Three steps to competitive gameplay

Competitive gameplay.


What does it mean to be "competitive"? What defines a competitive game, specifically a fighter? There are a few points. Some are necessary for the game to be (inherently) competitive in the first place. Others help the game to be more competitive. Let's run through things over...

Step 1: The game must be capable of supporting competition in the first place. In other words: two or more players (in the case of fighting games, almost always 2 players or teams, as adding more can and often will lead to inconsistencies) competing in a game with a condition to win/lose/draw. This is essentially the basic definition of a game that you can compete in. Every game which is to be designed competitively has this goal. A few games have/can be played competitively without this feature (a good example would be the "Super Mario Bros 3" competition at the end of the movie, "The Wizard"), but they were certainly not designed for competition, and are in this regard also not ideal, as they usually fail one or more of the following goals, and/or require outside influence (a points counter like in the Wizard, for example) (if you want to make a game like that competitive, simply add a speedrun/points contest mode). But this first step-the ability to "compete" at all-is the absolute basic needed to compete in a game.

Step 2: The game must be able to provide consistent results. The better player should almost always win. Again, for competition to be realistically possible, this is one of the most basic criteria.
Step 2.a. The game should be as non-random as possible. Super Smash Bros. Brawl is an amazingly competitive game. Its competitive community is huge, and the game is played for many thousands of dollars. It has a ridiculous skill ceiling, and amazing competitive depth even if you remove half the game (as the community has done). However, there is no denying that the game would be a better competitive title if most, if not all of the random effects in the game were set to a pattern. Some randomness is permissible-almost every top-caliber competitive game has some degree of randomness. However, go too far, and you lose track of the goal of consistent results; the better player may very well lose. And this is poison to competitive gameplay.

Step 3: The game should be as deep as possible. To pull the example of Super Smash Bros Brawl, there is a stage known as "Temple Hyrule", where you can run in circles away from your opponent for the whole match, keeping a massive wall between you and them. This means that the faster character, the character with the overall faster movement speed, will win every time, as soon as he gains the lead. For a character such as Fox, who has a projectile that moves incredibly fast, and who has one of the highest run, fall, and jump speeds in the game, it means that with and element like this, the game loses any and all depth. The "better player" will technically still win, but the entire question of "who is the better player" becomes senselessly trivial. Any idiot with an idea of how the stage works could beat a top player in an instant on that stage; the skill ceiling is ridiculously low. But I suppose I'm getting away with myself... What is "Depth"? Or rather, Competitive Depth?
Competitive depth is basically summed up through the number of effectively different situations that the game has to offer. Effectively different is important here, because there are effectively almost infinite situations in any fighting game. However, is it effectively different if you have Ryu backed up against a wall or halfway across the field when he does his normal bread and butter combo in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom? No. The only thing that would really make a difference there is if your back was close to the wall. Similarly, does it make a difference in Super Smash Bros Brawl if you are in a helpless falling state as King Dedede (a character with horrible air movement and a very high fall speed) if you are barely under the ledge of the stage, or if you're on the level with the ledge but too far away to grab it? No, not really-those situations are, effectively, equivalent. However, to use SSBB as an example again, if you are snake (a character with a very long but linear and fairly predictable recovery), it makes a gigantic difference in your position when you're offstage if you, say, have a jump or not-it's really the difference between life and death most of the time. Or even if you have set your remote controlled C4 mine (snake can use this mine as an extra recovery boost if he blows himself up with it). Such things are "effectively different" situations. There are trillions upon trillions of "literally different" situations in almost every video game simply by the game's various nature; i.e. when I get hit by Ryu's ultra in Street Fighter 4, whether I'm 10 pixels or 15 away from him, makes a difference... but not a huge one-I still got hit and I'm in, effectively, the same situation as if I had been 5 pixels closer to him or 5 pixels further away.
Another major defining feature of competitive depth is the number of options you have to deal with a situation. If you can always tell exactly what the best move is in a given situation, then the game is not deep. To pull the example with Smash again, in the matchup Sheik vs. Ganondorf, the Sheik player has one option that literally beats EVERYTHING ganon has-the chain. Sheik's chain whip can beat everything ganon has. The matchup is not deep because, no matter what ganon does, sheik can simply answer with the chain. Sheik just sits in the chain whip all day long and keeps knocking ganon away until the timer runs out. It's like in street fighter if you're playing Ryu and all your opponent is able to do is jump in->heavy punch (tip: SHORYUKEN!). The ideal thing in a competitive environment is that there IS no automatic "best option". You cannot tell, in most situations, what the best thing to do is. Especially in fighting games. For more details on this phenomenon, here's a great article in smash about "guaranteed options". If you're interested in this phenomenon, there's a great group of articles by Sirlin about it; he refers to it as "Yomi", and they're in his online book.
So why is this so important? Well, remember what I said above about trivializing "who is the better player"? Well, as far as competitive design goes, what is the difference between Tic-Tac-Toe, a game that is ridiculously dull and always ends in a tie, and Chess or Go, games that have gigantic competitive followings and that play out like national sports? The only real difference is exactly this-competitive depth. You have something like 5-6 situations in the game that are effectively different, and the best option in each case is immediately apparent. Compare to Chess, where you have several hundred thousand (this is just pulled out of my ass, it's probably way, WAY more) possible situations, not all of which are "solved" (the beginning of the game has several definable patterns, but there are a lot of them-people can't even decide on the best starting move!) (they are, however, solvable-there will, eventually, be a guaranteed best option for each position in chess, but it will be so complex that nobody will be able to memorize it). This is why chess-playing computers, although they get better and better, still lose to human grandmasters. This is why chess is competitive, and Tic-Tac-Toe isn't (or, at least, SHOULDN'T BE).
Keep in mind that "competitive depth" should NEVER be mistaken for randomness. There is a difference.


These three commands are the very basic rules when constructing a competitive game. Over the next little while, I'll be posting a group of articles about tips regarding exactly this in my genre of choice-fighting games.