I'm no purist. I don't need my video games to be games alone. I don't need my reaction times or problem solving abilities pushed to their limits to have my interactive fill. I cherish the emotional labyrinth of Gone Home. Despite all of their jank, I still enjoy the moral pop-quizzes of Telltale's episodic adventures. And whenever Naughty Dog has a new release, I'm down to pop in and out of cover, and pop in and out of cutscenes. I value the storytelling capacity of the medium as much as I value the storytelling capacity of novels or film.
Street Fighter provides some of my favorite narrative experiences in gaming. I'm dead ass serious. It's given me the same kind of chills I felt in Journey when realizing my robed companion was not the CPU. Though the premise of Street Fighter is basic, and the player interactions aren't much different from what you'd find in other fighting games, that basic premise and the player base have been in a decades long dialogue that is—at times—transcendent. At times, because there's an imbalance in the narrative experienced by the characters versus the narrative experienced by the players. It's like a 7-3 matchup. It should be 5-5, but Street Fighter has too much damn story.
Image from www.capcom-unity.com
THE EXPERIENCE OF STREET FIGHTER
The convenience store next to my elementary school didn't sell milk or bread. It sold sour candy and comics with hologram covers. This trap house for kids also had enough room for a few arcade machines. At first it was games like Caveman Ninja, Sega's Spider-Man joint, and The Simpsons (I mained Marge), but one afternoon I walked in and heard sonic booms and yoga flames. I honestly don't remember what came to the shop after.
This is how my Street Fighter relationships begin. I first saw the Warriors' Dreams and New Generation marquees at a pool hall that would kick me and my cousin out when the grownups started to order drinks. My girlfriend and I waited for hours to get into the SFIV launch party in Little Tokyo. EventHubs hooked me up with a community pass for E3 2015 and I spent the entire time in the SFV booth getting blown up by the likes of Alex Valle and Justin Wong. I tend to meet these games in public. That first glance is always between shoulders at an upright cabinet. In these settings, Street Fighter is a mirror. I watch players control fighters who are watched by NPCs, sitting on their crates and standing on their yachts. The NPCs watch fighters controlled by players who are watched by me.
I'm not one of those OGs who can tell stories about getting shanked for using throws in Hyper Fighting. I'm not a tournament player. I would attend a local if there was one between my workplace and home, but I ain't finna go way out to Orange County or Azusa. I'm just a filthy casual with 27 years to wash off. I'm fine with being an online warrior. But even though I don't belong to the competitive crowd, that scene enhances my experience of Street Fighter. There's a social network that accompanies these games, installed by grassroots competition. The pros and the pro-ams play the same game as the straight up amateurs. Thanks to netplay and the open-bracket tradition of fighting game contests, they often play in the same place too. In Street Fighter, Kevin Durant goes to Rucker Park all year long. Because of this, every rando is included in the community, involved in the history, and influences the continuity.
Some of you may be familiar with Low Tier God. Despite his handle, he didn't make his name being godlike with characters considered weak in the meta. He made it by being a troll. He was recently banned from Twitter for sexually harassing a cosplayer, and he's probably most infamous for losing a grudge match to Jay Viscant back in 2014 (a grudge he started by antagonizing his opponent on YouTube). When I encountered him online a few days ago and took the first match free, I'll admit to feeling proud for shutting down a real life Street Fighter villain. When he downloaded my style and beat me the next two games straight, the loss I held to my chest felt heavier than normal. I have no personal history with the man. Nobody saw this battle but me, him, and his Twitch followers. The added drama didn't make me gain more League Points when I won, and I didn't lose more when I lost, but the stakes felt higher somehow.
We hear about the emergent stories of Minecraft or Fortnite, but what is the emergent story of Street Fighter? Of course, there are stories that emerge from matches. The classic "Evo Moment #37" is a minute-long thriller that shows our hero, Daigo, being an impatient aggressor who discovers focus at the very brink of defeat. But more broadly, there's an emergent saga that has followed the series throughout the years. In the early days, you had people grinding away laundry money to become the champion of their bowling alley or pizza parlor. When the arcades began to vanish, coin-op refugees took to Usenet newsgroups to theory fight and argue about who was the best. They traveled across states, countries, and even oceans to prove they were as good as they typed. A few went on to organize tournaments that grew from dozens to thousands of participants. The Evolution Championship Series shares this arc. The Street Fighter V tourney at Evo 2018 had nearly 2,500 entrants competing for an $85,000 prize pool. The Top 8 had representatives from the United Kingdom, Japan, France, the United States, and the Dominican Republic. Evo is perhaps the most prestigious event on the Street Fighter calendar, but every month sees majors all around the world. We now live in a time when taking jet planes to challenge citizens of the Earth in Street Fighter can be a person's career. In 1991, there were only eight World Warriors. How many are there now?
