I’m posting this here in the hopes it will generate some good discussion…
World-renowned media scholar Henry Jenkins has posted a piece I wrote to his blog about the influx of post-SFIV members to SRK. The essay looks both at what makes SF unique and the problems that can arise in fan communities such as ours. Please check it out!
Also note that it was written for a media studies audience, so it talks about some fighting game mechanics is very simplistic terms (I had to assume the reader knew nothing about SF).
That was a pretty solid read even if it “wasn’t what I was expecting”. I don’t know if I agree with your thesis that we need to make the new members feel welcome if more iterations are to be released. Really, I think the only thing that determines that is game sales, but I guess if the next immediate instalment comes out and doesn’t sell too hot, then some burden could be placed on the community?
Character mechanics forming a big part of their ongoing narrative is an interesting take on things, though it’s something to keep in mind I suppose. Strong characterisation is essential to these games, even if narrative flow takes a back seat to the games mechanics.
Yeah I think this is really good. The character’s designs, movelists help form an idea of their personality, and the continuing matches make the metagame and the interactions within it into kind of a narrative for the community. If someone wins a hugely disadvantaged matchup, it becomes more interesting for the people watching the game and the people who play the game. I think that it being sort of an evolving story rather than a static one is what makes it interesting.
Well, it’s probably not essential to welcome new people, but it certainly helps My main concern is that the player base will decline again like it did after SF2. Video game genres have a tendency to cater increasingly to the hardcore audience, creating an ever-shrinking yet ever-more-dedicated player base. Compare Starcraft with Supreme Commander, or even SF2 to SFA3 and you can see it in action. We might even see the cycle happen again if the current SF4 player base wants the next iteration to be more hardcore and Capcom delivers.
That’s a good point, I honestly did not think about the evolution of matchups or tiers, though I guess I hinted at it in the discussion of game balance. This is in the same vein, I think: by following the series for a long time the history of those matchups and tiers becomes embedded in how you interpret the game now, just as previous moves/combos/etc do. But yeah the metagame is a great area for study :tup:
EDIT: OHHHHH I see you wrote it, I thought you said he wrote it and I posted it on here!
Oh right well, it was good, so good in fact I text my GF to tell her about it as I am a keen media student and doing game design next year, and I think communities are a very important yet untapped area of game design.
Interesting read. Bit confused though. The introduction and conclusion imply an essay about a fan community and its recent evolution, while the body focuses on the nature of character development within a genre of video games. Seems to me like it should be two different essays.
That is a weakness of it yeah, though generally what I was going for is how the awareness of that type of character development helps define fan communities.
I’d say we did need to. People continuously leave a community, but they only really join one at certain points (ie new game releases). You can’t hope to get better competition with an ever-dwindling number of members. The more fans the better, if you ask me. It doesn’t matter if they are new or oldskool, or young, or whatever.
Game sales - you’ll get a base level of sales for each game (ie the hardcore community), but this will generally be much smaller than the general public, who represent most of the sales. If you want to sell more copies (and we should be interested in this actually, if we want sequels), then you need a bit of media hype, and you need general casual gamers to be interested. The more people get into a game, the more of them can be expected to become fans in the longer term. And the way this community goes in alienating everyone (including old-timers), we need to hang on to as many of the newbies as possible. Some of them will go on to become good players, in spite of the negative welcome they get on here. There’s no need for us to be elitist about things and assume they will never get beyond scrub level.
I guess that’s a deep subject. Comparing to the early 1990s, the internet has really transformed things. There is no shortage of angles to examine the impact that communications technology and organized communities have had on promotion and success of media titles. And it’s still evolving to this day, with a lot still to understand.
You could write on that subject all day. It would still be a fairly trivial and pointless exercise, and if you ask me should not be something that appears on a university syllabus, but still, for somebody funding it themself, you will never run out of approaches to the issue, or avenues for the analysis.
That’s an interesting stance. Currently numerous media companies are investing an enormous amount of money, including into my department, to try and understand how this works. You can call it “trivial and pointless” but the guy who figures it out is going to be pretty damn successful.
^ yeah, well, I guess my point is, loads of people want to take film and media studies, many of them in the hope of somehow becoming famous or whatever. What none of them realise is that it’s oversubscribed and that 99.99% of them will end up nowhere, with a debt and holding a certificate that doesn’t really guarantee a job or anything else.
As for media companies trying to exploit how it works, yeah, I’m sure they are - I used to work as a business analyst in the mobile space, and directed one of the world’s first conferences on mobile entertainment communities and UGC. However, consumer behaviour is never 100% predictable - people do random things, especially teenagers. I’ll accept that viral marketing is the holy grail and promises billions to anybody who can figure it out reliably, but in the real world the consumer bahaviour patterns are evolving at the same speed as the understanding, so it will take the market to mature for another 5-10 years before it stabilizes and anybody can think of harnessing it as a way to easy money.
Still, it’s all very interesting from a SF fan’s point of view, and makes excellent reading on a message board like this. A great distraction, and very thought provoking. But at the moment, I feel that the “success” will be limited to the publication of management textbooks that promise the earth and deliver little, and I don’'t really count that as success.
Yeah well new strategies being figured out for a character or someone deciding to play them in a new way constitutes an evolutionary step for the character in basically the same way as a new iteration of them coming out, just on a shorter timeline, and it effects our perceptions of the character as the game continues to evolve. A good example is like juggernaut in MvC2. For a while, lots of people played him because the juggernaut glitch was good, but as the matchups changed, he became less and less powerful and less and less widely used. The perception of that character changed on its own without a new iteration of the character. Basically he went from being the juggernaut to just juggernaut, haha.
It’s an interesting point, but I think we need to distinguish between two different things. On the one hand you have player perception of characters, which is based on both their historical knowledge of how the character plays, and what you have described here.
But you can also talk about just the formal history of the characters as well, which excludes player perception. I would argue that in MvC2 Juggernaut was always worth X, but the player base’s understanding of X has evolved. In other words, within MvC2 he was always the same character, whereas he is different between XvSF and MvC2.
So I would say both points are valid; their use would just depend on what you want to talk about.
My main concern is that the player base will decline again like it did after SF2. Video game genres have a tendency to cater increasingly to the hardcore audience, creating an ever-shrinking yet ever-more-dedicated player base. Compare Starcraft with Supreme Commander, or even SF2 to SFA3 and you can see it in action. We might even see the cycle happen again if the current SF4 player base wants the next iteration to be more hardcore and Capcom delivers.