Thread by @KingHippo42, My older brother has had a resurgent interest in games lately, and [...]

My older brother has had a resurgent interest in games lately, and he bought MK11 and likes it a lot, always asks me for tips. He has zero interest in looking at the game's tutorial, frame data, and doesn't care for FGC jargon, so it's been a challenge, but also enlightening?

He likes Sub Zero, so I told him that F24 (Which I have to say every time as "Forward, Triangle, Circle) and B321 are strings that have to be blocked differently, so use those when you're in range and just "make it confusing"

Even just playing the AI on very hard, he got it!

I taught him 1 combo (which is really all Sub has) and showed him how any time you do over 7 hits you can activate Sub's 124 KB and do like 350 damage, which he liked a lot.

Naturally, this lead to a question: "Wait, you can use specials during the button strings?"

He's played other MK's and like SF2 before, but he had never quite gotten as far as 2-in-1's, so I did have to explain that, but he caught on pretty quick. About a week goes by, he's back texting me another question:

"wtf freeze doesn't hit from forward triangle?"

He naturally came across a puzzling scenario: SZ's ice ball does not combo naturally after his overhead F2, significantly weakening the reward vs. his hit-confirmable low B32 string. I told him that's true, *but* you have a tool in variation 1 for that - Amplified Ice Ball

So he starts playing around with that, now understands there are big differences in variations now. Another week, he's excited about Sub's B1. I tell him it goes far and can combo, but it can be ducked and hit.

"Well wouldn't they stand up to block forward triangle?"

I was like

All on his own, he'd figured out *conditioning,* and not long after that he was boasting about he was getting perfects because he "would dash out of the way" of their moves and hit them with B1/B3. He'd realized Sub's backdash is good and *spaced himself* to *whiff punish* the AI

I'm pumped, but I throw a curveball: "Okay, but what if while you're waiting for an attack they jump, what then?"

"Oh, dude, just trip 'em outta the air"

He'd remembered childhood games of MK2 where he would sweep when I landed from jumps and applied the same logic in this game

So he used *fundamental strategies from older games* to apply them to a new game for the purposes of *anti-airing* someone. Without even realizing it he'd stumbled upon a cardinal MK11 truth: jump attacks have recovery and can be whiff punished, which here he used Sub's sweep

I wanted to test him, so when he came over to work out we played a set. I beat him 6-0 easily with Scorpion (he doesn't have DLC so I don't use Spawn), but one thing I noticed was a few times where I'd fudge a teleport cancel off blocked B14, and he'd *punish* with 12 xx ice ball

I would say "nice punish," but he'd just look at me like I was nuts. "When you did square, triangle into freeze, that was good"

*Shrug*

"I just do that because it's faster than back square and some moves don't have as much lag when you block them"

My last observation was I threw him constantly, because he didn't actually know how throws worked that and didn't use them much. I explained they are basically really hard to escape consistently and if you block you can't escape.

"Doesn't that make them *super* good?"

Yes!

But, I made sure to explain, you can duck them and hit hard if you crouch without blocking. Oh, he goes. He thinks for a minute.

"So, if I do back X and forward triangle and they have to figure out how to block, couldn't I just throw 'em when they block?"

Look, is my brother *good* at MK11? No, but that measurement is meaningless to him. He just wants to do towers, hop online a few times, and play me on occasion. Obviously he doesn't like losing, but it's like dying in any other game for him: just gotta figure it out next time

There is a *chance* that if he played someone like me over and over again he'd get frustrated and quit, but since he's a big Soulsborne guy, he just treats it like he doesn't know enough yet. It's not like he hasn't played hard, punishing games; he sees fighters no different

There is a mythologizing and romanticizing of how much fighters are *unique* in the sense that there is literally nothing like it, and I wonder now, given my lived experience, if *that* is more detrimental to people playing than the supposed "difficulty" of playing fighters

Obviously, MK11 is pretty simple, I realize that - if I threw him Tekken 7 that'd be a much bigger barrier. But at the same time, why wouldn't he just treat it like he does his From games, or DMCV? He learned how to play those very well too, he's better at them than I am!

I also can't ignore that he just plain doesn't look into resources as much because unlike when he'd look up info for Soulsborne games, it's not as littered with jargon and things that *confuse him* more than helps. I'm no genius, but if I didn't decode this stuff, who would?

*decode this stuff for him

He's also pretty removed from the competitive sense in that he is not comparing himself to any other players or actively wanting to be the best, which I'm sure does wonders for the psyche and makes losing far easier to swallow and press on from

To bring it back to MK11 specifically, he has a space to play in the Towers of Time that will give him loads of different AI to fight against, usually cycling through the whole cast, and force him into creative situations to get rewards. I don't think he uses training mode much

I'm all for the critique that this is all incentivized by preying on latent gambling habits and yadda yadda, cool, but that hooks him in more than *anything,* in addition to the fact that he can hop online and have it play, as a Wi-Fi player, pretty darn consistently good

The story mode is *not* the single player content that drives the engagement, although it is cool, it's the Towers of Time. I see why those devs at the round table were enamored with AI talk - it's pretty important! But obviously, the online infrastructure is equally important

He recently got Soul Calibur VI, but he hasn't played it much. I asked him why, and he said it's because he feels the Libra of Souls isn't very satisfying for aesthetic - "I don't want to make my own character, I want to play Giralt" - and the "RPG bullshit" of its progression

This might just be him, too; he's talked about how he likes the aesthetic of the loot stuff that's in MK11 but could care less about the augments and their level progression. But I thought it was interesting that adding bells and whistles of other genres was a turn-off for him

In his words: "I just want to play, without waiting or cutscenes or level-up crap," and ToT gives him that option. That it has scaling difficulty in the various towers and challenges helps to keep it from being totally monotonous.

But even then, he *learned* important stuff!

So my big bro, who is a FG neophyte in every sense, started to learn basic concepts and strategies on his own, and has fun without absorbing a bunch of information through study/integration of FGC terminology/philosophies,

Would he feel the same if he had? Fuudo for thought!

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