My Street Fighter Match Videos from Evolution West 2007

I talked here about the strategy behind my matches at Evolution West 2007. Now you can see those matches for yourself and get a sense of the crowd excitement.

First up, it's me versus Viscant. I'm purple Bison (the dictator) versus his Vega (claw). I mostly flopped around, loosey goosey because I was pretty sure that would be enough to win. Bison has natural advantages in this match and Vega must know exactly what he's doing to win.

Next is me versus the evil Darkside Phill (DSP). DSP won the mindgame of our initial double-blind character selection by choosing Blanka versus my Vega (claw). Watch this whole match carefully because it's definitely the best of the three in this post. You can stop watching at around 4:50 into the vid when the match ends; I'm not sure why the rest wasn't edited out.

Finally, check out me vs. Afrolegends. I start with Vega (claw) versus his DeeJay. In case you get confused about the technicalities of the match, Afrolegends accidentally paused the game at one point, which is a foul that caused him to lose the round and consequently, the game (but not the whole match). Afrolegends played excellently during this match and all his other matches. He's a rising star.

Thanks to James Chen for recording all this and to Seth Killian for the announcing during the event. Seth, you did a great job, but please, please learn the difference between a "round," a "game" (2 out of 3 rounds), and a "match," (2 out of 3 games). It's actually a bit hard to follow what the score is during these videos because Seth uses these terms incorrectly throughout. But let's not be too hard on him because he did an A job overall. I especially liked when he joked about me being one of the developers of the game (referring to my role on Capcom Classics Collection 2, the version we were using in this tournament) and his jab about how I died to one of the most worthless supers in the game during my match against DSP's Blanka. What can I say, it's true!

Hope you enjoy!

--Sirlin

My Evolution West 2007 Performance

Evolution West was at Comicon this year. I'll talk mostly about the Super Turbo tournament because it was a great tournament. Here's the results:

1) John Choi (Ryu, Old Sagat)
2) Afrolegends (Dee Jay, Balrog)
3) Jason Cole (Dhalsim)
4) David Sirlin (Vega, Honda, Bison)
5) Alex Wolfe (Dhalsim)
5) DSP (Dee Jay, Blanka, Vega, Balrog)
7) Antonio Diaz (Blanka)
7) Viscant (Vega)

My very first match of the tournament was against Jason Cole, two-time Evolution World Champion in Super Turbo. But more to the point, Cole and I were the #1 and #2 finishers at Evolution North, so it was weird to fight him straight off the bat, but we didn't complain, it's all good. Cole would definitely play Dhalsim, and I decided to pick Vega. I think I've played Vega vs. Dhalsim against Cole about 20 games or so over the last couple years. During the "normal fighting" part of the match, I have the advantage (I think). But eventually during each game, there is a part called "Dhalsim does noogie over and over and I die." This is especially hard for Vega to get out of. Counterthrowing is, for some reason, very hard for Vega in this situation. Jumping out is literally not possible if Dhalsim does a correct sequence. Vega can flip kick out (charge db, f+kick) but this is a tough thing to do. First, you only get one shot per loop because it's a charge move and worse, if you are charging you aren't shaking out of the noogie. This means a) you take full damage from the noogie and b) you telegraph that you are going to try to reversal flip kick out.

After losing game 1, I said out loud "fuck this match" and switched to Bison. Cole is too damn good at noogie trap on Vega. Bison in theory is just as screwed, but in practice he can reversal throw out more easily for some strange reason. Anyway, Cole beat me.

I went on to beat everyone else I faced that Saturday, including James Chen who I reminded the
hard way that you can't jump out of Honda's Ochio throw. I advanced to top 8. Meanwhile, Afrolegends ran the gauntlet facing Graham Wolfe, Buktooth, Valle, Choi, Graham again, and Watson. He had to beat all of them (except Choi) to advance to top 8. That's quite a string of top players, and that was just to get to the top 8.

The top 8 finals took place the next day on stage in a boxing ring in Capcom's booth at Comicon. There were hundreds of excited fans equipped with noise-makers and everything. It was a really great atmosphere to compete in. Looking back, I guess that could make someone nervous but I didn't even think to be nervous. I love being on stage.

