A Californian public research university, UC Berkeley, is offering a class that teaches you how to play and get better at fighting games! Read on to learn more about the class and its offerings.
UC Berkeley Offers Course About Fighting Games
It’s a well known fact that fighting games are some of the hardest game genres out there. Once in a blue moon you’d have a random tweet, post, or video showcasing fighting game highlights and you’d decide to give it a shot. But here’s the problem, fighting games don’t exactly have the best tutorials nor the best ways to teach a completely new player to play. Luckily for UC Berkeley students, they can avail of a class that can teach them how to play fighting games.
UC Berkeley is Teaching You to “Git Gud”
UC Berkeley describes the course as an introduction to fighting games and is geared towards people with less than 100 hours of experience in the genre. The course tackles more than just gaming itself, with lectures regarding the fighting game community, history, and its cultural impact in Japan. The class also talks about how to understand fighting games at a fundamental level, decode certain fighting game jargon, improve oneself in a competitive environment, and run fighting game tournaments.
It’s expected that at the end of the course, students will be "more proficient in the fundamentals of a fighting game and be more knowledgeable about the genre overall, on top of having a more informed understanding of how modern-day Japan’s media culture came to be." The class is only available to admitted UC Berkeley students, and is conducted in person every Tuesday and Thursday from 5PM to 6:30 PM.
Shoryuken With The Heart, Not The Brain
Fighting game players took to Twitter (X) to appreciate UC Berkeley’s course as well as to poke fun at certain things that commonly happen in fighting games. Bardo (@AbsolutelyBardo) tweeted: "got a 0 on the final cuz the professor throw looped me to death from 50%" which is unironically a common occurrence in the latest Street Fighter iteration even at the highest level.
Prominent fighting game content creator, Maximilian Dood, also tweeted about his contributions to the FGC saying, " Teaching newcomers how sick fighting games are is now a COLLEGE COURSE? Bruh. I owe diplomas to like a million people." Honestly, he’s not wrong. He’s been one of the consistent contributors to the FGC and definitely one of the more prominent creators to make educational videos on YouTube from way, way back in the day.
Applications for the class will end on January 24, 2024. To sign up for the class, click here.
