There used to be a plethora of fighting games around when i was growing up, a whole genre of titles focused around two guys staring at each other and just going at until one was defeated. As simple as the formula was, there were hundreds of titles developed, with thousands of characters designed with special moves. Street Fighter 2, Tekken, Kind of the fighters, Mortal Combat, just to name a few of them.

My random wandering on the internet trail today brought up a number of images of fighting games. My new method of writing on this blog involves getting random inspiration from various online sources, which I then reflect on the areas that I am interested in, and write down any concepts that seem worthy of further development. Here is what the fighting games stirred from the depths of my unconscious mind.

Character Development Traits.
Why are certain character types used again and again in fiction, video games, movies and other cultural forms of entertainment. You can even see these character arch/stereo types in the way that the media portray people, and the public persona’s that people take.

Although we live in an unquantifiable world (more on this concept later), people like to behave, and treat others in ways that they deem to definable and predictable. Our whole way of living in the world is to constantly match the model of our predictions up to the data being presented to us and react accordingly. While viewing the world as these categorizations can be restricting, we must also remember that categorizations are the only way that we actually know ANYTHING. By learning about archetypes, different character traits and stereotypes constantly (researching new ones that you don’t know or understand, for instance The tarot trumps, the characters in the matrix, Greek mythology.) Looking at the origins and development of these archetypal characters can give you deep insights into the nature of culture, and how arbitrary a lot of the cultural memes we deal with every day are.

A lot of characters in these games are based on real people, it would be a really interesting way to teach people history that, by getting them to play late 90’s fighting games and then show them the historic figures behind it.

A Fractal Mythology :
All of these games, like nearly everything that we treat as a story has its own internal mythological universe when you look at it. There are good guys and bad guys, wise old people, novices learning the rules, people to be saved, victims, villains, henchmen and a vast other plethora of character types.

Tags: archetypal characters, character development, development traits, fighting games, special moves, stereotypes, street fighter