postrequisites

Something I've been thinking about a lot recently is something I don't have a name for. Assumed semi-prerequisites? Mid-ground postrequisites? Subtleties the base knowlege could indicate but only if you extrapolate using a greater understanding of the subject? Something that the instructor assumes one should know, is not baseline/foundational knowledge and so deeply ingrained in them that they're fully blind to it. Like the xkcd geologists but significantly subtler. A big reason I'm thinking about it is a ongoing conflict^[1] at work around assumptions of knowledge, documentation's limits, a recent turnover event, and how that all affects time-to-complete-a-task, but I'm not really a workposter and I have another example fitting the theme: Street Fighter (6)^[2] inputs.

In street fighter, you've got your basic punches and kicks of light/medium/heavy, a second set of those for crouching, and a third set in midair. As complex as even that is, you also have a set of special moves, like Ryu's famous hodoken fireball. These ones are all special inputs that require you to do several directional inputs before pressing a punch or kick. These are often a quarter turn of a joystick, starting from down and rolling forward or back, but not always. Street Fighter players usually notate these as either QC[F,B] (quarter circle [forward, back]) or using a numberpad's alternate directional mode to inform a notation where 5 is the joystick's neutral position and every other number denotes a direction--so 3 is diagonal down/right, 6 is right, 7 is diagonal up/left, etc--forming a notation like 236 for QCF. This is all baseline, foundational knowledge. If you don't know what an input is, a street fighter player gets that, is like, "aw yeah been there, lemme explain" and walks you through it. Guides almost always include a key explaining their notational quirks and sometimes even why they prefer one way over another. It's the low hanging fruit, the thing that sticks in one's mind after mastery as being an important thing that had to be learned, and can't be assumed known for a beginner.

Once you learn the special input moves, you then start asking "well, OK, now how do I actually make these cool flashy tricks land and help me win?"
You quickly learn most can't just be thrown out whenever, because when you whiff one or have it blocked, you're in a highly disadvantaged state your opponent can use to beat you up. That's where the experienced player explains, "oh, yeah, you gotta combo into them using a hit confirm" and the beginner goes, "using a what?" and the player goes, "oh right, let me explain..." and goes over the basics on how canceling works: certain regular attacks can have their followthrough animation bypassed entirely in favor of cutting straight to a special attack. Right here, tho, is where things start to get fuzzy: nailing a cancel window is, by and large, something you find by feel, it seems. You can quantify it^[3], but the numbers don't really mean much, especially to a new player. At this point, ime, the experienced player just gives up amd recommends labbing it out--practicing the timing until it sticks. They may explain settings you can enable to add a visual cue to go with audio, possibly note you can slow down gametime, but by and large they neglect what is, imo, the two most important aspects of canceling: when you input the directions for the special and how the game even reads inputs.

Let me break it down. Your move has wind up: your guy pulls back their arm to punch. That's the startup frames. Your guy punches forward, hitting the opponent: the "hot" part of the action that deals damage. The active frames. Then there's the followthru after the hit--your guy completing the punch out and pulling themself back to a neutral position. The recovery frames. Generally speaking, during the recovery, that is all your guy can do. You can't punch again till the recovery is over. You can't block, you can't jump. If you're in recovery frames and your opponent is not engaged in the activities of "getting hurt" or "recovering from blocking", that's their chance to beat up on you freely. Canceling, though, bypasses your recovery frames in favor of your next move's startup frames! So when your medium punch can cancel into your special uppercut move (aka a DP)^[4], you input your punch, and as your guy hauls back, you input your 623 for the DP, and then you hit punch again as your medium punch is hitting your opponent, which triggers the cancel: instead of returning to neutral with recovery frames, your guy immediately swings out a massive jumping uppercut.

This explanation is a) more in depth than any discussion of canceling I've read^[5] and b) points out the thing I needed pointing out and had to figure out myself thru much frustration: to cancel, you do not have to input the entire [joystick motion and button press] set of buttons during the cancel window, just the final press of the attack button that triggers the special. This immediately makes the "how do I do this little swooshy motion fast enough" go away entirely: you don't. It's a little like reading ahead in music--you don't read the note you're playing, you read the notes coming up. You don't push the buttons when you want the move to come out, but before.

