The Impact Factor

EVO, eSports and Why Fighting Games Matter

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Abstract: Evolution (EVO) is the largest fighting game tournament in the world, and has been one of the highlights of my summer for the past five years. EVO 2015 was no exception, packed with skilled players and tons of great matches. EVO got me thinking about eSports and the fighting game community’s (FGC) place within it. Several inherent factors uniquely situate fighting games in a place where exponential growth as a scene, and eSport, could occur. As I think about my history with fighting games, I can appreciate their contemporary existence and get excited about their future. Fighting games matter, and you should give them a chance.

It was hot and muggy, one of those summer days in Philadelphia that doesn’t stop until long after the sun has set. I was spending the summer working on my honors thesis, all day in lab and all night with the amazing Justine. With the recent release of Marvel vs Capcom 3 my passion for fighting games had been fully rekindled—I could not get enough of them. I spent the entire month long PSN outage in the game’s training mode. I started watching streams. Playing whenever I got the chance. I even tried my hand at Ultra Street Fighter IV. But something big was coming. That was Evolution (EVO), the biggest fighting game tournament in the world. For the first time ever I tuned in via Twitch streams. The tournament passed by in a flash of absolute brilliance. I was totally sucked in, staying up well past 2am to watch the finals unfold. I sat with Justine, watching in awe of the skill on display at this phenomenal event. I knew, from that point forward, EVO would be something I watch every year. How could I not?

There is always plenty of great matches to watch during EVO weekend. 

That was 2011. Now four years and five EVOs later, EVO 2015 is in the books. As always, the tournament was the greatest display of fighting game skill you can find anywhere. I tuned into as much of the pool play as I could. I made sure to catch as many finals as possible. I’m so glad I did. The awesome Persona 4 Arena Ultimax and Super Smash Bros. Wii U finals led into the jam-packed Sunday series of Top 8’s. We had the crowd exploding in excitement over crazy characters and huge player flubs in Guilty Gear Xrd. Mortal Kombat X solidified the rule of the indisputable king of Nether Realms games. Super Smash Bros. Melee was filled with upsets and intensity. UMVC3 saw America dethroned as Mahvel champs, and shook up the whole notion of tier lists. And then there was USFIV. The finals, losers and grand finals especially, were some of the most dramatic, tense, skillful, technical, smart, heartbreaking, and crazy matches I’ve ever seen. I can’t put into words how compelling it was. Please do yourselves a favor and watch it. As big as other events like The International or the League of Legends finals are, EVO is my world championship of choice. EVO 2015 was exceptional, exciting, enthralling, and any other positive ‘e’ adjective you can think of.

Watch the finals. You'll know what this means. It was INSANE.

It’s hard to talk EVO in today’s gaming environment without the world of ‘eSports’ coming to mind. I want to live in a world where it’s just as normal to watch EVO as it is to watch the World Series. eSports are big now, and they’re only getting bigger. That said, however, there have been numerous roadblocks standing in the way of eSports’s mainstream acceptance. The biggest, and certainly most unavoidable, roadblock has been time and money. Like anything else, eSports / competitive gaming needs time to grow. Huge leaps and bounds have been made on this front in recent years: tournament applicants are larger now than they ever have been, more and more teams are forming, and viewership is at an all time high. The money is starting to build. Prize pools are growing as advertisers are jumping on board this growing scene. Large non-gaming-affiliated companies are starting to sponsor teams and events as well, as we’ve seen with GEICO's Hearthstone sponsorship. I’m of the opinion that mainstream eSports acceptance is an inevitability. We’ll be seeing DOTA2 or LoL or Street Fighter on ESPN’s main channel sooner rather than later.

The Hearthstone eSports scene is growing at a pretty rapid rate. Behold the power
of a massive playerbase and good sponsor money.

But more can be done to expedite this process. The fighting game community (FGC), perhaps more so than any other competitive gaming scene, are taking steps to work towards this future. As my good friend and podcast co-host Charles Fliss wrote on his excellent blog, for eSports to succeed they need “more character and less advertising,” they need “celebrity.” When watching sports, individuals develop a connection with the athletes as much as they do the sport or team. Fliss writes how video games have a fundamental problem that physical sports do not: “there is a disconnect between the person playing and the game itself. The player controls an avatar…[whereas physical athletes are] inseparable from [their] sport.” Fliss argues quite effectively that you need to know the athlete and understand their skill to develop a relationship with eSports. His solution? “eSports lends itself to the theatrical nature of the world of…WWE.” Fighting games have engendered theatricality for quite some time. Take the Community Effort Orlando (CEO) tournament as a recent example. The finals take place in a facsimile of a WWE wrestling ring. Several players even adopted WWE-like entrances, which gained so much traction they were even written about on ESPN. Positive word of mouth on the biggest sports news website can only be a good thing, and I hope the FGC can keep this forward momentum going. My favorite two entrances are below.