My first match was against Viscant, a Vega player. I asked Choi if I should play Honda or something. He asked how the match goes and I said whoever gets ahead can mostly sit there or run away and it's hard for either character to make a comeback. He said it's too risky to play a match like that on purpose, so don't pick Honda. I asked about Vega and he said yeah, I have good experience with Vega so I should be ok. I sat down to play and the Ghost of Super Turbo told me to play Bison. Bison has like three ways to beat Vega pretty bad unless the Vega knows exactly what to do. I figured I'd be able to get away with at least one or two of those and it mostly worked. I won.

I then fought DSP (who had just lost to Choi, even though he beat both Valle and Watson earlier in the tournament). Given which characters DSP plays, I figured I'd be best off with Vega overall. DSP had a different way of thinking about his character selection though. I think he started by considering who *I* would think is my best chance overall given his characters and he also figured Vega would be my best bet overall. So he started with Blanka specifically to counter my Vega. Remember, these character picks are double blind, so he had to guess all that. I think he was one yomi layer above me there, and he got to play game 1 with a counter match in his favor. (Note to self: learn how to play Vega vs. Blanka.) Anyway, he won game 1.

I had a tough choice now. Vega was not working, so I needed someone else. I could play Bison, but Bison's scissor kicks don't quite work right against Blanka because of Blanka's hitbox while ducking. Also, Bison can't do anything once Blanka starts crossing him up with jump short. The match is probably in Bison's favor (I think), but there are a lot of ways to lose. I had a bad feeling about it (even though I won this exact same match (Bison vs. Blanka) against DSP in a previous tournament years ago.) I could be a little crazy and try Blanka vs. Blanka, but there's too many things I don't know about the match and I figured I should at least play someone I know what I'm doing with when hundreds of people are watching. Honda could work, though. Honda is good against Blanka but not so good against "excellent Blanka" who knows every detail of the match. I could probably pull it off though. But then I might be faced with Honda vs. Dee Jay in game 3, a very bad match for me. By this time I had to make a decision, so I decided to suck it up and win it with Honda.

DSP completely destroyed me first round. I think this confirmed everyone's fears that I had no idea what I was doing and that Honda was a terrible choice. Furthermore, I got hit by whiffed roll into bite and hop into bite. I think this must have looked like I was too old and had too bad of reaction time to stop it. Actually, this is not at all true. I knew he would jab roll into bite. I knew he would hop into bite. I can prove I knew because if you pause the game, then quit out to the main menu (of Capcom Classics Collection 2) then go to Street Fighter tips, you'll see these exact two maneuvers listed there, and I wrote it and took screenshots. Maybe DSP looked it up there! Ha. Anyway, I'm sitting there waiting for it, see it coming, and I have stored Ochio throw ready, and I mash on punches. And somehow, he got all the bites anyway. Ochio throw beats almost anything in the game, but Blanak's bite is so damn good that it actually beat the Ochio throw.

After the first round, I thought to myself "Hey, WAKE UP! You are one round away from being eliminated in a match you have every right to win! Don't just play mindlessly on instinct, THINK about it. Counter jump ins with jab headbutt. Jump or flying butt into Ochio, then mixup!" So I did. I turned off auto-pilot and did all those things and won. As expected, DSP then switched to Dee Jay and used the first round to demonstrate exactly what you do to practically perfect Honda. Ouch. I knew I had to break out of this pattern of being trapped at full screen by his projectiles, I did my best to get those next rounds off to a different start. That match is hard enough that I think I'll keep to myself what few tips I know about winning it.

