That you’ll leave out games you’d want and include games you don’t?
It’s integral to my point - You’d have a worthless ‘definition’.
At that point, all you have to do is say “Any game with ‘Fight’ in the title is a fighter” and be done with it.
lol WIN!:woot::woot::woot:
It’s not about getting what you want. That’s not how categorization works. You lay out a set of conditions that describe what you’re attempting to classify and you make your inclusions and exclusions based on that–not on personal whims.
If this means that Scott McCloud’s superb definition of comics necessarily excludes single panel cartoons like The Far Side or Non-Sequitur, and if it means that the IAU’s definition of a planet necessarily excludes Pluto, well, that’s tough titties.
Which is an example of something you can’t provide, because it deals in absolutes.
Planets are “A,B,C”. Plutoids are “D,E,F”. Asteroids are “G,H,I”.
Genre is subjective. I’ve illustrated that.
The IAU didn’t say:
Planets are “A,B,C” and sometimes “D”. When is sometimes? Whenever.
The IAU deals in mass, composition, orbit: The Quantitative.
Artistic genre deals in mood, theme, concept: The Qualitative.
Believe me, don’t believe me, that’s fine. I’ll be easy to disprove if you can muster your criterion. But no matter how you slice it, you’re going to wind up with a malformed definition. There will be glaring omissions and glaring admissions to the point that you might as well just say… whatever.
Fighters have Two Guys Punching Each Other.
It’ll be as effective as anything else.
This is actually a pretty cool thread. 
Recently when I’m alone with my really lame thoughts I’ve been puzzling out what it is that makes fighting games so much more appealing to me–and, presumably, you guys too–than any other (good) type of competitive video game. Stuff like Counter-Strike, Starcraft, other and newer titles and genres… they’re definitely fun, cool games and I respect their top players a lot, but I just can’t imagine personally having the interest or motivation to practice and learn them seriously.
Then I wonder what players of those kinds of games think of people who dedicate themselves to fighting games. Then I think about h… oh god no female can ever find out about how nerdy my thoughts are if I want to get laid ever again.
Let me ask you guys this:
Do you consider Fight Night or UFC games a “fighting” game? or as they are stickered in retail as “sports” titles?
/discuss…
No, genre is subjective only in certain respects. The entire reason genres exist is because there are certain conditions in place that act as heuristics for defining them. The reason we have such a poor grasp of what exactly constitutes a fighting game at this point is because it’s very difficult to whittle down just what those conditions are. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
You can easily find many quantitative features in a video game. Many of them have already been mentioned as potential criteria in this thread–the presence or absence of a gauge for how close a player is to losing, for example. There is nothing qualitative about that.
But throwing up our hands and just saying “whatever” isn’t the focus of this thread, is it? If that’s what you’ve settled on, then I don’t see what your remaining purpose is in this thread.
I’d rather people give their opinion and say it’s a bad fighting game than to out right say it’s not a fighting game at all in all honesty.
Genre being subjective SOME of the time. We agree on that. However that rules genre out an absolute use for ALL of the time. Even if it was quantitative 99% of the time - which it’s not even close to - your partitioning of games into genres will still fail 1% of the time. Realistically, it’s probably closer to 50% of the time.
As far as there being a magical combination of concepts…What proof do you have that it exists? I can illustrate examples which defy genre. The fact that you want there to be those conditions doesn’t make it so. It’s the logical fallacy known as ‘argument from ignorance’ or possibly ‘argument from personal incredulity’.
Again, it is impossible for me to prove this negative. I’ve offered up examples which do not fit the conventional mold of ‘fighter’, yet meet all of the qualifications one would logically consider. This is all I can do.
I eagerly await even the first cursory attempt at your conditions that would properly include or exclude these games.
And it’s this ubiquity that FORCES the onus onto the thematic. The fact that so many games of every type have that type of gauge makes it, essentially, useless for classification. It’d be like saying “Planets are made of matter”… While true, so MANY things are made of matter that aren’t planets that it becomes a meaningless criteria.
A man can’t be bored?
Look… all I’m doing is pointing out the Spruce Goose won’t fly. Doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy watching the crash.
