Video Game Conception of Martial Arts

One aspect that I feel is a significant detriment to the development and understanding of HEMA is what I call the “Video Game Conception of Martial Arts”. Now, this isn’t to say it is a problem unique to or caused by video games, some of the worst offenders I know have probably never played anything more in depth than Pong on their phone. So I’m not trying to beat up on video games here. I grew up as a gamer amidst the great moral panic of video games corrupting the youth – making video games out to be the problem doesn’t gain a lot of traction with me.

So then what do I mean by Video Game Conception of Martial Arts? This is the idea that you have a fixed set of ‘moves’ and a fixed relationship governing how they interact. Let’s construct a simple video game using only four, self explanatory, moves.

FighterGame 2000

Each of the interactions has a defined outcome.

DefenceAttack	High – Strong	High – Fast	Low	Block
High – Strong	Mutual damage (large).	(Look at the other side of the table.)	(Look at the other side of the table.)	(Look at the other side of the table.)
High – Fast	Strong breaks through.	Mutual damage (small).	(Look at the other side of the table.)	(Look at the other side of the table.)
Low	Low ducks under Strong.	Weak over reaches low.	Attacks cancel each other out.	(Look at the other side of the table.)
Block	Block stops attack and counters.	Block stops attack	Low goes under block.	You both do nothing.

Using this chart it is very easy to see what to do in every circumstance. You only have to know how to do four things, and under what circumstance they are best used. Which isn’t to say they are trivial. It isn’t like you can think of some game with clearly defined outcomes that you can still drive yourself to dizzying degrees of “if I know, and they know I know, and…”.

You can see the parallels between FighterGame2000™ and most of our HEMA source material. We generally see something similar to the attack and outcome table above. We are given a circumstance, and an action to achieve victory in the circumstance. Though it is more complex you could essentially break down something like the Ringeck gloss into a similar table, albeit with a lot of blank cells. (I’ve seen similar projects undertaken, but I don’t have a good example off of the top of my head to use as an example.)

The problem is that there isn’t one “zwerchau” and one “shitelhau”. There are a million different subtle variants in how it can be thrown. A million-million different variants once you factor in all the slightly different positions for you and your opponent when you throw it. So the table style approach quickly breaks down.

Shitel Beats Zwerch

Story time. I was once in a tournament match fighting a very good friend of mine. At this point I was very adept at reading them, and I was certain I knew exactly what they would do next: respond to my attack with a zwerchau. Canonically, for those of you who don’t know KdF, the zwerchau is the counter to a basic descending cut from above. In theory it is kind of a super move, blocking their attack and hitting the opponent at the same time; and even though that perfect execution is very rare it is still very likely to block the descending cut.

So what did I do? I threw a straight vertical cut right into it. And my straight vertical cut went right through my opponent’s zwerchau, parried their cut, and hit them in the head. After the match they even asked “did you really just shitelhau through my zwerch??”. Because that action and outcome just doesn’t make sense.

The reason it was able to work was because I was able to anticipate what my opponent was going to do, control the timing and positioning, and throw my strike in just the correct way. Because all the right small details aligned I was able to make something work that should never happen on paper.

(Reading this makes me sound like a master strategist, but really it all happened very quickly and mostly on instinct.)

Cutting The Legs Out Of An Argument

Dealing with attacks to the legs is one of the most clean-cut counterattacks in HEMA. Exploit the range difference between attacking high and low, to remove your leg from harm while simultaneously attacking high. This near ubiquitous counter is almost ‘perfect’. Your counter attack lands exactly when their sword is extended, making it completely unblockable.

Because of this there are many schools out there who train to never attack the legs, especially in longswords. Why would you do something so stupid as doing an attack to which there is an easy super-counter available?

Yet, despite this, cleanly executed leg shots continue to be delivered in longsword tournaments around the world. It is true that it is generally not as advantageous an option, but that is a far cry from being an unusable one. 

How can this be possible? A technique which a highly effective counter should never be used. It isn’t a case of rock-paper-scissors, there is no longsword source which tells us that “thus the leg shot defeats <x>”. It is all in the setup. Weight shifts, distance, momentum, threat, anticipation. These are all variables which play a massive role in the fight, and are the real determining factor in if a technique is a viable option in any given scenario. 

(Ironically enough, schools that maintain the leg shots never work tend to be the easiest ones to land leg shots on. Because they are not familiar with fencing people who know how to set them up properly.)

Reimagining FightGame

A more realistic approach to FighterGame2000™ would be to re-design the lookup table to factor in the rate of button press, and the force of the button press, and the angle of the controller, and the time of day, and the ambient temperature, and lag in the server, and…

Which is crazy. You can’t possibly outline exactly what would happen in all those scenarios. Which is exactly what fencing is! When actually fighting we never get the ‘clean’ exchange that is envisioned in all those action->outcome pairs outlined in our favorite fencing manual. It is certainly true that certain actions are generally favored to deal with certain other actions, that is where the techniques came from in the first place. But any attempt at understanding a fight has to take into account all of these little variables.

This is the tricky part of understanding fighting. There is so much nuance, and so many combinations, that you can’t just spell out an explicit list. Much of it has to be gained from experience and seeing how these things change for yourself. Exactly how this will change your approach to fighting and teaching is an article for another day (and probably multiple articles at that.) But for now it might be a good idea to revisit what you ‘know’ about how HEMA techniques interact, think about what variables can affect the interaction and outcome, and what combinations of these variables can cause you to overturn the ‘textbook’ outcome to the scenario. Because, although video games are awesome, we need to constantly fight from slipping into the Video Game Conception of Martial Arts. 

Now let me go double check that I’m clear to bring this golden goose to market…

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Actionable Items

Go through the corpus of your ‘known’ counters, such as “Zwer beats Vom Tag”. And by ‘counter’ in the sense that one beats the other, without implying any sort of timing between which happens first.

1. What is the counter you are describing?
2. Why does this work?
3. What assumptions have been made?
4. What can be done to violate the assumptions?
5. As the one violating the assumptions, what opportunities does that give rise to?
6. As the one who has their assumptions violated, how resilient is your method (setup, reaction times, abort path, etc) to having these assumptions violated.

You can work from both sides, using the results from question #5 to figure out how to make yourself as difficult to fight against as possible. Your answers for #6 should heavily influence what you consider a valid opening for the technique over and above what you listed as the condition in #1. You will see that #1 is very oversimplified and you need to adapt your training to deal with a lot more contingencies.

Example:

1. Zwerhau beats Vom Tag.
2. A descending cut coming from Vom Tag will be strongest in the vertical plane, but weaker in the lateral plane. Impacting the blade laterally will strike at it’s weak axis.
3. A vertical cut will be coming from Vom Tag in response to our Zwerhau. (There are several assumptions, but I won’t list them all. Even though I only wrote a single sentence you can actually find several assumptions built into it.)
4. Have the person in Vom Tag step back. (This is a freebie, because stepping back breaks everything. You will probably have several answers to #4 for each assumption.)
5. Strike to the hands as they execute their short range attack.
6. Make sure you have maneuvered them into a position where they can’t back up, due to momentum, available area, or stance. Be very attentive to motion backwards on the part of your opponent and be prepared to abort midway through execution.