I then faced Afrolegends, a man forged in fire. Now, I saw Afrolegends beat Graham Wolfe's Vega the day before. Afrolegends had magic powers with Dee Jay's low forward kick and probably did 50% of his damage against Graham with that move alone. Graham kept doing Vega's low strong, perhaps not believing that it could *really* lose to that stupid low forward kick, but it kept losing again and again. Armed with this knowledge, I was extremely careful to not get hit by it, and I did once right at the start of round 1! Then, ready for it, I tried to slide against it and I think I got hit by it anyway. I then even more carefully slid and actually hit him and carefully low stronged and actually hit him. But somewhere, things went really wrong and I lost big time. I turned to Choi, gesturing that I didn't know who to pick. Choi said "No more Vega," after seeing how soundly I was beaten. I agreed and switched to Bison (Even I'm not crazy enough to try Honda versus Dee Jay two times in a row). Game 2 was 1 round to 1 round and during the 3rd round, Afrolegends accidentally paused the game just as he was starting a crossup attempt. This foul means I win the round, and thus the game. Ouch. Afrolegends stuck with Dee Jay and showed superior knowledge of the match, and he won, eliminating me.

My two losses were to afrolegends (the #2 finisher) and Jason Cole (#3 finisher). Choi was #1.

Other highlights of the top 8. TWO people played Blanka (normally would be 0). TWO people played Dee Jay (normally would be 0). Someone played Honda. There were 3 double KOs, 2 in one game! This is more double KOs than I've seen in the last 5 years or so in ST. The two in one game was Jason Cole (Dhalsim) vs. Alex Wolfe (Dhalsim). First round, double KO. Second round, Cole won. Third round, double KO. In this situation (final round), the game automatically gives each player one round win total, meaning Alex Wolfe got a win marker even though he hadn't won a round yet! This was crazy stuff.

The tournament was topped off nicely with Choi pulling of several miracles versus Afrolegends, then Choi transforming into some kind of Korean Inferno against Jason Cole. By the end, Cole was completely thrown off his game and Choi dominated in a scary way. Later, Cole said to me "I can't believe he uppercuts at such risky times! Doesn't he know how risky it is! And he always hits. He's the luckiest mother fucker around, haha." Then Cole theorized that Choi actually conditions his opponents to act a certain way, then does his "risky" stuff only when he gets to a high pressure situation when the opponent is likely to play on instinct rather than thought. Later, James Chen theorized that Choi can "smell fear like a dog." Actually those were my words but Chen's idea. Anyway, he meant that if you make a mistake against Choi, Choi then puts pressure on you and tries to pressure you into making more mistakes. Maybe both theories are right. I had an alternate theory that if we could look into his mind, we'd see a rainbow, a floating panda and a Hello Kitty.

One last note about Guilty Gear: I hate team tournaments a lot and hope we're done with them.

--Sirlin

Checkers Solved

News that Checkers (aka "Draughts") has been solved by brute force computer analysis. I have a feeling that we're coming to the end of the era of long-lasting games that are based on complete, perfect information with no randomness. (Meaning that maybe games need to have incomplete, hidden information and/or randomness to avoid being completely solved.)

That said, maybe Chess is still safe for a while. I heard somewhere (lost the source, sorry) that if every particle in the universe could somehow be used to compute one operation per second and that all the particles in the universe were used in a massively parallel computer that analyzed all possible positions in Chess, it would take longer than the current estimated age of the universe to finish. So yeah, pretty long.

--Sirlin

My Performance at Evolution North 2007

The short version

• I got 2nd in the Street Fighter Alpha 2 tournament (part of Midwest Championships, not Evolution), somehow losing to Justin Wong
• I go 2nd in ST (Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo), losing twice to Jason Cole.
• I did not qualify in Guilty Gear, though I did beat entire teams with just my Chipp.

Street Fighter Alpha 2
Even though I haven't played this game in many years, it was still my tournament to win. I know more about the game than anyone else there, have more experience in it than anyone there, and I was pretty solidly one of the 3 best US players back in the day. Both Jeron and Flash G are solid though, somehow knowing how to play A2 (though I wonder how they know, ha). Each of them remind me about a concept I don't really have a name for--maybe "tournament intensity." They are both serious competitors who make good decisions during tournament play. Even when they are out of their element in a game I know they don't know 100%, they still make good decisions and eke out every advantage they can.