The 1 versus 1 battles in fighting games give them an inherent advantage over many of the other popular eSports. One of the chief complaints levied against watching eSports is that you don’t know what the hell is going on. Fair enough. The first time I tuned into The International, the biggest DOTA2 tournament in the world, I had no clue what was happening. Was it exciting? Sure, I guess. But understanding what’s transpiring on screen is a huge obstacle to new viewership. In general, video games often have more complex rule sets than conventional physical sports, adding to the initial work that is required to grasp what’s going on. In fighting games, however, it’s easy to understand the basic situation. The first person who gets hit more, losing more of their health bar, loses. I recently showed my non-gamer Ph.D. candidate friend a match of Ultra Street Fighter IV and within a couple rounds he grasped who was who, and who was doing better. I’d say that’s the level at which most follow physical sports. The one v one format is also advantageous in demonstrating individual player skill which, again, is strongly compelling. Often times the cameras will pan to show the player inputting their commands (i.e. pressing buttons), allowing you to see the speed and precision they rely upon to win.

I’d say the final advantage of the format is that competitive fighting games look almost nothing like regular play. Watching a pro match of Call of Duty looks only slightly different than when you play online. Watching professionals play Heroes of the Storm or Hearthstone is great, but again suffers from looking like ‘regular’ gameplay. I know the skill that goes into being pros in those scenes, and it’s a lot, but it simply looks less impressive. For anyone whose spent any time at all with a fighting game, be it at an arcade or on console, it doesn’t take long to recognize the matches going on don’t look anything like when you and your friends played after school. And that’s powerful.

In both the competitive gaming scene, as well as the larger world of gaming, fighting games exist in a relatively small niche. Prize pools are small, viewership is dwarfed by many other titles, and the games don’t generally sell well. It devastates me. Fighting games have meant a lot to me over the years. The more I think about them now, the more I appreciate them in a broader context, and hope that others will do the same. Fighting games have a long history of bringing people together. At an arcade, you made new friends and rivals. At home, you solidified friendships and lost hours and hours to intense competition. The FGC is perhaps one of the most diverse communities in all of eSports / competitive gaming. Its arcade roots are at the core of this. No matter who you are, or where you come from, if you have the skill you’re accepted into the FGC family. Rich or poor, able bodied or not, whatever your ethnicity or race, it’s your skill that gains you entrance. That is awesome. And, for the most part, the community acts like a family. It gives players a second home. (NOTE: Huge issues still remain in the FGC about inclusion, especially when it comes to women. My above statements predominantly apply to males. I don’t mean to diminish the notably inclusive nature of the FGC with this footnote, but I also do not want to pretend there aren’t still significant hurdles to overcome as the community moves forward.)

Fighting games bring people together.

But so many people are afraid to jump into fighting games. If someone gives a reason for not trying out fighting games, it’s often that “fighting games are just too hard to play.” In some regards, I agree that fighting games have an accessibility problem. In USFIV for example, some characters have combos that required doing an input in 1/60^th of a second. Or inputting 2+ moves simultaneously. But fighting games are more accessible now than they have ever been. And as we keep our eyes trained on the future, fighting games are looking to become even easier to pick up and play. You have games like Divekick that only require two total buttons to play, teaching players fundamentals like spacing, footsies, and resource management. Rising Thunder is an upcoming game from Seth Killian in which every attack is just a single button press. Skullgirls that has a training mode that does an excellent job of running through all the essentials to generally understanding how to play a fighting game. Even the biggest of big titles like Street Fighter V are taking huge strides towards accessibility, as can be seen by their panel at this year’s EVO. Sure, playing at the highest level will take a substantial time investment. But that’s true for any eSport. Or anything done at ‘the highest level.’

I love the core design philosophy behind SFV. It looks to take what's
great about Street Fighter and situate it in a modern context.

So please, if you take anything away from this piece it’s this: give fighting games a chance. They’re easy to pick up and deceptively complex. They embrace theatricality and celebrity. They have an amazingly passionate community to give you the resources and support you need. And above all? They’re just fun to play. So watch some streams, pick up a game or two. Maybe I’ll see you at next year’s EVO.

Games like Rising Thunder make me excited for the future of fighting games.
I want you to get excited too!

(Final footnote: I dislike the term eSports. So does the majority of the FGC. Not only does it draw unhelpful comparisons to physical sports, it also sets unrealistic viewer expectations. Not to mention plenty of legal headaches, as people like David Graham ('UltraDavid') have written about. There was too much to get into about that here. It looks like the term is sticking, though. At least for now.)