Learning How To Learn
Before you read anything else in this article, I think it's important that you know a few things about me.
The first thing you should know is that I write a lot. I have a lot of thoughts. I'm sure you can see that, but I encourage you to read my ramblings with the knowledge that they are honest and sincere.
The second thing you should know is that I have ADHD, and went undiagnosed for most of my life. When I was in school, I never really "studied" much of anything. I either understood it when it was explained in class (which was most of the time), or I didn't. I did my homework, got decent grades, and never really thought too hard about school. I was doing other things in my free time, like writing Minecraft mods in Java that never worked, jailbreaking my iPod touch, and replaying my favorite video game of all time, Kingdom Hearts 2, for the 6th or 7th time.
In 2014, I started college. The rigid structure of grade school was replaced with something a little more free-form, and I really struggled with it. In my second year, I was so depressed and burned out that I got kicked out of a class, and had to beg my instructor to let me back in. I had started smoking cigarettes. I was getting about 3 hours of sleep per night. It was not a good time for me.
During this time, however, I was doing a bunch of cool stuff in my free time. I had hacked my Nintendo 3DS, and was writing small applications for it in C++. I was building a personal website (which was sadly lost forever when BitBalloon was taken over by Netlify). I was also playing what would become my second or third favorite video game of all time, Persona 4 Golden, for the first time.
One of my biggest issues for many years was an inability to stick to learning something over a longer period of time. If there wasn't some structure in my life forcing me to commit to something, I've never been able to do it by my own free will. I just couldn't maintain interest long enough in order to see meaningful improvement. My life is full of unfinished projects encompassing many different creative fields, which has turned me into a "jack of all trades, master of none" type person. For a long time, I resented this, and it was very upsetting to me that I couldn't stick with things long enough to get truly good at them.
I simply had no idea how to learn things. School sure as hell didn't teach me, and I think most people don't really know how to learn either. At this point, I feel pretty equipped to learn new things, but it took me a while to get to that point. It will probably take you a while too, but, that's okay. This document is going to explain how I got there, not as some kind of grand success story (because I am NOT successful), but just to talk about the process of learning, and maybe help someone else with their personal learning journey. You don't have to spend money on courses or go to college in order to learn things. If you want to do those things, that's up to you, but you don't HAVE to.
So, without further ado, let's get into it. But first, we have to talk about Guilty Gear.
It May As Well Be Guilty Gear
Let's fast forward to 2020. During this time, COVID hit, I dropped out of college, got an IT job doing a multitude of tasks (check my resume), and got my first apartment. It was also when I feel like I finally learned HOW TO LEARN THINGS. And, while programming at work definitely helped this, the thing that REALLY facilitated that discovery was FIGHTING GAMES.
At the time, the only fighting game that I had ever really played was Super Smash Bros (yes, Smash is a fighting game, don't be weird about it please). I was pretty god awful at it, and I never felt like I could find any tutorials or guides on how to get better that spoke to my brain. Playing Smash was always a constant struggle with having no idea what was really going on, and not having a framework for understanding the strategy of the game conceptually.
While I was living in my first apartment, however, a beta for GUILTY GEAR -STRIVE- released, and me and my brother played it several times during the testing period. I was immediately impressed with how fun the game was, even with a limited understanding of it all. I thought about how cool it would be to genuinely get into Guilty Gear. Not to just play it here and there, but actually commit myself to it, in an effort to genuinely improve.
I had multiple things to prove here. For one, I just liked the game and wanted to get good at it. I wanted to be better at fighting games in general after struggling with them for so long. Not only that, but I desperately wanted to prove to myself that I could stick to something long-term. I wanted to learn how a person commits to a thing, and how to learn skills in a way that was easier for my brain. And so, I took the plunge, and as soon as Strive released, I sat down with the full intention to learn how to learn how to be good at Guilty Gear.
You Suck, Kid
If you're not a fighting game player, you may be under the assumption that fighting games are really hard. It is, unfortunately, a stigma that has stuck with the genre since the early days of their popularity, and continues to spread to this day. As someone who got into them relatively recently (2021-2024 now), I think it's important to fight this stigma.
But uh... Just, one small problem with "fighting the stigma".
Fighting games ARE pretty hard.
It's just that, fighting games aren't hard in the ways that most people think that they are.
A lot of people point to things like motion inputs (quarter circles and Z motions and the like) and the need to do complex combos as the reasons "why fighting games are hard". But, if you really get into it and start to learn these things, you will come to find that they aren't that difficult at all.
Motion inputs and combos are all about mechanical skill, which can be trained much more easily than you might think. After all, you exercise mechanical skills in pretty much any video game genre you play, and if it's a genre you're already familiar with, those mechanical skills probably come pretty easily to you. If you like shooters, you've trained the mechanical skill of aiming. If you're into MOBAs, you've trained the mechanical skills of kiting and lazer accurate mouse-clicks. Many people discount these mechanical skills because they've been subtly training them for years without even really thinking about it.
