Faking the Funk: Is Showboating a Viable Style for an MMA Game? - Wiggy's Blog

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Faking the Funk: Is Showboating a Viable Style for an MMA Game? Stuck

Posted on August 10, 2013 at 01:56 AM.

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After watching the surprise knockout of Anderson Silva a few weeks back, I wondered about the viability of showboating and "faking the funk" in combat sports, but also in the context of fighting games in general. There were definitely some pundits and fighters who were backing Weidman in the fight, but I think the conventional wisdom was that it was going to be a grind-it-out type of fight for Weidman or a dominant fight for Silva.

As Weidman showed us, it's often all about the location of the punch when it comes to a knockout. A punch to the carotid artery not only compresses said artery, reducing blood flow, but it also sends the head into a state of whiplash, violently shaking around the brain and creating an electrical short-circuit, which affects motor function and ultimately produces a knockout. Silva, for all his fancy footwork, evasion and taunting, wasn't able to avoid the science of a well-timed punch.

However, most of the time, what Silva was doing during the fight would have worked for him, as he often psyches out his opponent by getting into their head and by evading punches and feigning damage. Since his striking is usually so much better than his opponent, he uses jabs, kicks and body shots to make his competition respect his power. Once they respect his power, he goes about disrespecting their power by using his amazing reflexes to create glancing blows that don't land flush. He then tops it off by dropping his hands and allowing himself to be hit just to mess with them some more. I've always thought that at certain points when he's doing this that he's probably getting somewhat damaged, but his real skill is in not showing the damage. He continues to clown and showboat, effectively sucking away his opponent's will to strike altogether.

The interesting thing about this style of fighting is that it's never really been translated into the virtual realm. I suspect the main reason is because it would be quite difficult to implement and balance. The closest the UFC games have come to emulating this is from the addition of feints and the inclusion of a taunt button. You can definitely mess with the AI or your friends by using these tools, and it can be fun to evade incoming punches, but there's nothing that quite matches up with the Anderson Silva style of fighting. Hell, there's nothing even really close to the slightly less flashy Jon Jones style of fighting.

To be sure, something like this would be incredibly hard to balance, as you would have to essentially buff the defense of a Silva character in order to compensate for the incoming shots he would have to take. Just the same, fighting with this style would almost run counter to how most people are used to playing fighting games, which is to get in there and start trading bombs. This isn't to say that everyone fights this way, but many users want to make fights a striking affair, so a gameplay system would have to accommodate several fighters who fought with some level of funk-faking and showboating.

It's easier to replicate someone like Lyoto Machida, as his elusive style just ends up resembling a patient fighter, and you can use feints and counters and quick kicks to achieve the desired effect of fighting something like the real-life person. Silva, or even Jones, would require a different type of gameplay balance, right down to the stats beneath the hood and the animations of the fighters. There would almost have to be some kind of intimidation or momentum system in place to show a fighter's mental state as well as his physical condition.

I think the only way to really achieve this kind of fighting style for certain fighters would be to completely rethink the feel of MMA games, particularly in terms of the animations. Much like how traditional fighting games (Street Fighter, etc.) have characters that move and carry themselves differently, I think the movement speed and animations of individual fighters would have to be unique. A fighter like Silva could have this sort of behaviour "baked in" to his fighting toolset, and most of the motions would be automated. In this way, it would actually be quite similar to games like Street Fighter, as you would have to know the timing, movement and animations of a given character before you could land their powerful attacks. Silva or Jones could be this way, where you would have to control them in a specific manner in order to unlock the mastery they truly possess.

If anything, I kind of feel that it's interesting to think about these sorts of AI possibilities as we enter the next generation of consoles and videogaming. AI systems haven't really been the focus of innovation in the last five or ten years, and it would be nice to see something more than just a throttle on aggression or speed. I'm intrigued by what I've heard about the "MMAI" that EA is touting for EA Sports UFC, but that seems specifically catered around game-planning and aggression. It would be nice to see fighters conduct their business with more personality and unique behaviours, and I think it's a goal that would be worth pursuing.

What about you, OS? Do you think an MMA product should accommodate this style of fighting? How would it best be implemented?