Justin Wong has that same tournament intensity, and he's even more intense. I saw Justin play Ken, Rose, and some 3rd character (I think) during the tournament. He seemed to know just enough to get by. I figured he would play Rose against me and he did (maybe he even picked first, I forget). I picked Zangief to counter. Maybe it was my years of zero practice, or maybe it was Justin's "tournament intensity," but he destroyed me in that match. He demonstrated that he knew to counter jump-ins, which is really the main problem for Rose in that match. It was absolutely a testament to "time does not equal skill." Justin has probably played Alpha 2 about 1% as much as me, considering I played it for at least 3 years about every other day and he played it, well, almost never. And yet armed with only meager knowledge about a few important counters, he kept his head about him, turned up his tournament intensity, and was able to beat me.

Oh yeah, after game 1, I abandoned Zangief and went for Rose vs. Rose. I demonstrated that my secret low strong tactics can usually hit other people's low strongs. Rose vs. Rose is a game of doing only a few moves most of the time, with a couple random occasional things thrown in. I had the lead in games, but Justin was able to come back, mostly because he knew a little better when to do nothing and when to do the occasional strange thing.

Incidentally, my other loss in A2 was to NKI. He knows almost nothing about A2 either, but he fakes it very well. He played Rolento using A3 tactics (or CvS2?) in order to fake general proficiency. That's cute and all, but not nearly enough to win. He won by dancing around long enough to land Rolento's deadly custom-combo. Every time he activated it, he hit me with it. I think he learned this from A-Groove in CvS2, but he certainly didn't learn it by playing A2. Again, time spent playing A2 is most definitely not the major factor in whether a player can win.

If anyone is curious, I hardly played Rose at all during this tournament. I played Ryu almost the whole way through.

Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo

There were a number of good players at the event, including Jessie Howard, Wes Truelson(sp?), NKI, Jason Cole, Flash G, Jeron, and Darkside Phil (DSP) to name a few. Again, Flash G and Jeron showed their "tournament intensity" and gave me hard matches. They are able to "keep their heads about them" under pressure, but I was able to beat them, possibly more through super knowledge of ST nuances, though maybe I do have some impromptu ability of my own, shrug.

Facing NKI was a somewhat daunting because he beat me at Evolution two years ago (maybe I lost to him last year too, I don't know). I remember when NKI didn't know the first thing about ST and I could beat him without even trying. He devoted himself to the game, lived in Japan for a while, practicing often, and finally came of age when he beat me in a tournament two years ago. You can't really think about stuff like when you step up to play, and I managed not to. I used Vega (claw) to beat his Chun Li. His Chun Li is very solid, but cheapy wall-dive proved superior that day.

I lost only to Jason Cole and then again to Cole in the grand finals. I got noogied about 100 times by his Dhalsim. The finals score was 2-3 in his favor, so it was close, but his noogies proved greater than my wall-dives. Incidentally, Cole--who used to have quite a temper--has a different type of tournament demeanor altogether compared to Justin Wong and his crew. Cole doesn't seem that intense. Maybe "relaxed" is the better word. He seems to just let the right choice flow through him. Usually patient, and aggressive when he has to be. Cole likes to talk a lot about 'clutch' (the ability to really seal the deal under the final moment under the highest pressure) and he certainly has it in spades.

Guilty Gear Slash

I got jerked around by a few possible teams I could join, then decided to ahead with my original plan of playing alone. That means I'd have to beat 3 people in a row without losing one game to advance each time. Literally 10 seconds before my first match, RashReflection asked if he could join my team, and I said ok. I was--well--the main force on the team though. I defeated a couple teams all by myself. Against one team, I beat their first two members myself, then faced a potemkin player as the third (I was Chipp! Ouch!). After grinding this guy down with like 100 hits, I got him down to 2 pixels, and got hit by a low counter-hit low fierce. GG, Chipp dies. I was a pixels away from eliminating that entire team with Chipp...and they went on to get 3rd I think. Ugh, ugh.

Yeah, I hate the Curse of Chipp. I practiced Potemkin and Faust against random people ahead of time, and realized how many holes I have with them compared to Chipp. My practice matches with Chipp were like 10% me losing in one hit and 90% me completely owning, so I decided to go with him for the tournament after all. Maybe I should learn Millia in GG Accent Core. She always seemed like a non-sucky Chipp to me, but I could never get the hang of her at all. Anyway, I did not qualify in GGXX. Hopefully I'll have a real team for Evo West.

--Sirlin

Can Games Teach Ethics?