The game is, essentially, always playing catchup. There's a lot of implications for this I'm not going to get into here--it's why there are "hit confirms"^[6] as a concept, it's why autopiloting is bad, it's part of what neutral is built around--because the salient bit is right here: canceling is one of these mid-level concepts that don't get broken down like a foundational concept but are both distant enough from the ground floor and so ingrained in a proficient player they don't realize it needs breaking down: they just do it, so why can't you?

I love taking up hobbies--it is essentially hobby in itself for me--I love learning new things and trying new ideas, and seeing how they all interconnect (they all do). This means I sit at this point a lot. A spot where I have the basics down, but there's a certain element I'm missing, something that it seems everyone proficient is doing, but I don't have the vocabulary to express the hole or ask the right questions to get them to explain what is so deeply ingrained. In SF6, it's been this cancel thing. I've been able to bypass it with modern controls and skip to actually playing neutral^[7], the aspect of the game I want to play, but I keep feeling like the added physical complexity and expanded options of classic controls would add a level of nuance I would appreciate. This has been a mountain for me though--a mountain of misinputs, of "hey why didn't this come out"s, of "how do you even do these two/three/six moves in succession??"s. I think I made a breakthru today by stumbling upon an input trick when searching out how in the world one even inputs Ryu's famous "cancel your giant uppercut into an even bigger Super uppercut" trick of DP>SA3^[8] that finally clinched what I wasn't understanding about canceling.

I said there were two things not explained: when to input directions (during other attacks) and how the game reads these. It turns out, the game is basically listening to directions and attacks on two separate channels. If the direction input and the attack input line up in time, and the direction (or directions) mean something for that attack, a different attack than the basic one comes out. But vitally, they're still separate. The 236 you put in before your kick still exists in the timeline as a QCF, independent of that kick input. What makes this so vital to know is one last input element: the Super Art. These are special attacks that deal high damage but whose use is locked behind a gauge that slowly grows as you hit, block, and are hit. To execute, you generally input two consecutive quarter circle inputs and then a punch or kick. These are high commitment moves--both physically with the doubled input and in game, with special cutscenes and massive recovery times that mean you want to be Very Sure they will land. The best way to ensure they land? Cancel a special attack into a super art!

Yesterday, this meant to me that I had to input a quarter circle forward, a punch, and then two more quarter circles plus a kick to make Ryu DP>SA3^[9]. Recall you wanna push the attack button part of that input during the active frames of the move prior. The start up plus active frames of Ryu's DP total around 22 frames, so you basically have 22 frames of a 60fps game to input two quarter circles and a kick... except you don't. The directional input channel is separate from the attack channel, which means it still remembers you had just put in a quarter circle from the DP, so to execute the SA3... you only need one 236

You mention this to an experienced player, and they'll go, "oh, yeah, of course that's how it works!"

You try to explain it to someone who has never played a fighting game and you get this blog post

When trying to learn, you look up the inputs, see what they are, and assume everyone else is just that much faster than you are; a skill gap that may not be physically possible to bridge.

Mid-level, assumed/ingrained knowledge; an invisible gap; you need to have enough knowlege to know what question to ask, but if you had the knowledge to formulate the question you wouldn't need to ask it. A hole in learning that's built on assumptions from both sides--from the learner that there is only one way forward, and from the teacher that everyone probably has come to conclusion z from datapoints a and b. It's much easier to remember beginnings and endings; the in between, the unsteady graph of highs and lows that don't always correlate with knowledge gained is much harder to delve into.

How do you explain how you do something by feel? How do you show how to do a thing without hashing out each exact step in time, creating a rigidity that shatters as soon as something goes off script? How do you foster a step into the unknown, both preventing disaster and allowing the greatest amount of growth? Can you shorten the time it takes for the next person to learn? Should you if it means the foundation is suspect?

Teaching's hard. Learning's hard. It takes time to do both, and neither are linear.

• learning
• street fighter six