Does winning equal fun?
This was originally going to be a script for a YouTube video, but was ultimately scrapped. I made some adjustments to the original script to better fit an article and try out this style.
Fighting games are fun.
… Most of the time.
One night, I was at my local, watching 2 people play JoJo’s, they were having a conversation mid-match, and a third person said,
“If you’re winning, you’re having fun!”
That made me think for a bit. Does winning always equal fun?
After mulling it over, I eventually came to the conclusion that no, it does not.
So, in competitive games, win conditions can be vastly different between characters, decks, game modes, et cetera.
To define my term, I’m using “win condition” to mean the strategy you have that gets you to a win state.
Take Yu-Gi-Oh for example. The win state is to either get your opponent’s life points from 8000 down to 0, bring their deck size down to 0 so that they can’t draw a card when required, or some other alternate effect that certain cards might have.
However, each Deck has vastly different win conditions, be they just having a big monster on the field that can attack for game, strategically negating your opponent’s moves, outright preventing them from doing anything, and so on and so forth.
Fighting games are similar. Obviously, the win state is to reduce your opponent’s health to 0, however, different characters and archetypes do this differently. Grapplers want to scare their opponents into a position where they can land that big throw. Rushdown characters want to stay in your face and keep pressing buttons until you die. Zoners want to keep you farther than they can throw you and whittle your health down while you can’t touch them.
Now, all of this leads to a simple fact, that being that different people tend to gravitate towards different play styles, with most people sticking to the same styles between games. If you’re learning a new game and you love big command grabs, you’re more likely to pick and enjoy the character that has the big command grab (assuming the game has one). This leads to the opposite phenomenon, at least for me: If I’m playing a character I don’t like, even if I’m doing well, I’m not having fun.
A good example of this is Croagunk in Pokken. I absolutely love Pokken, I think it’s an amazing game, and I like all the characters… Except Croagunk. For those unaware, Croagunk is the RNG type character, kinda like Faust in Guilty Gear… If Faust had an unavoidable 10% chance to just lose 10% of his health and put himself in a soft knockdown.
I hate him. I hate how he plays, I hate his combos, I hate his RNG, I hate his voice, OH YEAH! Imagine dreading WINNING because it means this happens:
(I have this opinion because I got everyone to level 100 and it means I was forced to play him for over 2 weeks straight. It was not fun.)
Sometimes even characters whose archetype matches what you like can be unfun in some forms. For example, I enjoy my fair share of grapplers…
… Except Zangief.
Ironic isn’t it? The granddaddy of grapplers, and he just doesn’t do anything for me. X-men, Marvel 2, CvS 2, SFIV, SFV, if I’ve played it, I’ve probably tried him in it. However, there’s just one thing that’s off about him for me.
Mobility.
I get that the main point of a grappler is that they can have a lot of trouble getting in, but managing to eventually get in means, well, you know…
But a lot of games with grapplers I play have at least some burst movement tools or something with good armor that lets you get in faster, so you don’t spend most of your time just sitting there, blocking projectiles, maybe timing a lariat to get that extra few pixels farther. Oh, I’m in! Can I try my grab? They jumped. Oh well.
I know I’m being a little hyperbolic, but my point being, I can LAND that grab, I can get pressure going, I can be “winning,” but I’m not having fun, I’m panicking! I know that if I slip up ONCE, it’s back to full screen gaming again and this. Isn’t. Fun.
Even seeing the victory screen doesn’t always mean I had fun, especially against less favorable matchups. I feel like I’ve just barely scraped by.
Street Fighter 6 did a little to alleviate this with Drive Rush, but it’s just barely not enough for me. It’s still a huge struggle. Though, now that I can say that the honeymoon period has worn off, I just don’t really like SF6 in general. It’s just not for me.
To conclude, winning does not always equal fun. There are a lot of things on a player’s mind that contribute to whether or not they’re having fun. I’ve personally had a lot more fun losing and learning to everyone at my local with the occasional high moment from taking a game. Some of my most fun moments have been from games that I ultimately lost, and that’s ok. Everyone gets their fun from somewhere.
Thanks so much for reading all the way through! I promise the majority of articles I write will have a more positive lean to them in the future.