catch them, then end it with a low again.
If they block low, start ending it with the mid. They’ll then probably start trying to hit you AFTER the mid followup is used a few times, so change the rules AGAIN and use the delayed-mid which feints the final mid hit, comes out slower and catches counter-attackers. OR you could just do the first hit of the block chain after they’ve been trained to block mid, then attempt to throw them, which will catch a standing opponent, even if they are blocking. If they aren’t expecting it, they probably won’t be able to escape it.
Essentially, you have a move you want to use, they have a counter to it, you have a counter to their counter and it all goes around in circles until you can get back to the original move you want to use. And this is pretty much a giant rehash of this much better article.
Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock, it’s all there is to it, really.
