Street Fighter and Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman’s Shoryuken

The fundamentals of Street Fighter share many characteristics with the fundamentals of Walt Whitman's poetry. Knowing when to use a shoryuken against an enemy is a question that can be answered through careful analyzation of Whitman’s literary work -- so long as one knows what to look for. Both Street Fighter and Whitman's poetry require the attention of one's surroundings, accepting oneself, and separating oneself from others when they become too intense.

Becoming a good player in Street Fighter requires many qualities, such as foresight, good reflexes, and good observation. However, two of the most important skills are living in the moment and paying attention to the little things that are hard to notice in the heat of battle. Whitman alludes to noticing the smaller details that people tend to overlook when he writes:

“Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self ” (Canto 2 lines 28-35).

Pausing one’s mind for a moment and simply observing is a key factor in both winning a fight and in understanding more about the world. Paying attention to one's health and special attack meters is essential to Street Fighter in the same way that observing one’s world is essential to forming one’s own unadulterated opinions about it. Whitman, being so open-minded and free-thinking for his time, believed that it was important for everyone to understand the world through one’s own critical thinking, observation, and comprehension.

          Whitman also has an unadulterated love for himself. In “Song of Myself” Canto 3, Whitman writes, “Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest (Lines 28-29)” Here, Whitman’s speaker is saying that he accepts every part of himself and is not ashamed of himself. Similarly, in Street Fighter, a player cannot be doubtful of her skills when she is playing. It is important to remember that one’s own instincts are reliable and that they should be counted on in times of doubt. Considering the fast-paced nature of a match in Street Fighter, actions that do not require planning are vital to one’s arsenal.

Besides instincts, studying the game of Street Fighter itself can make one a better player. However, the problem with any fighting game is that there will always be people who over-analyze it, possibly by learning the movement of frames to the point that these people can know what one will do before the move has even been done. People who play Street Fighter for fun separate themselves from these overzealous gamers. This is similar to how Walt Whitman separates himself from the franticness of society when he writes:“Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,” (Canto 4 line 14). It’s hard not to get too involved in Street Fighter. One might begin participating in tournaments for money or playing online in order to gain more battle points and to look better than other players. Doing these things takes away from the original spirit of the game, which is meant to be fun and friendly. Becoming good at the game is not wrong, but bringing the game into the realm of money induces a feeling of intense competition that is more hostile than it is exciting. The difference can be compared to a fencing match with protective equipment as opposed to a gladiator match.

To connect Walt Whitman’s poems with Street Fighter seems bizarre at first, but much of what Whitman said in the past is still relevant today. In fact, it is the fact that people today can read Whitman’s poems without the shock of his contemporaries that shows he was ahead of his time and possibly more relevant to today’s society than his own. Whitman may have shocked and offended most of his contemporaries, but people today would not be so open to his ideas today without his early contributions to literature and how they affected philosophy. The inadvertent integration of Whitman’s open-mindedness about philosophy and sexuality into modern culture has conditioned people to accept those ideas today.