Image from thedragonfortress.wordpress.com
THE NARRATIVE OF STREET FIGHTER
Street Fighter lore is a convoluted soap opera of karate mysticism, paramilitary organizations, and transhumanist secret societies. It didn't begin this way. Early installments stuck to tropes established by exploitation flicks like Enter the Dragon. In the original Street Fighter, the King of Muay Thai presented a gauntlet with pairs of combatants repping five nations for...reasons. In Street Fighter II, a mysterious crime lord invited eight hopefuls to take him and his three henchmen on for...reasons. Sure, some of the endings in SFII hinted at motivations beyond prizefighting, but it was generally assumed that the characters fought for the same purpose as Evander Holyfield or Bret "The Hitman" Hart. It was their occupation. Or avocation. It's just what they did.
Street Fighter the video game series didn't need much story to justify the action. Street Fighter the multimedia franchise provided it anyway. 1993 brought two volumes of manga. 1994 brought two feature films. 1995 brought two TV shows. Much of this material would not make it into game canon, but the influence of the "Street Fighter Expanded Universe" is seen in the animefication that crescendos with the Street Fighter Alpha sub-series. The retconning that happens during the Alpha games suggests Capcom regretted leaving most of Street Fighter's world to the imagination. You could hardly blame the company. Street Fighter characters were already iconic by the mid '90s. They even held their own when paired up with the massively popular X-Men (X-Men vs. Street Fighter hit arcades in 1996). Few pop-culture properties featured the diversity and bold design to match Marvel's flagship superhero team (only '90s kids will remember nobody caring about the Avengers). Street Fighter had it, but what it didn't have was over thirty years of backstory like the X-Men.
The plot holes were patched with increasingly contrived combat scenarios. Street Fighter kept running out of excuses to have fighters in these streets. What once required no more set up than, "It's a guerrilla martial arts tournament," mutated into G.I. Joe team-ups to stop the dictator, or the cyborg CEO, or the ghost of the dictator, or the Emperor of the Illuminati. This type of constant escalation is very difficult to sustain. It can exhaust fans of even the most beloved franchises. Like the X-Men. As allegory for marginalized struggle and teenage disillusion, the X-Men were—at times—transcendent. But now, X-Men lore is a convoluted soap opera of romantic entanglements, cosmic entity possessions, alternate futures, alternate pasts, and alternate Days of Future Past.
I'm not lobbying for Street Fighter to go full Playdead and eschew dialogue for environmental storytelling (unless you gon do it). And I'm not here to be militant and take away anyone's arcade mode. We saw how that turned out for SFV's launch. Street Fighter needs some story, but it could do with a lot less of it. Or at least, it could do with a lot less of the kind that makes comic book crossovers look restrained. Take less cues from DC and Marvel. Take more cues from Rocky and Hajime no Ippo. Save the spectacle for when we hear, "Fight!" and let it end with, "K.O." Fill the interstices between matches with a glimpse at the lives and relationships of Street Fighter characters, and let that glimpse reflect the lives and relationships of Street Fighter players.
THE METANARRATION OF STREET FIGHTER
When G and Sagat were released for Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition, I was eager to check out their trials and mess around with them in training mode. I was less eager to play through their prologues. The Character Story mode in SFV could have featured portraits unburdened by the weight of other storylines, but this mode still struggled to give the fighters compelling reasons to fight. Ibuki confronts Abigail over fart noises. Birdie tries to bounce Ken from Karin's dinner party. Blanka attacks Laura for stepping on his Blanka-chan merchandise. Riveting stuff.
