Simplicity and Complexity in the Player's Brain

 Hello once more!

    Lately (three months now) i have been getting really into Tekken. I love fighting games because of their high skill ceiling in every conceivable aspect of the game, making me think really hard about the game and how to become the best. For a player, the game already has the best way to play it built-in; all they have to do is find it! Tekken however has taken this to another level. I have also sunk my teeth in guilty gear xrd (sol main btw) but it hasn't made me think as much as Tekken 7 has. I decided to go against my usual playstyle and i selected Jin to main, one of the most mechanically demanding characters in the game. Today specifically i was thinking about Jin's parry and that line of thinking led to me writing this post.

    In Tekken 7, Jin Kazama is a generalist. He has every tool for every situation, even if other characters shine better in certain categories than him (master of none and all that). In order to learn the character, i have broken down his moveset and slowly incorporate it into my playstyle. Lately it's been the parry that i have been trying to incorporate and i am famously garbage at parrying so i have been having loads of trouble. It can be said that the parry is the simplest of moves to understand. Press back plus left punch and kick at the same time and Jin will perform a parry that parries all high and mid attacks. Every attack Jin parries, he will move to the side and get into a position to punish. The hard part obviously is the timing of your enemy.

    This is however the fascinating part: in order to make it easy on myself and get used to the parry, instead of simplifying, which is something that usually comes to mind when i throw the word facilitate, i incorporated the parry in a more complex way. What i do is, i parry after i whiff a move, after the opponent closes the distance and threatens to tear me apart, after i wake up (i get up from the ground, not like in real life in the morning) or during my pressure, to catch my opponent trying to steal the turn from me. All of these of course are over-simplified descriptions of what actually goes on in my head. In truth, there are a plethora of conditions to consider which i decided to leave out. And yet, despite all that, it's easier to land parries that way! These are the abstractions and supporting structures that my brain has constructed, as a form of training wheels to get the parry down. In order to make something more easy, i made it more complicated.

    And that made me think. Do humans complicate things to make them easier? And if so, how do they do it? Why is the complex, easier? 

    One field that immediately comes to mind is mathematics. In mathematics, abstractions and structures are created all the time in order to complicate, thus facilitating, concepts and operations. Multiplication is a great example of that! Multiplication is a more complex operation than addition. However, the human brain will be able to answer 20*10 faster than 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10. The simple way to write out 20*10 is huge! By making it more complex, we make it shorter and easier to understand. Instead of 20 operations, it's only one. If i want to carry a 100 feet of rope, i will not keep it in a single, simple line. I will spool it into a ball of rope, a shape infinitely more complex than a simple line and then lift it up and carry it. The human brain has a really neat property of taking complex structures, giving them a name and treating them as a single object, while culling all nuance and detail. You don't freeze and start computing if a box i gave you has 100 smaller boxes inside like a matryoshka doll. A computer would take considerable more time to register the collection of 101 boxes. The human brain however treats it as a single object: a box with smaller boxes inside. The smaller boxes that are inside, no matter how many they are or their color or their shape or material they are made out of, all become a property of the biggest box. It's a box with the property of having smaller boxes inside.

    This wonderful human process, the art of culling detail and treating complex structures as a single thing, applies to games as well! To take things back to Tekken and Jin, at some point i decided to learn and integrate the wavedash into my playstyle as well. I saw the DP input (forward, down, down+forward) and instantly did what i did with Sol Badguy, just whipping buttons wildly, but it wouldn't come out. My brain couldn't change course from the standardized DP input i had created however because i treated it as one immutable thing. So i went one level lower and dissected the DP input and realized that there's a pause between forward and down in Tekken. This new input that i started doing however clicked once i treated it as a wavedash input in my head, rather than a modified DP input. Wavedash and DP inputs, while similar in execution, are two completely different things in my head and i bust them both out at completely different times with completely different goals in mind. 

    Now comes the million dollar question: let's spin this around to the game designer's perspective. How do i leverage this whole situation to the benefit of my game? How do i play with humanity's tendency to objectify complex things? 

    This is what i personally can think of. It is by no means comprehensive and i invite you to think of more ways to exploit this better! The first application of this that i have thought of is the one i just described in Tekken: such a small difference between the DP and wavedash input was enough to make me pause and realize the completely different way Tekken wants me to utilize that input. In Guilty Gear, the DP input comes out when i am in trouble. It's the panic input. Sol's DP is invincible on startup, deals a buttfuck ton of damage and tosses the opponent high in the air for me to play with. In Tekken, the wavedash is supposed to be an approach tool, a punish tool in neutral or an evasive button. If it was a normal DP input, my goofy ass would've still been trying to bust out wind hook fists as a "get off me" button. That process of stepping back and seeing things from another angle always makes learning fun. It is fun. It's like i solved a puzzle and my reward is getting to terrorize people in neutral (once i get the hellsweep input down LOL). Btw i didn't use the word puzzle randomly: this is the second implementation that i thought of. Taking a step back to analyze something and coming out with an answer that was seemingly in clear sight, giving you that "oh shit!" feeling. That's puzzle-making 101.