OT: Western v. Eastern martial arts

[HoneyBadger]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...egional_origin

This is a pretty good starting point towards understanding the geographical diversification of martial arts. Under the European section, you'll find information about 'Stav', a Norwegian martial art based on runes, Kiridoli-an ancient Georgian martial art, Bataireacht--Irish stick-fighting, Gouren-a Franco-Brittanic martial wrestling form, and Svebor, a Serbian martial art used by knights.

[Endoperez]

Originally Posted by Omnirizon

French and English boxing are really nothing more than informal styles evolved from street fighting. The German and Italian schools may have focused on a weapon (two-handed sword, side sword, rapier) but none of them were tied explicitly to one weapon, and all trained in the use of several weapons or shields and armors, generally as a companion to their favored weapon.

Asian martial arts evolved from street fighting just as much as western arts. By this I mean that the fights might have been fought in streets, or a forest or in a field or at your front door against hostile people trying to kill or rob you, and winning was to be achieved by any means necessary.

I also don't know any Asian martial art that would be explicitly tied to a single weapon that don't have comparable western equivalents, e.g. kendo - sport fencing. Most martial arts seem to teach both unarmed techniques and usage of many different weapons, or only unarmed techniques, or only usage of a single weapon.

Eastern martial arts seem to be tied explicitly to a single weapon or style, with a history for that style extending for hundreds and hundreds of years. I think this is why we today link the word "martial arts" to "Eastern martial arts".

In Asia, martial arts have stayed important for far longer than in the West, and the martial culture has been stronger and more secretive. At least in China, many martial arts are only passed down a single family line and to close family friends, and furthermore, people have remembered who taught who before their time. These charts and family lines go back several hundred years when there's that much history, but people often deviate from what they were thought, or learned from several masters, or weren't tought everything so they improvised the rest.

As for the reason many people don't think the Western martial arts are important, well, the reason is there have already been many generations who thought the same. Majority of the Western martial arts have been forgotten.

also, any thoughts on why so many specific styles were developed in the East but never in the West?

See above. Secretive families, and perhaps also the fact that the arts get fancier names in the east. "East-London Fencing School Style" probably doesn't live that long...

Originally Posted by Omnirizon

there is evidence of even the Native Americans developing open-handed styles of personal combat.

They fought, so of course they had a way of fighting! It's not about the style so much as the methods of teaching it, and for the systems used for that. They might have lacked the systematic methods of teaching that would transform a personal fighting style into a martial art, but surely they had something which they taught to friends and family.

I'm more concerned with Middle Ages era of martial arts. It is at this point that we have specific styles developed for warfare... ...while the east have specific terms for each style related to a weapon, the West has the more general term "fencing".

Terms are necessary for teaching the use of weapon. If weapons aren't used, the terms will be forgotten. See link to Silver's Paradoxes of Defence for some weird terms.

Western styles are limited to the schools they came from, and typically when the teacher of a school died his style died with him. Eastern styles are focused on the weapon itself, and many schools would teach the same style with some variation. We just didn't see this in the west.

"Eastern styles are limited to the families they came from, and typically when the sons of the school didn't learn it the style died with the master. Western styles focused on the school itself, and many students would spread the teachings around with some variation."

It goes both ways.


For anyone interested, I tried to learn about Western martial arts myself, few years back. Here are some useful links.

Paradoxes of Defence, George Silver, 1599
It gets interesting after the half-way point, when he starts telling why the (French) rapier is bad and polearms, including the British shortstaff, are good. It's interesting because he mentions so many ways to fight with the various weapons.

British Quarterstaff Association videos

A Brief History of the Quarterstaff

Irish stick fighting (shillelagh/bata)

Also, here's an Indian martial art. It's much less known than other Asian MAs, so I thought to post it here.
http://www.kalari.in/kalari_videos1.html

So my original question: how should the learning of of something like Kenjutsu vs the italian Dardi school be represented in a game system?

How the LEARNING should be represented? That's a very good question. I guess it hasn't been asked often enough, because this is how it is represented in most games:

"Okay, you hold the sword like this, with your hand on the grip, between handguard and the pommel. That's good, now, the main thing is, you stick it to your enemies. Let me show you..."