Sagat's gets dark. His PTSD almost makes him Tiger Rampage his servant. But G's story, somehow, is arguably the most biting political satire in games this year. Longtime fans are busy speculating about his connection to Q from Street Fighter III 3rd Strike, but all the story portrays him as is a New Yorker using social media to spout pseudo-populist, totalitarian nonsense. Oh, and gold. He got lots of gold. Capcom lighting up Donald Trump isn't even what interests me the most about G's prologue, however. That honor goes to Rashid. Rashid watches G's video and decides to take a jet plane to challenge this citizen of the Earth to a street fight. But why? There was no tournament going on. Rashid wasn't avenging the death of his friend. G didn't pose immediate danger to anyone. Was it (in the immortal words of Guru from Gang Starr) just to get a rep? Or was it because…
Image captured from Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition on PS4 Pro
...he seemed like a new kind of Street Fighter? A "Street Fighter!" Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is the only time that has been used as a proper noun in these games. G is a Street Fighter. Rashid is a Street Fighter. Ryu and Chun-Li are Street Fighters. I mean, of course they are, and always were, but the narrative of the series rarely acknowledges that this is their occupation. Or avocation. This is just what they do.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines "metanarration" as, "any narrative text, or part of a text, which deals with the nature of storytelling and narrative structure."天 A common way for a story to explore the nature of storytelling is through self-reference. This can be achieved when the events of a story reflect the ways in which we experience the story. Street Fighter is this kind of ouroboros. The Street Fighters fight each other because it is their profession, passion, or pastime. We live that story when we play Street Fighter against one other, be it our profession, passion, or pastime.
Image captured from Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection on PS4 Pro
Street Fighter shouldn't bring the character narratives closer to the player narratives just to satisfy my idea of elegant storytelling. Street Fighter should do it because this stuff writes itself. Nobody had reason to be surprised when Sako took TWFighter Major 2018. He's one of the Five Gods of Japanese Street Fighter. He won the inaugural Capcom Cup in 2013. He's been playing SF for longer than his winners finals opponent, 21-year-old Caba, has been alive. But we were surprised, because he's a husband and father who told Caba's Guile to go home and be a family man. Because he's pushing 40 in a sport where 25 is considered up in age. Because he won his first SFV major with a 21-0 record. He didn't lose a single game. That might not be as interesting as watching Ryu struggle with the Satsui no Hado for the fourth or fifth time, but it's pretty damn close.
天 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/metanarration
Street Fighter provides some of my favorite narrative experiences in gaming. I'm dead ass serious. It's given me the same kind of chills I felt in Journey when realizing my robed companion was not the CPU. Though the premise of Street Fighter is basic, and the player interactions aren't much different from what you'd find in other fighting games, that basic premise and the player base have been in a decades long dialogue that is—at times—transcendent. At times, because there's an imbalance in the narrative experienced by the characters versus the narrative experienced by the players. It's like a 7-3 matchup. It should be 5-5, but Street Fighter has too much damn story.
Image from www.capcom-unity.com
THE EXPERIENCE OF STREET FIGHTER
The convenience store next to my elementary school didn't sell milk or bread. It sold sour candy and comics with hologram covers. This trap house for kids also had enough room for a few arcade machines. At first it was games like Caveman Ninja, Sega's Spider-Man joint, and The Simpsons (I mained Marge), but one afternoon I walked in and heard sonic booms and yoga flames. I honestly don't remember what came to the shop after.
This is how my Street Fighter relationships begin. I first saw the Warriors' Dreams and New Generation marquees at a pool hall that would kick me and my cousin out when the grownups started to order drinks. My girlfriend and I waited for hours to get into the SFIV launch party in Little Tokyo. EventHubs hooked me up with a community pass for E3 2015 and I spent the entire time in the SFV booth getting blown up by the likes of Alex Valle and Justin Wong. I tend to meet these games in public. That first glance is always between shoulders at an upright cabinet. In these settings, Street Fighter is a mirror. I watch players control fighters who are watched by NPCs, sitting on their crates and standing on their yachts. The NPCs watch fighters controlled by players who are watched by me.
