Friendship and Enemies and the Fighting Game Community
The Fighting Game Community, or FGC for short, is a group of people who come together to compete in computer games that are classified as ‘Fighting Games.’ This article discusses some of the social aspects of the FGC. The particular section that is of interest concerns the explanation of the rather harsh environment that is the local arcade. Playing games in an arcade is different from playing them at home. For fighting games, you pay for a single match, which is usually best of three rounds, where each round can last a maximum of 99 seconds. If you win, you get to stay on and fight the next person. If you lose, you’re forced to go all the way back to the end of the line, wait, and pay again for the chance to redeem yourself.
This article relates to the concept of Friends and Enemies and their balances. Let’s say that we have an arcade that just opened up in an area, and all of the players in that area have no prior relations to anyone else in that area. Let’s also assume that every player has a new relation with every other player in the arcade, so that any three nodes selected can always form a triangle. When you first enter the arcade, every person in there is your enemy. Why? Because they are there to take away from your playing time. And since matches are short, it’s possible to lose all of your money very quickly. Since you don’t know anyone there yet, it’s natural to think of everyone as your enemy, just like the article states. So now every edge in the graph is an enemy edge. We know that this is an unbalanced graph, since every triangle contains three enemies, and the only balanced graphs are three friends, or one friend and two enemies. However, in the article, it is explained that once people fight each other enough, friendship can emerge. Because of this, the graph begins to balance itself out. This shows that even in a harsh environment it’s still unnatural for everyone to be enemies.
– John DeCorato