A lot of my time spent in the fighting game community over the years has been spent answering questions. It still is in fact to a large degree spent answering questions. Questions which are rarely very good and often lead to bad answers. So I figured I’d take some time out of my day to write a bit about questions and answers in relation to learning fighting games.

Too broad, too bad

Bad questions often come to me in the form of incredibly broad and/or vague questions. Not only is it incredibly hard to answer super-broad questions without asking follow ups yourself. You also risk having the answer devolve into some sort of 4-page essay if you do try to answer. Broad and or vague questions are also more likely to invite answers from people who think that they are easily distilled to specific answers i.e. morons. I mention this because in the age of chat software like Discord being the main tool for fighting game related discourse, it has become increasingly easy to end up getting your bad questions answered by people who don’t know what they are talking about. These nuggets of garbage are then propagated by the person asking the question and if left unchecked can poison a large swathe of the conversation.

An example of a bad question could be “As character X what’s my neutral?” or “What do I do as X vs Y?”. These questions are almost impossible to answer without either prodding the person asking more specifically what they are trying to achieve, or by giving a 40 page booklet as your answer (a bad answer then). The questions are entirely too broad to be tackled without being broken down into pieces. On top of this in an open and quickly moving forum such as Discord you get the aforementioned people who believe they can be answered with a sentence or two. It is not rare to see an answer that looks something like “X character has no neutral, you just go in” or “You want to sidestep left vs Y”. Incredibly vague questions met with answers that mean equally little.

Another thing to note about extremely broad questions is that generally speaking the people answering have no way to know the level of the person asking the question beforehand. Answers regarding fighting games in general tend to often end up differing quite a lot depending on how skillful the person asking is and it is way harder to adapt an answer to a broad question. The more specific the easier it becomes to give several concrete options that are easy to grasp.

Specificity is key

The key to asking good questions that will help you improve is to be as specific as you can. Instead of asking “what is my neutral?” try breaking down the parts you identify as problematic and specifically target them. A better question could look something like

“In the midrange I am having trouble approaching my opponent without getting counter hit, how can I fix this?”

This gives the person answering the question a much better framework to start from. As mentioned before the more specific the easier it is to give helpful advice.

But can you be too specific when asking a question? I find it quite tough to imagine a question too specific in fighting games. Unless the person asking is particularly looking for an answer with broader application. But even then answers to specific situations in fighting games are generally applicable in other situations anyway, and it is much easier to ask a follow up question to a concrete answer than to try to digest a massive essay covering a wider topic than you were actually interested in.

Avoid asking value based questions

A big pitfall in terms of asking quality questions also comes in the form of value based questions. Stop me if you've ever asked or been asked the following “Is character X good?”, or “What are my best moves?”. Questions like these are not only bad because they are to a much larger degree open to subjective interpretation, but they also don’t teach the person asking anything. Even if we were to concede that a character could be reduced to objectively good or bad moves, just knowing what they are tells you very little.

Unoptimized q/a in effect

The same thing could be said for character strength, if you the reader are at all familiar with fighting games you will probably know that reports of character strength will differ wildly from one moment to the next. To compound the issue, character strength doesn't scale at the same rate as player skill. Newer players often get hung up on what character is considered the strongest at the highest level but fail to understand that their dominance only shines through when executed perfectly. If you want to improve at fighting games, or any competitive escapade really. I strongly suggest you start asking questions that let you build up a solid base of understanding, rather than questions that will inevitably lead to you being molded into an amorphous blob of vague statements and values based on whims.

Not black and white

It would be amiss of me not to mention that all types of questions obviously have their place in the discussion of fighting games. Very open ended questions can often times lead to things like new and effective approaches to tackling issues a character faces in a matchup. But for fighting games, these broad questions should in my opinion mostly be relegated to the area of inviting theory-crafting. This because they generally require all parties involved to have a decently wide knowledge base to begin with.

Can simple answers be good? Of course, but in my experience simple answers to broad questions tend to be sketchy at best and most often stem from a misguided perspective. Can value based questions lead to productive thought? Certainly so, but you are almost always better off building an understanding of the game in which to base your own opinions on, rather than willfully parade someone else’s.