I'm not one of those OGs who can tell stories about getting shanked for using throws in Hyper Fighting. I'm not a tournament player. I would attend a local if there was one between my workplace and home, but I ain't finna go way out to Orange County or Azusa. I'm just a filthy casual with 27 years to wash off. I'm fine with being an online warrior. But even though I don't belong to the competitive crowd, that scene enhances my experience of Street Fighter. There's a social network that accompanies these games, installed by grassroots competition. The pros and the pro-ams play the same game as the straight up amateurs. Thanks to netplay and the open-bracket tradition of fighting game contests, they often play in the same place too. In Street Fighter, Kevin Durant goes to Rucker Park all year long. Because of this, every rando is included in the community, involved in the history, and influences the continuity.
Some of you may be familiar with Low Tier God. Despite his handle, he didn't make his name being godlike with characters considered weak in the meta. He made it by being a troll. He was recently banned from Twitter for sexually harassing a cosplayer, and he's probably most infamous for losing a grudge match to Jay Viscant back in 2014 (a grudge he started by antagonizing his opponent on YouTube). When I encountered him online a few days ago and took the first match free, I'll admit to feeling proud for shutting down a real life Street Fighter villain. When he downloaded my style and beat me the next two games straight, the loss I held to my chest felt heavier than normal. I have no personal history with the man. Nobody saw this battle but me, him, and his Twitch followers. The added drama didn't make me gain more League Points when I won, and I didn't lose more when I lost, but the stakes felt higher somehow.
We hear about the emergent stories of Minecraft or Fortnite, but what is the emergent story of Street Fighter? Of course, there are stories that emerge from matches. The classic "Evo Moment #37" is a minute-long thriller that shows our hero, Daigo, being an impatient aggressor who discovers focus at the very brink of defeat. But more broadly, there's an emergent saga that has followed the series throughout the years. In the early days, you had people grinding away laundry money to become the champion of their bowling alley or pizza parlor. When the arcades began to vanish, coin-op refugees took to Usenet newsgroups to theory fight and argue about who was the best. They traveled across states, countries, and even oceans to prove they were as good as they typed. A few went on to organize tournaments that grew from dozens to thousands of participants. The Evolution Championship Series shares this arc. The Street Fighter V tourney at Evo 2018 had nearly 2,500 entrants competing for an $85,000 prize pool. The Top 8 had representatives from the United Kingdom, Japan, France, the United States, and the Dominican Republic. Evo is perhaps the most prestigious event on the Street Fighter calendar, but every month sees majors all around the world. We now live in a time when taking jet planes to challenge citizens of the Earth in Street Fighter can be a person's career. In 1991, there were only eight World Warriors. How many are there now?
Image from thedragonfortress.wordpress.com
THE NARRATIVE OF STREET FIGHTER
Street Fighter lore is a convoluted soap opera of karate mysticism, paramilitary organizations, and transhumanist secret societies. It didn't begin this way. Early installments stuck to tropes established by exploitation flicks like Enter the Dragon. In the original Street Fighter, the King of Muay Thai presented a gauntlet with pairs of combatants repping five nations for...reasons. In Street Fighter II, a mysterious crime lord invited eight hopefuls to take him and his three henchmen on for...reasons. Sure, some of the endings in SFII hinted at motivations beyond prizefighting, but it was generally assumed that the characters fought for the same purpose as Evander Holyfield or Bret "The Hitman" Hart. It was their occupation. Or avocation. It's just what they did.
Street Fighter the video game series didn't need much story to justify the action. Street Fighter the multimedia franchise provided it anyway. 1993 brought two volumes of manga. 1994 brought two feature films. 1995 brought two TV shows. Much of this material would not make it into game canon, but the influence of the "Street Fighter Expanded Universe" is seen in the animefication that crescendos with the Street Fighter Alpha sub-series. The retconning that happens during the Alpha games suggests Capcom regretted leaving most of Street Fighter's world to the imagination. You could hardly blame the company. Street Fighter characters were already iconic by the mid '90s. They even held their own when paired up with the massively popular X-Men (X-Men vs. Street Fighter hit arcades in 1996). Few pop-culture properties featured the diversity and bold design to match Marvel's flagship superhero team (only '90s kids will remember nobody caring about the Avengers). Street Fighter had it, but what it didn't have was over thirty years of backstory like the X-Men.