Except…I would consider UFC games and wrestling games a type of fighting game. It really is that simple to me.
You’re the one insisting on absolutes, not me. For just about everyone else here, heuristics–something that isn’t designed to stand up to the kind of scrutiny that it will most likely seldom run into–will do fine.
Making unwarranted assumptions about somebody’s argument and then drawing conclusions based on those unwarranted assumptions is known as the straw man fallacy. But you know that.
I really shouldn’t be spending this much time discussing this, so I’ll refer you to Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. In addition to being a superb book in general, it includes a chapter devoted not only to McCloud’s definition of comics, but also his process for arriving at that definition. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how it could–in theory–be applied to fighting games.
No, it doesn’t. Think about what you’re saying. Yeah, by itself, “planets are made of matter” is a useless criterion. Most criteria are useless when strictly taken on their own. If you ask me what a lemon is and I tell you that it’s a yellow thing, that doesn’t give you a good idea of what a lemon is. But if we determine that a lemon is yellow, that it is roughly fist-sized, and that it is a citric fruit, we narrow it down considerably. Criteria become much more useful when taken together rather than on their own.
This is more like the Wright Brother’s plane–it’s purely experimental, it will fly very briefly, and then we’ll all get bored of the History Channel and find a different channel to watch until someone else flips back to it.
Just some random input at ~4AM…
By your definition, would Shadow of the Colossus be a fighting game?
Heck, Twisted Metal is a fighting game too. >_>
Dude… here’s a straw man:
“Captain Crunch is a nazi sympathizer because he secretly supported Hilter”.
I’m taking an unproven premise, coupling it with an unprovable evidence, specifically to demonize the crunch. There are all kinds of variations, but at the end of the day it’s where I make an argument so I can attack it. Usually it’s an argument for the otherside to create a weak point. Here’s what happened:
Your Premise: An existent, undiscovered set of criteria to properly describe fighting games exist.
Your Evidence: …?
I don’t know ‘specifically’ why you believe that. You’re not sharing it with me. Calling it an argument from personal incredulity is fair and logical. All I can assume is you think it exists, because you can’t imagine it not existing.
I’ve read it. It’s not without it’s detractors.
Which is all very gravy. It is. But Lemons are homogenized - there’s not that much variation.
I have no problem with that. You see it as a chance to kill some time. I, personally, see a chance to maybe - maybe - help people understand critical thinking. To me, that’s time well spent.
And I never said a heuristic would fail all the time. Just a notable part of the time.
One of the lynch pins of my argument has been there are no clearly defined boundaries between genres.
I’ve even specifically said that it’ll work well for ‘ideal’ games.
If your point is it won’t work all the time, then we have nothing to discuss in that regard because I agree.
However, I’m curious to why you think that. My belief is because genre is subjective and not absolute you can’t properly classify blindly. You don’t agree with that point. So why do you think it’ll fail part of the time?
If you still think you’re wasting your time, feel free to just address that one point.
Whoa, this debate has become such a mindfuck. 
Things have started getting philosophical, people are re-framing each other’s statements and ideas. The analogies, points and counterpoints have become increasingly abstract, and there’s so little topical anchorage left at times, it’s easy to think that it’s the semantics of conceptual theory being argued. Jeez, I’m just proud of myself for not having had to use a dictionary (yet).
It’s all fine and dandy to declare “we can’t truly know anything so we can’t truly learn or identify anything” and sit on that, but it doesn’t get us anywhere, hahah.
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The criteria is what was already being discussed to this, and should be based around–but should not be defined by–ideal examples.
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The criteria isn’t meant to be polarizing. It’s not meant to be a rigid classification system because it’s expected that (many) cases will fall between or outside of accepted genre criteria. Indeed, the “pure” ideal criteria may not actually exist as one specific instance.
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The criteria exists as a basis for comparison. It provides reference points from which we can derive insight. Relative proximity to these reference points affords us a loose and approximate “classification,” which, as dictated by the limits of perception, is the best we can do. This proves useful for communication and organization but of course does not have any of the required integrity required to be an infallible logical step.
