fighty games

Video games have been my favorite pastime for my entire life. My favorite genres are JRPGs, platformers, boomer shooters, metroidvanias, and roguelikes. But there’s no community like the fighting game community hereafter referred to as the FGC.

I have spent a lot of time both competing and supporting the FGC, and have actually found the most fulfillment in supporting roles like commentary and bracket running. The game series I am most well known for are SoulCalibur and Windjammers.

If you were linked this page, it may be because I would like to help out with your event! I love helping, so what follows is a resumé of my FGC involvement.

Lead Tournament Organizer

The lead tournament organizer for a given game is responsible for specifying the rules and entry pricing of a given game, communicating with players to drum up hype for the bracket (and make sure they all sign up on-time!), and coordinating with commentators, bracket runners, and setup providers to ensure the event runs efficiently. They also are responsible for seeding the bracket according to player strength and location, to ensure that strong players and training/travel buddies don’t meet each other early in the bracket.

A lead tournament organizer will also usually double as a bracket runner for at least one of their pools. Most events allow them to compete in their own bracket as long as it is not a detriment to running the event efficiently; extra bracket runners are helpful for this case.

Bracket Runner

A bracket runner is responsible for directing players to available stations to play their matches, and recording results and progressing the bracket accurately. Most large-scale brackets are split into pools that will usually be 16 to 24 players, and are expected to finish within two hours. Using stations as soon as they become available and selecting matches in such a way that they will open up more matches to be run is key to effective bracket running.

For popular games where pool matches are streamed, they will work with stream runners to hold matches and communicate with players to send them to the stream station.

Stream Runner

This role is a liaison between stream production and bracket runners on the floor to find matches to send to stream. It can be a bit of a delicate balance; you don’t want to take matches that will stall a bracket, but you do want to keep the stream queue saturated for viewers.

Commentator

This role provides play-by-play and color commentary for matches that occur on stream. My two focuses as a commentator are to help viewers understand what is happening on screen, and to ask questions of knowledgable co-commentators to provide information on less obvious interactions, such as lethal hit conditions in SoulCalibur VI.