*Ding! You have mastered Iaido! You can now use swords, katanas, sabres and two-handed swords!*

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by Endoperez

How the LEARNING should be represented? That's a very good question. I guess it hasn't been asked often enough, because this is how it is represented in most games:

"Okay, you hold the sword like this, with your hand on the grip, between handguard and the pommel. That's good, now, the main thing is, you stick it to your enemies. Let me show you..."

*Ding! You have mastered Iaido!*

I love you. That approach seemed so innovative, at the time.....

[HoneyBadger]

I think one of the most important differences between eastern and western martial arts is that many of the eastern martial arts-karate, kung-fu, and aikido in particular-focussed on bare-handed techniques. Europeans encountered these forms at a time when they had assumed gunpowder was the pinnacle of fighting, and the techniques-combined with the mysticism and romanticism of the East-appeared almost superhuman.

European techniques were overshadowed because they were so often combined with more primitive technologies-swords, daggers, horses, etc. So I think gunpowder and exoticism were the keys.

[Omnirizon]

Originally Posted by Endoperez

Yes. The learning is exactly what I'm interested in and the point of my original question and why so many comments here MISS the point. The glibness of your comment has actually highlighted this. It's easy enough to model in a game the getting so many points of "skill" in using a sword and saying "oh that's training from one school or style or another." It could be training from a German school, a Japanese Sensei, or your pirate captain; it doesn't really matter. The game system can't really account for these nuances and most of them are superflous anyway, and I think this is actually the logical conclusion of most comments in this thread. I've no argument there.

The issue is that the learning doesn't happen in a vacuum and from the individual, not the historical point of view, there are significant differences in learning to fight with a Yari by practicing Sojutsu and learning to fight with a spear by practicing in some military school for Oliver Cromwell. The personal experience and affects between what are only two possible ways of learning to fight with a spear is significantly different. Because in my game the character is hopefully going off to adventure to their personal fulfillment, rather than die in an English Revolution, the experience and _affects_ of learning to fight with a spear in a military school for Oliver Cromwell should be different than practicing Sojutsu with some Master. Simply "learning to fight with a spear" isn't sufficient nor accurate; no one learns anything in a vacuum apart from the accumulation of other experiences. My question is coming from the angle that there is more involved in learning to use a spear than just how to fight with that weapon. "To fight with that weapon" cannot exist in the mind apart from other structures of the mind. What was placed in the mind in Cromwell's military schools versus what was placed in the mind by some sensei teaching sojutsu?

What should those differences be? I don't want martial arts to be simply the ability to swing a sword. For one reason they are a significant portion of "being Human" in my game, and for another they are so much more than that in history and real life too. We can never model the phenomenon of a Martial Art without doing a martial art, so creatively modeling their effects in a game is well within reason. There's no reason that some 'magical' effect modeling in game for martial arts is any different from any other way we might model the phenomenon of practicing and performing a martial art. I'm just asking for some ideas on what these effects may be; and how might I, for example, model the difference in personal affect from learning to fight with a spear in an English military school under Cromwwell to learning to fight with a Yari through practicing Sojutsu from some personal Master during a peaceful period in Japan. Or if you wish to not make any necessary split between West and East, how is there a difference between the Cromwell military school and learning to use a spear for the purpose of simply using a spear from, say, a French teacher in time of peace?

[Foodstamp]

Are you really asking a question here? From your last post I can only guess the question is:

"How is learning to use a spear in an English military academy different than learning to use a spear in France?"

We would have to know a little about the teachers to answer that question I think. Or are you looking for something else, the question getting lost in your very verbose posts?

[WaltF4]

Omnirizon, what other experiences come with learning a martial art? Does the significance of these experiences depend more on why someone learns a martial art or how they learn that martial art? Are you actually concerned with stylistic differences arising from instructional differences in the use of same weapon?

[Omnirizon]

Originally Posted by Foodstamp

Are you really asking a question here? From your last post I can only guess the question is:

"How is learning to use a spear in an English military academy different than learning to use a spear in France?"

We would have to know a little about the teachers to answer that question I think. Or are you looking for something else, the question getting lost in your very verbose posts?

