Phantom Hits

In SSBM there's a phenomenon known as a "phantom hit", where if your attack only just =barely= connects with the hurtboxes (hurtbubbles, actually) of an opponent, you get an attack that still does damage but ends up doing zero knockback.

Thinking about people's reactions (both their words and their visceral emotions) to phantom hits in melee has always been really interesting for me.  It's a weird phenomenon where the player feels as if they were "robbed" of a clean hit and I think this is largely because the sfx of the hit still plays, as well as the damage of the hit still occurring.  The crazy thing to me is that people seem to consistently adopt this "glass half empty" interpretation of the phenomenon rather than the flipside, which is to see it as "well, this attack normally would have missed entirely, but in this case you were close, so you still got a reward").

There are people who will cry for "phantom hits to be removed" because of some infuriating game-losing instance where they missed a crucial hit (a jiggs rest, or a marth tipper, are the most common examples).  For the large part I'd assume most of these people probably get more upset about other things (being wobbled...random twitter beef), but it still really interests me how universal of a reaction this seems to be anectodally.

What if these complaints got their wishes answered, except instead of turning all phantom hits into clean hits, we just turned all phantom hits into flat-out missed attacks?  The ironic thing is that people would probably feel happier that their attacks are "missing less often", when in reality their attacks would be missing more often.  A kind of logical fallacy at play, if you will.  It's fascinating because if you think about it, it makes perfect sense that people would feel this way; it's only through a level of rationalization that you can detach yourself from that kind of thinking.

Of course, technically you could argue that phantom hits should =logically= be considered to be on the side of a hit rather than a miss.  This is because if you dig into the actual game logic, a phantom hit occurs when the hitbox DOES overlap, but only by 0.01 units or less.  So in that sense, the hit spheres should theoretically indicate a hit.  But I'm almost certain that hardly anyone actually knows this; they just have an emotional reaction to the sfx playing and the damage still occurring.  Imagine that melee was coded differently, for example, such that the "phantom hit bubble" was simply a separate, larger bubble than the actual hit sphere.

When this sort of thing comes up I'm constantly reminded of the scene from Mighty Ducks, which I wrote about back in 2012.  This is the scene where coach Gordon is thinking back to when he goes for the penalty-shot win-and-in goal and it bounces off the rim and doesn't score.  He says "A quarter of an inch this way and it would have gone in.  A quarter of an inch, Charlie."  And Charlie just says "Yeah, but a quarter inch the other way and you’d have missed completely."  It was just one single side scene in the movie, but that really stuck with me ever since.  That feeling of "being so close" is a common thing, and I feel like it's rare that people see things from the flipped perspective.