We all know that people aren’t the same as one another, this is also true in the games people like to play, some people like play with each other or competitively against one another, by themselves or with friends and even how difficult the game is. The fact that lots of people have different tastes in comparison to each other really goes to show why different games genres seem to strive so much! This includes one of my personal favorites genres Fighting games, nothing really beats the feeling of only you and the character you choose against your opponent against theirs in a one versus one style match. Some problems are included though a prime example of this is a community I’m in, the “Guilty Gear” community whose game series is commonly regarded as some of the most complicated fighting games with such a diverse cast of characters who play differently to each other. This causes them to be fairly marginalized the fighting game sphere as being called too difficult. I’ve decided to make a study on this community through the app discord due to how as of right now it is being nominated for the award of “The Best Fighting Game of 2021” with its newest title “Guilty Gear -Strive-“.
The Guilty Gear games is a fairly complex game with various gameplay mechanics with a combination of fast paced combat and because of that this makes new players not want to try the game at all and avoid it and its community could be an instance of being scared of losing. Like an article says, when losing there would be a cause of rage and even if someone else won while the main player would lose would be specifically frustrating. (Kahlia 2021). That being said with this is especially true for fighting games, after all the only ones participating in the game is you and your opponent with no one else to rely on, not understanding the game and its mechanics against someone could be pretty harsh to a new person and with good reason people don’t want to play in order not to experience that frustration. Something that also comes to mind is how there is most people play video games to end up relaxing and not really looking for much when it comes to any type of competition. ( Front. Psychol., 2019). Some people aren’t looking for anything too complicated and the idea of having to learn a bunch of different mechanics in order to be able to play with others effectively is pretty hard to do as all they would do is lose against people who know how to play the game in fairly effective ways constantly until they would either learn their mistakes or learn the other functions of the game in order to improve themselves.
Looking at the community in a 3rd perspective was quite a treat they seem to know how difficult the game is and welcome all types of players with open arms using the power of discord. Discord allows the community to interact with each other in organized formatted ways, on the side of the forum at all times are various topics from finding games with players on the same system as you to new player advice to character specific forums. This allows players of all skill ranges to enter where they want to go and find out what they want to know fairly quickly! Say for example you want to find out cool information and what the game plan is for the character named “Sol Badguy” ,without noting how strange that name is, instead of going on a hunt asking people everywhere for information, you can simply click on the tab created for the character and there players from the whole server who have that same interest would be talking there you could even consider it a small community inside a much larger one as each of these smaller groups have their own jokes and own interactions separate from the main chat this isn’t for just one character however this is for the whole cast of playable ones! Which at the time of this writing is 17 with the 18th one coming on November 30th. None of these character play the same as one another and are all very colorful and unique in their own ways as are their groups. For example during a small observation in one of the character chats specifically for a character called May what I ended up seeing was players constantly sending each other pictures of the character in question drawn in a small fashion with the text “STUPID” written on the bottom as well as them constantly saying “Totsugeki” which is something the character shouts in the game in a very common move the character uses becoming a joke within the community. This is more done as some sort of teasing with the players in this chat however as everyone seems to use it and when asked these players will tell new comers the positives about their character and would try to hook them into playing their character by saying you get to ride dolphins to beat your enemies and speak on how the character is fairly a good place to start even if defensively May isn’t strong. This in comparison to the “Ky Kiske” chat with players talking about ways to increase their offensive abilities as they seem agree that the character in question seems to be lacking the tools to offensively for a lot of times in comparison to the rest of the cast.
On one of my next times of observing the server I made it a priority on how new players were treated for system mechanics and not just about character specific moments. This was fairly easy to find as conveniently enough there was a chat for that too! When entering this chat I got to witness first hand a veteran player explaining to a new player who had trouble understanding the system mechanic called “BURST”. To put into sort terms what BURST is a tool that allows the player to push back their opponent a large distance away, hence the name BURST, when hit correctly like if the opponent is not blocking, this can be activated at any time when the BURST gauge is full, for offense it is effective as it can keep the opponent in a spot where the player wants them as well as replenishing other resources and for defense BURST is very effective as it can be activated in the middle of getting hit into a combo cutting that combo short. The new player didn’t quite understand that and insisted that the mechanic had provided a few seconds of invincibility to the player who had activated it. After a bit of explaining the veteran player very politely explained why the new player was wrong by also showing in game what the mechanic actually does. This is just one instance of this happening but it’s more common than you expect as even though the game is hard for the people who are willing to learn the always have questions on what works and doesn’t work.
Speaking of in game play nearly every hour or half hour I would always get mentioned via a special tag players chose when first entering the server after a bit of looking I found out what this was. Match requests, anyone can initiate these and can specify what players can join on a few tags like what coast you play on , the system you play on and what character you play. Due to me not adding many tags just the generic ones like what coast I live I didn’t receive many but scrolling through the chats I found that there were chats for these, mainly if you played on console or computer, when seeing people respond players would enter a voice chat and talk to each other about where in game they will find each other to start the match. I joined one in order to listen to what was going on and to my surprise it was fairly tame people would compliment each other middle of games telling each other that they love the combo the opponent they did, excitedly yell when the players would get into very intense games, then after the games tell each other “good game” and tell each other what they could do to improve in the game. There was no limit to people joining however at any point a new player could come in ask if they could join and gladly be introduced into the match taking turns on who would get to fight who. There would however be moments where a person would get angry and complain about why they were losing and not understanding what they did wrong or saying that they had lost because of a bad internet connection or saying how their opponent’s character was “broken” a term used to say how a character is too strong in comparison to the rest of the cast.
While the community is fairly small everyone supports each other and after this hour of watching these players interact with each other I can say for certain there’s no wonder why the game “Guilty Gear -Strive-” is getting nominated for Best Fighting of 2021. Even though the game itself is complicated it surprises me how quickly veteran players come to the aid of new players in order to help them improve about system mechanics to how they can do better in matches. I also absolutely am in love with the fact that the community has no shame in making small jokes each character has one a few include as follows for Sol Badguy a “Monke” as everything he does is so good even a monkey can play him, for Leo Whitefang a character well know for amazing offense pressure a “Gorilla” since he is a bit scruffy and has some of the highest damage in the game, May under “Totsugeki” since that’s one of the main things she says in her best move which funny enough is her riding a dolphin, Zato=1 under the name of “Big Brain Eddie” as he is really complicated basically using two characters at the same time one being Zato himself and a partner named Eddie a shadow puppet who appears when summoned for a few seconds and a last example of Ky Kiske “Dragon uninstall” as the character has an alternate form called “Dragon install” but it’s so weak that almost no one uses it. It is disturbing however are the few people who take it just a bit too far making these harmless jokes more into stigmas against players who play these characters almost giving the attitude of every character is broken except for their own character, thankfully however those people are few and far between the sea of friendly people.
Works cited
(Juho Kahlia 2021) ‘IF THE GAME DOES NOT WORK, IT IS LAGGING, OR YOU DIE IN GAME, YOU JUST GET FURIOUS’ – CHILDREN’S EXPERIENCES ON GAMER RAGE
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2883/paper3.pdf
( Front. Psychol 2019 ) The Association Between Video Gaming and Psychological Functioning
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01731/full
You made it to the end! I didn’t think anyone would really go down much further than the sources, so as I gift I will provide to you a few images and gifs from the server itself and what character mentioned in the essay it pertains to to get a better sense of comedy that is shown in the server at this current time.
As one last image to show would be some of the more lighthearted cute images that the artist who helped make the game made as a thank you to all the people who helped the game sell over 500k copies world wide
