Video games, programming and other forms of digital media are becoming more popular offerings in classrooms around the United States, but we hadn’t really seen one specifically focusing on fighting games before.
That is apparently unless you live or plan to go to school around Northern California where students can earn credits for throwing Hadokens.
The University of California, Berkeley is currently gearing up to hold a course named The Art of Fighting Games for the Spring 2024 semester — though it seems like they’ve held it in the past as well.
This is a real class with homework, reading assignments, research projects and more, and it won’t even be an online course. They’re actually going to teach about fighting games in a classroom.
Of course, this caught the attention of the fighting game community with many wishing they could either attend or teach the class — or obviously make jokes about the tests and grades.
Although the teachers probably won’t fully train you to win tournaments, students will be required to play the assigned fighting games along with learning the mechanics and fundamentals.
The course description states students won’t be graded on how well they perform, but rather their “eagerness, commitment to improvement, and effort in the course assignments.”
Berkeley has the public syllabus available online, so we can check out what the first half of the semester’s coursework is going to look like as well as the grading.
On top of the games themselves, this course is also setting out to teach students about the origins of the genre, its impact on Japanese culture, arcades, the rise of the fighting game community and FGC-related jargon.
They also point out this class is covering the fundamentals of 2D fighters and specifically not platform fighters like Super Smash Bros though the main focus this semester appears to be on the Street Fighter series.
In fact, part of the first assignment is actually downloading Fightcade to run Street Fighter 3: Third Strike, which will then be used on future homework.
That includes things like parrying Ryu’s full Denjin Hadoken Super and playing a first to five against your classmates.
Their “exams” will be Swiss-style tournaments pitting the students against each other where they then need to submit an essay reflecting on the experience and what they need to work on.
It’s not all fun and games, however, as there are readings to accomplish and lectures to attend including watching INFINITE’s discussion on creating the Third Strike theme song.
And then there’s the final project, which is a group research presentation looking into a “historically significant player in fighting game history” where students will need to dive into a competitor’s background, contributions and interestingly, an analysis on their play style.
The syllabus specifically names players like Bala, Justin Wong, Xiaohai, BST|Daigo Umehara and Rohto|Tokido as examples of who to research.
Although this course is probably a bit too basic for most people here, it is really cool to see that fighting games can exist now in an academic setting to be studied and learned with its own rich history for new generations to appreciate.
If you are actually interested, though, signups for this elective class are still open until January 24, 2024.
My university certainly didn’t feature anything like this, but they did allow me to create a website dedicated to fighting games and the local tournament scenes for a course, which helped a lot in landing my job here at EventHubs — so don’t be afraid to get creative with your passions and interests in the field of academia because it can end up being way more fulfilling than the standard coursework.
If you want more information, check out the official Berkeley page for The Art of Fighting Games.
Image by Tumisu from Pixabay.