Psych Researcher here; What should i concentrate on trying to research fighting game wise?

[Felipe_Gewehr]

why can fighting games trigger anger and toxic impulses so hard and why do people give in to it?

take that question with a grain of salt

My personal explanation is a mix of a number of reasons:

1) I'm one of the very, very few people who even play fighting games in my social circle. And by playing online since it became available, I realized I could consistently beat the majority of casual and average players, eventually managing to consistently beat good players, and now, trying to reach the level of beating excellent pro players. This all sediments itself in my head as the feeling of: playing fighting games is one of the very few things I do VERY well, and most people dont even play a fighting game to begin with, so I must be better than a very large number of people at this particular thing.

2) Since, according to the logic of the first point that I'm supposedly better than most people, it must mean I should be winning most of the time. If I lose, the entire validation of "IM SUPPOSED TO BE GOOD AT THIS ONE THING" creeps out in nasty ways. "If am not good at this, then what am I good for?" - cue toxic rage feelings.

3) Sometimes I make a hard read, react accordingly and still get punished by some dumb streak of luck, or the game fucking up or something random. This again brings up the rage, as "well I KNEW he was going to do it, I did everything right and still failed, this is just unfair". It would not be a big deal, were it not, again, for point 1.

Fortunately, these disfunctional feelings of relating worthness with how good I'm at playing MK (which is entirely silly and illogical for a plethora of reasons) have severely diminished in strenght as I got older and got into therapy (for reasons entirely unrelated).

Long post, just to see if someone else relates in some way to this?

 

[AtlasM]

One other idea, likely really hard to do but could be interesting:

I wonder if there's a way to measure the "Mental Stack" that players encounter during fighting games, the execution penalty it imposes, and how much the penalty is in different environments or settings. For example, some combos a player might have a 95% success rate in practice mode. Move them to an in game match against the computer, it might drop to 90%. Move to online in ranked, it might drop to 85% (could be lag, could be pressure of online). Move to an in person tournament, could drop some more. Does playing in Pools matter vs top 8? How much consistency is there player to player?

Just hypothetical numbers, but you could look at things like Anti-airs, reactions to overheads, combo execution, stuff like that. The hard part would be that you'd need to find a good sample of players willing to participate in the study, and you'd need to watch and rely on human judgement to go over footage to calculate these things. You'd probably also need to set up controls, like having the players participating all using the same character, agree to use the same anti-air, and the same combo. So a lot of complications to go through.

But if you could pull it off, it'd be pretty interesting.

This is the one! will start on this first and contact discords to ask for analysis on these things, and data. Will contact those i know.

 

[AtlasM]

This is the one! will start on this first and contact discords to ask for analysis on these things, and data. Will contact those i know.

i will also make a part 2 to this from watching those play at our local at the end of this month and asking the two questions-

Does mental stack from an enviroment heavily affect play and how, and does pools matter vs top 8 spot?
Physically watching these games will also help as we have vods at our locals.

 

[Marlow]

Awesome, good luck!