The Community Lab's newest event — Bring Your A+ Game!
Hi. I thought it would be nice to have a post explaining this whole thing in case anyone has questions.
Table of Contents
The Community Lab
The Community Lab is a discord, but it's also a project.
I started TCL back in 2021 when the online "poverty FGC" was at the height of its popularity. People were playing stuff on Fightcade. You know what I mean. Samurai Shodown 3, Jackie Chan in Fists of Fire, Survival Arts, Best of Best, Dino Rex.
It was a good time, but it couldn't last forever.
For a lot of people, fighting games like these were just what was available. At a time when the major games were all delay-based, like SFV and Tekken 7, and offline events were canceled and everyone was at home without much to do, why not just play?
But somewhere deep down for people like me, there's a will to play new games and have novel experiences. The idea of taking time to push a game, play other people, and see what unfolds is both fun and fulfilling, personally. That's the core of The Community Lab: find fighting games that are as of yet undiscovered, and people to play them with.
Building Community
Part of the problem with posting about fighting games is that no one can decide where to do it. Twitter was the pits, but for a while it's where everyone was. I'm sure if you go back further, it was forums and personal websites, but I came into the FGC in 2019, so I never got to know that stuff. Anyway, Twitter is functionally dead. On Twitter, your posting is cut off from anyone without an account, so there's really only so much people can find on there. The Community Lab is a way to keep up with what people are posting regardless of where; Twitter, Bluesky, Youtube, whatever.
The other thing is having a schedule. I can't deny that it's discouraging to ping for games and have no one reply, or get pinged for games when you're at work/out for dinner/trying to sleep. We started with tournaments (Back to The Lab) and that was fun and all, but it had its limitations. For one, tournaments can only happen so often — Even with a team we could hand off Tournament duties to (streaming, bracket running, commentating), you can't do something like that every day.
We tried a weekly schedule, but it had a couple issues. Some weeks were a struggle to find enough people to do everything, even thought it's totally chill to have someone play in tournament and commentate, etc. Also, it was hard to keep up with VOD uploads and making Top 8 posts, I'll admit. We're hoping the shift to biweekly events will be good for everyone.
Instead, I wanted to introduce more types of events. Not everyone is necessarily competitive, and schedules don't always line up. Instead of revolving around Tuesday at 8PM EST - a time very inaccessible to people outside of the Americas, frankly - we'll spread it out.
Bringing Our A+ Game
So, this wasn't actually my idea, but it's a good idea. The basic concept is a "fighting game book club", where we revive a game's netplay, lab, and share tech for the whole month. I wanted to tie that in to the themeing of The Community Lab we have going on.
The stream, thumbnails, and promo all use stock images of science labs, classrooms, and sticky notes and paper for things like the game display. That lead me to "Bring Your A+ Game", a simple name that's in line with the school thing, because we're not solely here to compete, but to learn. I think it ties in the fun and also the work of "discovering" an old fighting game that you really love.
Still, we're not really grading the games so much as using it as creative exercise.
This also has the benefit of opening up what games we can play. While tournaments are restricted to netplay platforms with simple setup - Fightcade and Arkadyzja - having a month to play a game and not requiring a stream means we can run anything if people are down for it. If it's on Steam, SNES, PS2... pretty much anything.
How Can I Join?
We have a dedicated chat #bring-your-a-plus-game in The Community Lab.
Curse discord for not letting you use the + sign in channel names...
On the first Sunday of every month, at 12PM EST (so that I can be there for it), we're going to host a stream where people can propose a new game for the month. Then, the team (whoever else is there with me) will decide which one we like best.
I created a loose guideline for this, because I get how easy it is to talk forever about your favorite game. It goes like this:
- Basic facts about the game; title, developer, release year, console
- Short summary of buttons and game mechanics – 5 minutes tops
- Clip showcase of 5 clips, at least one from real match play
- Share any other info you think is important about the game; similarities to other games, etc.
We want presentations to be around 15-20 minutes, and the stream will be 2 hours long, plus the final game choice. That gives 6-8 people a chance to take the stage, to talk about a game honestly and directly to people. I hope it's a fun time for everybody!
Conclusion
I decided to start off by picking the first game. January is just after the holiday season,
so it'd feel wrong to expect people to all get stuff ready for a stream.
Our January A+ Game is Fighting Layer (Arika, 1998).
It's playable on Arkadyzja and MAME, so get to it!