I made use of the term, “Salty Bet” in several of my posts’ titles because I thought I’d end that day with writing something about an odd phenomenon on Twitch.tv called SaltyBet. Unfortunately, I was either distracted or lost my heart about writing, so I’m only now getting around to saying something about it, so I apologize that the punchline to my “joke” has taken so long to be delivered. Unfortunately, if it was a joke, the punchline wasn’t worth the delivery. If it isn’t a joke, then I hope it might stir a passing interest in whoever is reading this.
Players can find many types of poker games at online casinos, and all of them require skill, strategy, and a bit of luck. Texas Hold'em is the most popular poker game in the world, but three card poker is one of the quickest to learn. Well, playing with fake money is always fun. For anyone confused, Salty Bet is a website where you can bet on fights between weird AI bots, battling in M.U.G.E.N, an old 2D fighting game engine. The contenders are stripped from generations of fighting games, or sometimes simply inspired by them.
More nerdy sections of the internet have, recently, been all a-tither about new and odd livestreaming phenomenons like SaltyBet and Twitch Plays Pokemon. If you’re unsure of what “livestream” means, let me explain briefly: livestream refers to someone broadcasting something, whether a game, movie, their own reactions, or a combination, out onto a site like Twitch.tv or YouTube, where it can be watched live by others. Often, livestreams tend to be interesting but inert experiences, where viewers are just an audience for whatever personality wants to put on a show, whether they are silently playing something or adding their own explanations, humor, and, in a lot of cases, being obnoxious for the sake of “humor”.
In the last few months, though, there’s been a change with more shows appearing that try to include the audience in what is happening. At it’s most basic, I’ve seen streamers will create impromptu polls that their viewers can vote in, whether in the little chat window that’s on their channel, or through an external site; but it’s gotten a lot more complex than that. Twitch Plays Pokemon is building on that idea by actually allowing the audience to control what the character does on screen. As people write things like, “up”, “down”, “left”, “right”, “A” and “B”, the character actually follows the commands. Bear in mind that the character will try and follow “every” command, so much of Twitch Plays Pokemon is about watching an aspiring Pokemon Master run around in circles, open his backpack, and either waste items or stare at things with scary frequency.
It offered the audience over their experience and it was interesting to see the randomness and intentional idiocy that took place, as the hero spun around, threw away items, and released his Pokemon. Though I also think that the gradual parring of that freedom has proven just as interesting; as time has carried on, the way the audience interacts has been made more simple, so there’s less random actions because the game is trying to follow “every” command; and there is now a time limit for the channel to play through the game, so the journey isn’t a months-long ordeal.
Another project also caught my eye, though, and that’s SaltyBet. It’s a webpage and Twitch channel that shows a constant stream of fighting game rounds. Making use of a free and open-source engine called MUGEN, SaltyBet has a roster of literally thousands of characters, all of whom are programmed with their own movesets and “then” programmed with varying types of AI that make use of the character’s moves and attributes in this or that way. The characters, and their AI, are then paired off to fight. It’s a rather simple idea and, on its own, is a little dull, but I think the last twist is noteworthy and changes everything: the audience can bet on the combatants.
Salty Bet History
There’s no need to worry about your bank account, though, as the bets are just in fake currency and whenever you do manage to lose all of your money, SaltyBet then provides a “bailout” of some amount of money so you can keep betting. Given that there’s no real fail point, because you always have that lifeline, you would think that takes away from the potency of betting, but it’s oddly compelling and funny. I’ve spent hours listening to the fights, which tend to include the sounds of combat and a soundtrack of music that runs the gamut from videogame soundtracks to A Tribe Called Quest; and hours actually watching. There’s something interesting in trying to divine who is going to win, or, even just in figuring out who is going to be the underdog (I usually just bet on who I think is going to lose, on the off-chance there’s “money” to be made on the upset).
As time has passed, the system has gained more nuance, as well. At first, SaltyBet tended to pair together characters randomly; but now it is broken down into tiers and characters will enter and leave whatever tier they are in based on win- and loss-streaks. Right now, there are five tiers: P tier, B tier, A tier, S tier, and “X” tier. The first four make use of that system I mentioned, but “X”-tier is meant for characters that the channel’s moderator considers broken, especially compared to the other characters in the other tiers. With the characters separated, the channel than weights its random selection of bouts so that “S” matches show more often than “A” matches, and so on. I think it’s meant to create some parity, though I honestly think that a better system could be found to segment the fights, but that may be a discussion for another time, but the tiers do make it a “little” harder to figure out who to bet on, if only for veteran gamblers, I assume.
The considerations behind betting are fairly numerous. By this point, I tend to bet based on the style of character, the name of the person who created the fighter, and, often, tend to bet to show my approval or disapproval of whatever the character represents. The style of the character matters because it often seems like there are general design trends the creators follow: with well-known fighting characters, it’s not uncommon to see people are trying to be relatively faithful to the character or, at least, try to make them more powerful, but still recognizable. With characters from the Japanimation, like Dragon Ball Z and Naruto, it often seems like people try to make the characters imbalanced because they “want” their favorite character to win as often as they can. With joke characters, like dated characters from old videogames, characters from shows that aren’t teh amine, random drawings, and traffic signs, I tend to stay away from betting as people tend to follow two distinct paths: either to make the characters incredibly, absurdly, even game-breakingly, powerful; or to make them absolutely pathetic, but making use of behaviors that are meant to make the opponent AI fall over itself. Lastly, there are “way” too many of characters called Touhou that, to me, seem like more of the creepy loli nonsense that’s come out of Japan lately, and usually powerful thanks to some particular exploitations taken with the movesets.