Can games teach ethics? I think they definitely can, but my colleague Frank Lantz argued that I have it wrong. Before going on, I should define some terms such as "ethics" and "Frank Lantz."

Frank teaches game design at NYU and is the co-founder of an unusual game company called area/code. I see him about every year at game conferences. We have a shared understanding of competitive games and the culture that goes along with them. I draw from fighting games while Frank's drugs of choice are Poker and Go. (Yes I capitalized those on purpose.) We seem to disagree on things when we talk, but it's the "good kind" of disagreement where I think each of us learns some new point of view from the other.

Here's my side of things. Imagine a game vaguely like Oblivion, a 3D world where you control a character who can visit towns, talks to people, pick locks, and fight. Now imagine that the there's more of a diplomacy system in the game, the ability to sway politics (perhaps a voting system and the ability to persuade voters) as well as the ability to accomplish things by force. Actions have consequences, so you can break into houses and you can fight people in the streets, but you'll have to deal with the legal system and the police system if you do. So there's our world.

Now let's start with ethics. Stealing, lying, and killing are usually morally wrong things to do. Backing that statement up is beyond the scope of this post, so I'm hoping that can be taken as a given. The game world I propose is set up to reinforce those values. But, we would expose the player to a few extreme and unusual situations where stealing, lying, and killing become the morally correct thing to do. If you have the ability to save the life of a drowning person, but a thick-headed guard won't let you steal his boss's boat without a forged note, then it's probably good to forge that note. Saving a life is more important than a blanket commitment to "never forge." Perhaps you disagree, but it's definitely the kind of ethics I subscribe to and it's my game after all.

These extreme situations would be engineered so to make it obvious that breaking the usual rules can be a morally sound thing to do. This alone would be a big idea for some people whose thinking is stuck in the "lying is a sin, period" mode. (When a murderer with bloodied hands, stops and demands that you promise not to tell the cops which way he runs, and you agree, then the cops run up and ask where the murderer went...I think it's ok to break your promise, for example.) Anyway, this is not Earth-shattering stuff (I'd hope), which is why we then need to move into areas of gray. After we've established conventions (it's usually wrong to steal) and shown some exceptions (sometimes in unusual circumstances, it's wrong *not* to steal), then we can cook up a bunch of really gray areas where most people will disagree. Some people will make choice A, some choice B, and hopefully almost everyone will be confronted with the question "what is the right thing to do here?"

It's easy to go through life not asking questions like this, and getting stuck into one mode of thinking about ethics, but you can't have much a personal theory on things unless it stands up to tests...the very kind of tests we can create in a virtual world. The player would hopefully end up exploring his own view of things just as much as he'd explore the game world. It would also be very valuable, I think, to show that when you make a certain decision about stealing or whatever, that the local bartender thinks one thing, the distraught mother thinks another, the church thinks another, and the professor of ethics (he's definitely an NPC in here somewhere!) thinks another. And yes, the professor of ethics disagrees with the church on a great many things.

Now for Frank's side of the story. He says that one or the other is true: your in-game decisions about ethics have in-game consequences (meaning they manipulate various stats) or they don't. If they do, then no matter how clever your situations, the player will really just try to "game" the system. You'd just choose the path of least resistance and most power, or whatever other stat maximizing suits your fancy, rather than care about any "real" (or should I say "virtual?") issues. And if your decisions *don't* affect any stats or gamestate, then they are meaningless and that doesn't teach much either. Actions without consequences don't have lessons.

He says the entire approach is wrong, and that games he's learned the most life lessons from have no mention of ethics at all: Poker and Go. Here you learn about self-improvement, patience, seeing people for their merit rather than their skin color, and so on. Furthermore, he reminds me that *I* learned all those same lessons too, also from competitive games that don't concern themselves with explicitly teaching ethics. He says developers should care a lot more about just making good games (Starcraft 2, yay) and less about the authorial meaning I'm trying to convey.

Now I'll open it up to the floor. Is one of us right, or both of us? It's been three months since I discussed this with Frank, and while I still think the game I describe could be very effective if implemented well, it's hard to ignore his arguments. What do you guys think?

--Sirlin