Well I tried to ask (paraphrased):
"What is difference between learning a Eurpean martial art in a military school and learning an Asian martial art from a Master in a Dojo?"

in this question I suggested that there must be SOME difference because Eastern styles have strong consistent terminology whereas Western styles do not and instead are typically associated with a certain military school.

However, in response I got mostly pounced on by people exclaiming that European martial arts were just as highly developed (in fact probably more so!) than those in Asia, but that the Europeans were more fluid and quickly absorbed new styles and techniques into an overarching style and blah blah blah blah Europeans do EVERYTHING better than Asians blah blah blah is why we don't have such a rich heritage of specific martial arts in Europe blah blah blah.


So to avoid running into what is an obvious but subtle sore point in the Western mindset, I attempted to repose the question. Instead of saying "learning spear in military school" vs "practicing sojutsu", I said "learning spear in english military school" vs. "learning spear as an art for sake of learning to use the spear with the ideal that it may lead to higher levels of self actualization, and doing it in Europe, perhaps in France." Of course this sounds absurd, and the reason why illustrates the reasoning for my original question. But people seemed unhappy/unwilling to indulge a question in this form, and instead wanted to offer up examples of how the West had their own in depth martial arts. So when I tried to appropriate this in a way that would pose "military school" against the colloquial "martial art" without involving the East, it sounds pretty stupid; however that's basically the logical conclusion of what people were suggesting to me.


If you're willing to accept a non-essentialized difference between the East and West, and offer up ways in which the Eastern pedagogy of martial arts is different from Western pedagogy of martial arts, then please share with me. I'm looking for ways to model it in a game system. It could be anything... I'm NOT saying one is better than the other, I don't believe they are. I just don't believe the "put a skill point in swords and you learn swords" is a good model; easy, but not good. Learning a weapon comes with a lot of other ideals attached. I'm not afraid to be creative here, what is mundane to us could be good fodder for special abilities in a game world, and might even better model for the mundane than a simple skill point.

[Omnirizon]

Originally Posted by WaltF4

Omnirizon, what other experiences come with learning a martial art? Does the significance of these experiences depend more on why someone learns a martial art or how they learn that martial art? Are you actually concerned with stylistic differences arising from instructional differences in the use of same weapon?

Walt, I'm not necessarily concerned with stylistic differences because they would be irrelevant in an RPG. I'm more concerned with the character affect impact they might have. For example what ELSE does someone learn in a military school in the English countryside? How about in a German military school? How about from a Master teaching the Yari, or the Naganita(sp?).

My idea is that no one learns the use of a weapon in a vacuum, so a simple skill point and you get "one level of spears" isn't sufficient. Rather, the pedagogy of weaponcraft has always come with other ideals and skills. What are these? I'd like something that can be reduced down to something easy to manage, maybe a few examples drawn from WEst vs. East martial pedagogy; thus my original question. I feel that the West - East difference in martial pedagogy offers the richest difference for cultivating weapon skill system ideas for a game.

[Fate]

So, here is my understanding of your question:

Different styles of fighting are taught in drastically different ways, even with similar or identical weapons. You want to represent this in a way more interesting than French spear fighters have +1 attack and English spear fighters have +1 defense or that kind of oversimplification.

I would counter that it is difficult to break this style of gameplay, especially when I don't know anything else about your game (such as whether or not you want to have stats or skills, and, if you do, what kind you would have). If you don't want a "The Punch does 8 crush damage" dynamic I am interested what you would replace it with.

You might want to look at the game "School of Sword" (an online flash game you should be able to play for free, though not without visiting obnoxious flashing sites). It is based on three areas (above, right, left) in which the player may make attacks or blocks. It is based on predicting where your opponent will strike and taking advantage of the long downtimes after every move. The important part, from my perspective, is the emphasis on the what is actually done with each move rather than abstractions (of course, you can always go farther in that direction).

If your interest is the learning itself, you might want to wonder to what extent the PLAYER learns different styles as opposed to their CHARACTER. You probably also want to consider what the basic unit of THING LEARNED (is it a style, a move, or something else?). Another part which is important, especially for many of the martial styles that come from militaries (as opposed to martial styles that came out of street fighting) is the other skills taught with equal or greater importance, such as marching and survival skills.

I hope that sheds some light. I can't give any more specific help without knowing any more about your game.