As for creators, this tends to come into my mind a “little” less often, as I’m not very well acquainted with the community and the character creators, but there are times when I’ll key on a particular name like “googoo”, because the characters tend to be very silly and, in their odd way, over-powered. It’s sometimes an unreliable guidepost, though, especially now when many broken and exploitative characters are being made to fight one another, and only one another.
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Lastly, I do tend to bet with my personal inclinations. Normally, I tend to bet against characters that appear too loli for my liking, and by loli, I’m referring to the genuinely weird trend of provocatively dressed and “pretty” female characters who look very young. I hate the trend and am deeply disturbed by it and, honestly, by people who like it, so my gut reaction is to bet against it, thus, I tend to not bet on the Touhou characters (in fact, I’ve known come to call them “chird brides” to be a thorn in the side of creepy people on the channel). Below that, I usually try not to bet on women in the game, in general, but that’s only because, apparently, in the world of videogames, women tend to forget to put on a bra so there’s a lot of bouncing; and, with surprising regularity, their “defeat” animations usually involve their skirts flying up to reveal their underwear or, honestly, the force of the winner’s last attack will literally tear their clothes off, so they’ll be laid out in shredded clothes and underwear (I think I saw a Sailor Moon character who was actually topless under her Sailor outfit). It’s not something I care for. Beyond that, I don’t tend to bet on Japanimation characters, but that’s much less principled as I usually don’t like shows about screaming men who turn blonde, robots powered by the screams of their thin teenage pilots, or about child ninjas.
I’m not entirely negative, though. I do tend to bet on a handful of character types out of a reflex. Often, I tend to bet on characters from the Samurai Showdown series as I “love” those games. I’ve had a love of them since I was a little boy and wasting quarters at a mall arcade to play through the entire “campaign” as Hanzo or Tam Tam before my brother would say we needed to go back home. Beyond that, I also tend to bet on Godzilla characters, especially Godzilla himself, as I genuinely love him. Otherwise, I usually try to bet on gut feelings and, actually, reading through what other people are saying, as every betting phase tends to initiate a quick stream of “shouts”, suggestions, and people cryptically saying the safe bet isn’t so safe.
Beyond the silly games that tend to play in my head, there is that social element and it is definitely powered by the “betting”. By including some fake money, it actually stirs people into thinking like gamblers, whether to try and appraise the situation with the knowledge they hold, or just to bark out their hopes and give a thin reason for them. Much of it is just tied to general truisms, like “never bet against 2hu”; “always bet on waifu (i.e., bet on the female character)”, “never bet on DBZ”, etc., but I always find it funny to read. Though the antics don’t end there, as people tend to curse and yell out suggestions to their characters in a vain hope that influence will give them the win. It’s a kin to that strange mixture of hope and anger you’ll hear in a bar or at an OTB, including when people celebrate or curse their luck and the thing they bet on.
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Unfortunately, SaltyBet is a part of the internet, so a lot of its worse aspects tend to rise up. There’s a lot of homophobia that just bubbles up as people watch the fights and equate a character performing badly with being a dick-sucking fag; female characters tend to get ridiculed pretty badly if they lose; and “nigger” or “nigga” tends to appear in the window often. That’s part of the reason why I’m lukewarm on the site; though another reason is tied to the characters and have actually led me to realize that there’s a pretty big gulf between the anime I was briefly obsessed with as a kid and young teen; and whatever exists now. The Touhou are the best examples, as they seem deliberately child-like and I just find it annoying, especially when paired with the fact that they tend to be very powerful, which says that whoever created, say, a little girl in a maid’s outfit and a butter-churner’s cap was purposefully designed to be over-powered because the creator has some strange fondness for a little girl dressed provocatively. I’m not comfortable with that; especially with the frequency, as it seems a big portion of the game’s roster is tied up in those characters.
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At the least, it has helped me to better understand fighting games from just a mechanical perspective and those creepy loli characters have helped in that. They tend to be over-powered because of their movesets and, especially, with regards to how quickly they can chain together their moves: it’s not uncommon to see a never-ending stream of projectiles that home in on the opponent, that over half the screen, or that come one after another to keep the enemy juggled so the “chird bride” can just destroy the enemy. That’s only at the “most” fair; many of the characters also tend to have attacks that will have an affect on the entire screen, so the move is inescapable; be a chain of attacks that are uninterruptible and do a lot of damage; or the little girls will stop time and heal themselves. It’s not particularly fun to see characters who have so many advantages fighting, especially to know that a lot of their power is thanks to their creators having a weird hard-on for a little girl with cat ears and a maid’s dress.
I tried to watch and listen to the channel for a time as I wrote this, but seeing one too many of those obnoxious characters actually made me close that tab, but still, I can’t help but admit that the concept and the execution is intriguing. It has added a kind of interaction that lets the audience generate its own suspense and activity without the chaotic openness of Twitch Plays Pokemon. Viewers aren’t barking out commands for the fighters to use in performing their abilities, but they are instead pinning all of their hopes and knowledge on top of the pile of fake money they throw in. Yet, on a more personal level, it also does remind me of when I was younger and happy to just stand beside an arcade cabinet, alongside a small group of other spectators, and simply watch people fight it out. Just like on the site, there’s a kind of social dynamic there that feels unique as people cry over good fortune and bad, yell out commands, and throw fits (though with SaltyBet, players don’t have the cathartic outlet of kicking the game, which I often saw), so there’s some level of nostalgia. So I think it is worth a gander, even if it might not have much lasting appeal, but it did have enough of a hold on my mind to make me attempt writing this post.