How do we define fighting game?

Maybe the controversy of what constitutes a fighting game can be settled if we define what it means for a game to be classified as a fighting game. Here are my basic requirements:

• The central theme, and function of the the game has to be focused on Martial Arts. The Martial Arts can be hand to hand, weapons based or some combination thereof.

• The game has to have a dojo, gym, or practice mode that allows the player to learn, practice and study the fighters offensive, and defensive options. This mode must be available to the player at any time except during a match.

• Each contender/character in the game must have an equal chance to win. That is, given any two characters in a match either one must have an equal chance to win, given that the players involved have relatively equal skill sets and knowledge about the game. (We sometimes refer to this as the game being balanced).

• The primary objective of the game must be to get better at one or more of the martial arts presented in the game.

• Fighting Game Check Condition: If the martial arts matches/contests were completely removed from the game, then there would be no game to play. In other words the game cannot be a game about other things that simply has a martial arts component. e.g. Shenmue would not qualify as a fighting game under my definition.

• The game must center around a set of martial art competitions, matches, rounds, or encounters, where each competition, match, round or encounter has a clearly identified winner or loser. Unless the game has the possibility of a draw. An each match, round, competition or encounter must have a well defined beginning and end

• The opponents involved in the fight must initially have equal health, stamina, meters, or whatever metric is used to determine health of the fighter and the possibility for the fight to continue.

• Each character contender in the game must have a roughly equal amount of offensive and defensive options.

• A fighting game should keep track of the number wins, losses, matches played, rank obtained, or martial art goals achieved. In other words any game that is a fighting game will keep the fighter's statistics in some relevant way. The statistics should be persistent between matches, competitions, encounters etc.

• Any character involved in a match, round, competition, or other martial art encounter, must have the ability to block, evade, parry, duck, perform offensive moves and defensive moves based on the martial arts skills that character has.

if a game meets all of these requirements, it is clearly a fighting game. This set of requirements would disqualify beat-em ups, and action-adventure brawlers. However, games like Fight Night Champion, and UFC, and SIFU or Absolver would quality.


A martial arts based fighting game can legitimately be, Single Player, Two Player, Team-Based

• human vs AI
• human vs human
• AI vs AI (Remember VF4 would let you pit your trained AI against someone else's trained AI)

We can divide the Fighting Game Genre into

• Fantasy Fighting
• Combat Simulators
• Combat Sports

The idea that if the fighting in a game doesn't require two player then its not a fighting game, is ridiculous

 

Good write up.

Interestingly enough, and related to the topic, for the past few years, I've heard evo FGC people and hype men, saying that Smash is not a fighting game. I kinda find their ridiculous take to be hilarious, because Smash is what I call, a multi-brawler fighting game, kinda like Powerstone.

Strangely enough, the people who say Smash is not a fighting game, always seem to be individuals, who play Tekken and modern day Street Fighter. The other big joke is, some of them even claim, that Killer Instinct is not a fighting game. They definitely have to be trolling hard, because it's not funny. Lol!

 

The playstation store took down the Fighting Game category. (At least I could not find it).
If you search for fighting game you get:

https://store.playstation.com/en-us/category/a7223ba8-7860-48c5-91dd-d6458fe29566/1