Fighting to create the fight
On a Tuesday evening in the Norris Game Room, McCormick junior Alejandro “Nazo” Escoto squares off against Tomi “Shigen” Inouye in a Dragon Ball FighterZ match. Acting as both a mentor and opponent, Escoto is teaching the game to Inouye through the on-screen interactions. At one point, when Inouye is caught being overzealous and gets punished with a devastating 52-hit combo, there’s nothing he can do but watch as Broly, his last remaining character, loses all of his health. “The idea that hitting buttons gets you killed is still a bit novel to me,” he says, gracious in defeat.
Escoto smiles. “You don’t get the liberty to just mash.”
Escoto is in his element. A fan of fighting games and a member of the associated community for an entire decade, he’s finally managed to formally establish the Northwestern University Fighting Games Club (NUFGC), a weekly gathering where like-minded students can interact and play games with each other and the greater Chicago fighting game community. The club has only been running for a month or so, but for Escoto, the idea was years in the making.
Escoto is one of many self-described “eleveners” who entered the fighting game community with the release of “Marvel vs. Capcom 3” in 2011. Neither he nor his friends could travel from his hometown of Miami to Orlando for major events throughout most of middle and high school, so they trained among themselves to improve. Having such a core group of opponents, which would later partially inspire NUFGC’s founding, proved critical.
“You have to command respect,” Escoto explains. “You have to show who you are through your play. Other than that, people won’t engage with who you really are. When you’re playing with someone, that’s when people are like, ‘I get this guy. I know what he’s about. I get his personality, his playstyle, what type of person [he is].’ It says a lot about you.”
Escoto has since been able to engage with the fighting game community in both Florida and Chicago, including multiple appearances at Community Effort Orlando, a large annual fighting game event. But his close batch of training partners went away.
Escoto was already well-integrated into the Northwestern esports scene as a co-president of League of Legends, another esport at NU. Filling the fighting games void at Northwestern, however, meant something else to him. NUFGC started with a basic Google form that Escoto created on August 27th, simply to gauge interest. Getting resources — Escoto himself only possesses a single console and hitbox controller — and a venue for NUFGC posed a challenge, but the club’s inaugural meeting became a reality in early January when he snatched the Game Room’s Tuesday evening timeslot.
“Our first meeting, I had a little anxiety attack,” Escoto remembers; he had only brought two setups for eight attendees. Even though this configuration left four people not playing at a given time, everyone seemed willing to wait their turn. “Now that I know who’s going to be consistently coming and bringing their setups, it’s a lot more comfortable.”
For Inouye, who picked up Dragon Ball FighterZ last summer, even a handful of meetings was enough to advance his own gameplay to what he considers approximately intermediate level, but he acknowledges that he has a lot to work on.
“Immediately obvious to me is reaction time,” Inouye determines. “There’s so many things you have to react to in FighterZ…you have to expect whether the next move is going to be high or low when blocking. I don’t know how much is guessing or reacting, but for whatever reason, the top players always seem to know what’s coming next.”
One of the goals of NUFGC was to break down fighting games’ relatively staggering barrier to entry, as the learning curve between different games can be daunting, particularly for someone who’s never played the genre before. If a newcomer expresses interest in a particular game, Escoto is eager to go into training mode and show them the ropes before playing a few matches, possessing an impressive breadth of knowledge across several common titles. Many club-goers already have years of experience with these games, and NUFGC fashions itself as a forum for more experienced competitors to test their mettle as well.
“If someone is learning a game, and they’re playing against someone who has been playing for a really long time, they’ll feel as if they’re always being left out of something, always left back, handicapped, and [the better player] doesn’t get much out of it either,” Escoto says. “When you’re playing against someone else that’s new, they’ll play and figure out their own strategies, and while it’s not necessarily optimal, those two playstyles will start to interact, and they’ll feel like they’re learning the game at their own pace.
Escoto isn’t ashamed to admit that NUFGC is still in a “testing phase” and wants to include other members’ input in club decisions, but he acknowledges that there is an opportunity to grow. He constantly receives feedback from a group chat of other organizers in the Chicago area, mulling over the possibility of hosting an official tournament or spearheading a carpool to Combo Breaker, Chicago’s largest fighting game event; 2019’s iteration had over 3,000 entrants across 20 games.
At the start of the next game, Inouye’s Broly is once again backed into the corner. “I can’t move,” remarks Inouye. Escoto looks away from the screen for a brief moment, “…in the sense that I don’t know how to move. I suppose I literally can move.”
Escoto chuckles, returning his focus to the screen. He manages to hold off an impressive comeback from Inouye to emerge victorious in the best-of-three, and the two exchange a fist bump.