Most people can aim somewhat decently in a first person shooter because they've been playing first person shooters for years now. If you sat a person who had literally never played one in front of Counter-Strike, it would take them a while to adjust to that mechanical skill before they could become proficient in it. Many people assume that first person shooters are simply "easier to get into" than something like a fighting game. However, if you look at the reality, the fact of the matter is that familiarity is the real driver of that ease of access. You can move quickly and aim easily because you've done it before.
Another thing people point to (less so than the mechanical stuff) is the amount of knowledge you need to be aware of to be strategically competent. I think that this is pretty fair, but not unheard of in terms of video games that people are into on the whole. At the time of writing this article, there are one hundred and sixty-eight fucking champions in League of Legends, all with different optimal builds, skill rotations, build orders, and matchups against every other champion that might appear in your lane, much less the game as a whole. In a fighting game with 20-some-odd characters, you really don't need to know all that much to be decent, especially if you have some strong fundamentals. (I'm sure this is the same with League too, by the way, but it's fun to pick on League.)
The reason I've gone into these things is to dispell the myth that the game is the problem. It's vitally important to understand this. The game is not the reason why you're bad at it, or why it's difficult to play well. Because we're all human, we like to make excuses for why we're bad at a thing. These are the clear and obvious reasons that most people pick to make excuses about when it comes to fighting games, so I thought it would be important to get them out of the way immediately.
So, training these mechanical and strategic skills is important, but they're not really what makes playing fighting games difficult. The real problem is that you have to perform, both strategically and mechanically, in a 1v1 environment. In these moments, all of your careful consideration and mechanical practice and detailed strategy development goes out the window. You are reduced to your baseline, and you will lose all sense of self, and you WILL become a monkey pressing random keys. Not only that, but you WILL get your ass kicked, over and over and over again by players who are better than you, until you learn how to truly play the game. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.
Unfortunately, the only way to get past this stage of the learning process is to get in there and do it anyway. It may seem scary, but there's really nothing to be afraid of other than a bit of bruising your own ego. If you can take the punches, lose, and genuinely learn from the experience, you will become a strong fighting game player.
This is, I think, one of the most fundamental aspects of learning. All things are difficult when you first start doing them. And, depending on what the skill is, you may find that it's genuinely emotionally difficult to grow. It hurts to lose, and to know that you're bad at something. That's why most people will never play a fighting game at a high level. In that 1v1 environment, there aren't teammates to blame for your loss, or to complain about feeding, or to lose a lane for you.
The game is not the problem.
Your teammates are not the problem.
You lost because you suck.
But like... That's okay. When jumping into anything new, you have to aware of your own suckage, and welcome it with open arms. In the words of the great Jake The Dog: "Sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something." In order to learn, you must take this to heart, and truly accept it with every fiber of your being.
Fighting games put this upfront, directly in your face, immediately. And, that's probably why people think they're hard.
Running Into Walls
Okay, so, you've pretended to accept that you suck. Where do you go from there?
If you are truly starting from absolutely zero, you need to get some basic fundamental concepts in your head. You can do this in a bunch of different ways. Watch tutorials. Read some beginner literature on the subject. In the realm of fighting games specifically, I watched some YouTube videos on bare fundamentals, and played the tutorial for Guilty Gear. (If you want specific recommendations for fighting games, check out Sajam and Core-A Gaming. These guys are incredible.)
These bare fundamentals will, obviously, be different per-discipline. The fundamentals of cooking are different than the fundamentals of programming, or of fighting games. The point is that, by drilling down into the basic essence of a subject matter, you have a baseline for how to apply more detailed and varied information in the future. You have know the rules before you can start breaking them (or, so I've heard).
Once you have these fundamentals, your goal is now to apply those fundamentals in a live fire environment. THIS is the part where you will find out that you suck real quick. Cook a burger. Build a website. Play ranked and fight Sol Badguy. No matter what you do, you will start to find the edges of your knowledge pretty quickly.
The important part is that, when you find these edges of your knowledge, and when you fuck it all up, and when you lose, you have to return to the TRUTH. It's okay to suck, and it's okay to make mistakes, and you're going to make a whole lot of them.
Here's a secret: Nobody ever stops feeling those edges. Everyone runs into walls.
As long as you are learning SOMETHING, for your entire life, you will never stop fucking things up, or thinking that you don't know as much as you could know. The only difference between a newbie and a professional is experience. And, the way that you move away from being a newbie is by continually running into those walls, taking a moment, and then asking a simple question. "What went wrong here, and how do I change it next time?"
This is the sort of thing that tutorials and YouTube videos can't really teach you. The ability to make a mistake and ask yourself how you could do it better next time is something you have to hone on your own. It WILL be difficult, but please, trust me, it is worth it. After you've fucked up a few burgers, you will know the right temperature settings and the right timing. After you've built a few websites, you'll know the common pitfalls.
The point of all of this is, you don't know what you haven't seen. You have to get out there and SEE STUFF in order to know what you need to work on. When you see things for the first time, and you inevitably run into issues, solving those issues will allow you to build up a bank of knowledge for how to deal with them. At first, it will be simple stuff. But, eventually, as you grow, you will see situations that are less common, and you'll be able to call on your past mistakes to build a personal framework for understanding those less common problems.
Fundamentals allow you to get into it.
Getting into it allows you to run into walls.
Those walls teach you how to become a problem solver.