The plot holes were patched with increasingly contrived combat scenarios. Street Fighter kept running out of excuses to have fighters in these streets. What once required no more set up than, "It's a guerrilla martial arts tournament," mutated into G.I. Joe team-ups to stop the dictator, or the cyborg CEO, or the ghost of the dictator, or the Emperor of the Illuminati. This type of constant escalation is very difficult to sustain. It can exhaust fans of even the most beloved franchises. Like the X-Men. As allegory for marginalized struggle and teenage disillusion, the X-Men were—at times—transcendent. But now, X-Men lore is a convoluted soap opera of romantic entanglements, cosmic entity possessions, alternate futures, alternate pasts, and alternate Days of Future Past.
I'm not lobbying for Street Fighter to go full Playdead and eschew dialogue for environmental storytelling (unless you gon do it). And I'm not here to be militant and take away anyone's arcade mode. We saw how that turned out for SFV's launch. Street Fighter needs some story, but it could do with a lot less of it. Or at least, it could do with a lot less of the kind that makes comic book crossovers look restrained. Take less cues from DC and Marvel. Take more cues from Rocky and Hajime no Ippo. Save the spectacle for when we hear, "Fight!" and let it end with, "K.O." Fill the interstices between matches with a glimpse at the lives and relationships of Street Fighter characters, and let that glimpse reflect the lives and relationships of Street Fighter players.
THE METANARRATION OF STREET FIGHTER
When G and Sagat were released for Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition, I was eager to check out their trials and mess around with them in training mode. I was less eager to play through their prologues. The Character Story mode in SFV could have featured portraits unburdened by the weight of other storylines, but this mode still struggled to give the fighters compelling reasons to fight. Ibuki confronts Abigail over fart noises. Birdie tries to bounce Ken from Karin's dinner party. Blanka attacks Laura for stepping on his Blanka-chan merchandise. Riveting stuff.
Sagat's gets dark. His PTSD almost makes him Tiger Rampage his servant. But G's story, somehow, is arguably the most biting political satire in games this year. Longtime fans are busy speculating about his connection to Q from Street Fighter III 3rd Strike, but all the story portrays him as is a New Yorker using social media to spout pseudo-populist, totalitarian nonsense. Oh, and gold. He got lots of gold. Capcom lighting up Donald Trump isn't even what interests me the most about G's prologue, however. That honor goes to Rashid. Rashid watches G's video and decides to take a jet plane to challenge this citizen of the Earth to a street fight. But why? There was no tournament going on. Rashid wasn't avenging the death of his friend. G didn't pose immediate danger to anyone. Was it (in the immortal words of Guru from Gang Starr) just to get a rep? Or was it because…
Image captured from Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition on PS4 Pro
...he seemed like a new kind of Street Fighter? A "Street Fighter!" Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is the only time that has been used as a proper noun in these games. G is a Street Fighter. Rashid is a Street Fighter. Ryu and Chun-Li are Street Fighters. I mean, of course they are, and always were, but the narrative of the series rarely acknowledges that this is their occupation. Or avocation. This is just what they do.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines "metanarration" as, "any narrative text, or part of a text, which deals with the nature of storytelling and narrative structure."天 A common way for a story to explore the nature of storytelling is through self-reference. This can be achieved when the events of a story reflect the ways in which we experience the story. Street Fighter is this kind of ouroboros. The Street Fighters fight each other because it is their profession, passion, or pastime. We live that story when we play Street Fighter against one other, be it our profession, passion, or pastime.
Image captured from Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection on PS4 Pro
Street Fighter shouldn't bring the character narratives closer to the player narratives just to satisfy my idea of elegant storytelling. Street Fighter should do it because this stuff writes itself. Nobody had reason to be surprised when Sako took TWFighter Major 2018. He's one of the Five Gods of Japanese Street Fighter. He won the inaugural Capcom Cup in 2013. He's been playing SF for longer than his winners finals opponent, 21-year-old Caba, has been alive. But we were surprised, because he's a husband and father who told Caba's Guile to go home and be a family man. Because he's pushing 40 in a sport where 25 is considered up in age. Because he won his first SFV major with a 21-0 record. He didn't lose a single game. That might not be as interesting as watching Ryu struggle with the Satsui no Hado for the fourth or fifth time, but it's pretty damn close.
GG if you read all of this. GG if you're salty that I wrote all of this.
天 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/metanarration
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