Or more specifically a state of play. Fighting game terminology is unfriendly at the best of times, and when you want to go about deconstructing footsies, you can’t talk about them in the same way you talk about throws, guard breaks or super combos. Instead, it’s better to think about it as a traditional discipline carried out by players, or a specific segment in the “timeline” of any fighting game match – whether that game is Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, BlazBlue or whatever. Footsies are a thing that’s likely to occur at the beginning of a round but can also be re-established in an emergent fashion later on. Many fighting games can display a message at the side of the screen when you perform a throw tech or a crush counter, because those are gameplay mechanics built into the game. Conversely, it would be hard to imagine a fighting game flashing the words “Good footsies! (500 pts)” on the screen, because it’s a state of play formalised by players and you’d need some kind of advanced machine learning to analyse what’s happening and decide if footsies are happening.
You could try deconstructing footsies yourself – with a visit to Google and a few searches you’ll find talk about “mid-range” “space control”, the “ground game” and “safe” “pokes” that help one player dictate the “pace” and “flow” of the game. I don’t intend to get too wrapped up in the minutiae (but we can still keep the above aspects of play in mind) – instead, let’s return to the concept of footsies as a moment in a round’s timeline.
Deconstructing footsies in a round
You start the round, you engage in footsies, you commit to a gamble… maybe you retreat. Then maybe there are more footsies. And so it goes on. The biggest mistake a glossary on fighting games can make would be including footsies as a regular technique amongst guarding and throws – in reality, it would probably need its own chapter in that glossary.
When deconstructing footsies, we could look at the established conventions first. One thing that is certain is that the “footsies” part of a round or match relies on constants for animation speed (the number of frames in each move’s animation), movement speed and hitboxes – essentially, players engaging in footsies are typically at “mid-range” (close enough for attacks to land whilst still offering a means to create distance if things get risky) using safe pokes (attacks that complete quickly so that it’s harder for an opponent to punish them, and serve to keep the opponent at a distance) on the ground to try and gauge (or, better still, control) the options and opportunities available to both characters. If there was a fighting game where the character movement speed, animation speed or hitbox sizes changed randomly during rounds, deconstructing footsies within that game would be impossible. Instead, footsies rely on the fixed parameters encoded into each game. Furthermore, a common understanding of fighting game design is that the more powerful moves are less “safe” to perform – nobody throws out their strongest move at the start of a round, because it’s often easy to avoid or counter such a move at that moment in a match. Instead, a player can rely on those safe mid-range pokes to gain vital information without the risk of (over)commitment.
Concepts and upsets
Of course, there are plenty of other elements of play that can upset the footsie game – what happens when you’re throwing out pokes and then a player decides to step back, throw a projectile, and then disrupt mid-range play by jumping at you? However, experienced players will know the strengths and weaknesses of their opponent’s character, and may anticipate this – either with a plan to punish the opponent or to simply nullify their efforts and bring things back to the footsie game.
The idea of footsies is an emergent concept that relies on established design tropes in the fighting game genre. Because the characters move in this manner and attack in these ways, people can understand what footsies between a particular pair of characters will look like. In a fighting game with a small cast, things quickly become pretty complex, but when you have bigger rosters and more potential matchups, the “mid-range” play becomes more varied. Even so, it’s a single-word term that encompasses a lot of behaviours and practices in the game, and so I can totally understand new players hearing the term and being a bit bewildered when trying to decode its meaning. However, experienced players need to educate rather than dismiss those who have more to learn.
Deconstructing footsies for others
As said in our opening, however, footsies aren’t a concept that can be measured by an in-game system, and so people will always dispute the terminology one way or another. I’ll admit that when I started paying more attention to fighting games, I mistakenly thought that footsies were what happened when players tried to bait out unsafe moves from their opponents, and I thought of it as a specific decision or strategy rather than an organic state of play. Footsies are the foundation of a match that incorporate smaller building blocks of fighting games such as the rock, paper and scissors game of attacks, blocks and throws, or the merits and pitfalls of jump attacks and anti-airs.
If you want to take anything away from this rambling, know this – there’s no need to be disheartened when you don’t understand every facet of a complex concept that affects and is affected by so many other genre tropes. The genre of fighting games dates back to the arcade classics of the 80s, and it’s a testament to their intricacy that people still end up debating terminology to this day. When drafting this article I never intended to set out a definition of the term, because I don’t want to jump into that particular fire, but I think that mistaking it for a singular action rather than an established “procedure” during a match was one of my own mistakes. However, everyone benefits from conversation, education and attention in the games we love, so let’s all get along, shall we?