i wrote this to Yahtzee, ended up being longer than I had planned. I thought I might as well post it twice, since I put some effort into it and god knows if he'll ever read it.
"I do realize that you never asked me, but here is a better reply to the question of why ?or rather when-- fighting games are fun.
Fighting games offer you what many games these days, especially rpgs, don't: an extremely robust, well-balanced mechanic of interacting with another player. It's an arena that lets people develop, and show off, a high level of skill. They are not single-player games. They are social games. No fighting game has ever been, will ever be, or SHOULD ever be about the story mode, or about playing against a computer opponent. This is because a fighting game isn't really a fight, or at least it's actually not about the spectacle of the violence. That's just fluff, the eye candy that draws people in. A fighting game is really more like a dance competition, or a debate. You learn a very specific language, and the person who uses that language to better effect, more spectacularly, more gracefully, is the winner. You can't play a fighting game like a single player game. You are not fighting against the game's mechanics, as you are in an rpg or a linear story game. You are using the supplied mechanics to fight against another (ideally intelligent) human being. It's not pinball, but chess.
Some of my best memories of gaming time with my little brother include playing tekken 3, each of us skilled to the point where we could do combo after combo, grab after grab, without touching each other. We'd duck and break the hold, and parry the strike over and over again for minutes at a time, each of us grinning and enjoying ourselves immensely. Why? No one was winning, but it was a pleasure to keep on outsmarting and being outsmarted. It was a pleasure to just be _good_ at it, and to be fighting with someone who was good at it.
This dynamic would come to the forefront immediately if you tried to play a fighting game at an arcade, or in any other social setting. No one cares if you can win using only the throw command. That's not really playing the game. It's not engaging the game's potential. Nobody would play with you at a party if you showed yourself to be that kind of player. It's like the bad guy in Karate Kid who breaks your kneecap instead of out-karate-ing you. Who cares if you can beat someone like that? Who cares if you can pull out a shotgun and blow off Bruce Lee's head? No one respects that kind of "play". No one respects that kind of unqualified "win".
If you think about it, it is bringing a single-player attitude to a social game that creates all of the assholes in the multiplayer world, the same ones you complain about encountering in the mmorpgs. These people are in the game to "win", as though it were a single player game. They will grind, and exploit bugs, and kill people indiscriminately to increase their stats, their possessions, or whatever perks the game offers, at the expense of their relationships with other real people. But there are other people who are using the game's mechanics in order to have a relationship with other people, and I would argue that these people are probably having more fun. Or at least, they are having their fun and helping other people to have more fun too, rather than having fun at the expense of other people, aka being a total cock. These attitudes apply just as well to real life.
When you play a fighting game as it's meant to be played, using all of its subtle grabs, escapes, parries, jabs, and reversals, against an opponent who is interested in engaging the fight as fully as you do, that's what really makes a fighting game fun, both to play and to watch. Not the violence, not the win, and for gods sakes not the story mode. It's about the skill, the memory, the quick thinking, the intelligence and cleverness of yourself and your opponent."
cheers,
flynn