… Do you feel that? That’s me, fucking your mind!
instead of arguing where the lines between the fighting game genre melds with others, i think a more pertinent question is, what is the DEFINITIVE Fighting Game?
Street Fighter 2 ( or ST, HD, etc)?
Karate Champ?
Smash? 
Whether or not this is a straw man depends entirely on the nature of the discussion in which it takes place. Simply accusing Captain Crunch of hidden Nazism is not, in and of itself, a straw man argument.
I’d wonder why, out of all possible conclusions, you’d pick that one. Genres, by definition, essentially are criteria–or rather, they’re at least composed of it. I don’t know what makes you so certain that the fighting genre is any different.
I’m sure it isn’t. Most bold theoretical statements aren’t.
Variation is a hurdle in the process of classification, but it doesn’t invalidate it.
I don’t think so. I think it’s quite the opposite. If you truly viewed this subject critically, you’d realize that nobody here is looking for the absolutely immutable boundaries that you seem to think they are. With every turn of the semantic screw, you’re pushing the argument further and further to its extreme, which is edging close to a false dichotomy–either we come up with categorical divisions that stand up to examination more rigorous than anybody should reasonably expect them to, or the divisions are worthless. You see the problem here.
Notable? What exactly do you mean by this, and why are you implying that it makes the effort to develop such a heuristic worthless?
Which nobody is looking for and which nobody in their right mind would require, rendering your argument irrelevant in the first place.
I don’t agree with you that genre is 100% subjective. To an extent, it is, but to say that it is to the exclusion of any objective criteria is a falsity. The presence of a certain convention in a genre is sometimes a matter of opinion and sometimes a matter of fact. Many of the features mentioned in this thread as conventional to fighting games are not up for debate–either they’re in the game or they’re not. (And, incidentally, the fact that we even refer to it as “fighting games” at all strongly implies that we have at least a vague idea of the conventions involved, even if we don’t yet have a commonly agreed-upon working set of them.)
Furthermore, your insistence that genre falls apart when subjected to rigid scrutiny is irrelevant, since genres are defined by common conventions rather than rigid borders. Fighting games have common conventions, and I imagine the entire point that the OP had in mind was to figure out what those common conventions are–and, of course, what they aren’t. When subjected to the level of scrutiny that you’re suggesting, yeah, it’ll fall apart, because occasionally you’ll have a convention that overlaps into the set of conventions from another genre. That’s a central characteristic of the heuristic method: it’s quick and dirty, not meticulous down to the smallest detail.
Of course, you’ve said you actually agree with what I’ve been saying all along, so I’d venture that your involvement in this thread is less concerned with critical thinking and more with intellectual masturbation. You saw an opportunity to regurgitate the stuff they teach in Evidence Analysis 101, which I can’t much fault you for since it’s kind of fun to do. Personally, I would have wandered off into the comics forum by now, but that’s just me.
You can’t do the second before you do the first. You can’t know what the definitive fighting game is unless you have a definition for fighting games, and you can’t define what a fighting game is without defining what it isn’t.
By “define,” of course, I don’t mean a rigid boundary to the exclusion of all others, but more of a set of traits that particularly characterizes a fighting game. Just throwing that in as an apparently necessary disclaimer.
I don’t give a fuck about Smash or anything but this is where it gets interesting to me. Do you consider Fight Night a fighting game? What about pro wrestling games like No Mercy? etc. That’s kind of tricky. Maybe we break “fighting games” down into subgenres?
ftr I completely consider Pride FC to be a fighting game, and definitely some of the UFC games too, because although not conventional, you still have a lifebar to deplete and a set of tools at your disposal to do so with. Although, they do have the submission mechanic which I don’t think most other fighting games really have…
Re: Super Dodge Ball
I didn’t know SDB had life meters. I might have to check that out.
re: definition
You bastards need to re-read my post dammit. >:|
Summary plz: I don’t think a true definition exists. The best we can do is recognize “fighting game” as a genre with a number of specific, definite, recognizable traits. Some games stretch the boundaries of those traits (Unorthodox fighters), and others actually crossover into other genres entirely (hybrid fighters). That’s all.
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How would you classify this game ?