Mashing is when a player rapidly presses a button or buttons as fast as they can. Mashing is one of the simplest video game skills. It’s worth recognizing that mashing is actually a skill. Some people are better at mashing than others. People devise techniques for mashing most effectively. Mashing can vary by game. Mashing isn’t always recognized as a skill, because many people do it in order to avoid learning how to play certain games, and other people deride some games as “button mashers”.
There are a lot of reasons to mash buttons in all sorts of games. If you want to perform an action at the soonest possible moment, then mashing is a good way to guarantee you’ll be close, especially if you don’t know exactly when to press the button. If you want to hit a tight window, then mashing similarly gives you a lot of chances to align a button press with that window. If you don’t know how to play an action game with a lot of similar attacking moves, then mashing all the buttons can be a way to of useful results. If a move has a short or no recovery time, then mashing can help you perform that move as many times as possible in a second. And of course, some games include minigames and special moves that rate how fast you can mash.
In the past, a lot of games liked to include tests of how fast you can mash buttons. Nowadays, this type of skill challenge has been mostly worked out of games because it causes arthritis, and many disabled players cannot participate. Modern AAA games featuring a mash challenge almost always include an accessibility option to replace it with holding down a button instead.
Many Mario party minigames are mash tests, like Pokey Pummel or Domination. In computer terms, a button becoming depressed is called a make signal, and a button release is called a break signal. The way that most video games interpret button presses is that each frame a button is either pressed or not pressed. If the button was not pressed on the previous frame, but is pressed on this frame that is considered a make signal. If it was pressed on the previous frame but not pressed on this frame, that is considered a break signal.
In most cases, games only care about the make signals for triggering actions. This means there is a hard cap on how fast you can mash in a second: exactly half of the game’s native FPS. For a 60 FPS game that is 30 times a second. In other words, the button is alternating between being pressed and unpressed each frame. No human has ever mashed a button 30 times in a second. TAS of the above Mario party minigames is able to mash a full 60 times a second by abusing the pause button, so that the recording has time to unpress the button and repress it on the frame it is unpaused.
Mash Techniques
NES Tetris moves pieces faster when the dpad is mashed rather than held, so players have devised a variety of methods to mash the dpad as fast as possible to move pieces into place at higher speeds, such as using your index fingers to mash faster (called Hypertapping) and mashing on the back of the controller while holding the thumb in place (called Rolling).
PC games are capable of polling for inputs at a higher frequency than console games, resulting in mashing exploits in a few PC titles. In Mirror’s Edge and Deus Ex, spamming the Use key faster than intended can allow you to press buttons without the associated animation in Mirror’s Edge or duplicate items in Deus Ex. In many FPS games, the jump key is spammed to enable bunnyhopping. In all cases, this is achieved by binding the key to the scroll wheel, which can send the signal much faster than any button, especially if it’s a freescroll mouse.
A lot of older shmup and first person shooter games included weapons that had no minimum refire time. This meant that spamming the button let you shoot really, really fast. Some older shmups let you hold down the button to auto fire, but it was much slower than mashing the button. Over time shmups moved towards rapid auto fire when you hold down the button, first as an accessibility feature, and now simply to make the games more exciting.
Another limitation of older shmups was that you could only have so many of your own projectiles on the screen at a time. This can also be seen in classic megaman titles. This had the interesting effect that when you were closer to an enemy you could shoot projectiles faster if you mashed fast enough. You can see speedrunners of classic Megaman games hugging up against enemies to shoot them as rapidly as possible.
If a modern game wanted to replicate this effect without the physical strain involved, they could have an auto fire button with a reasonable refire time, but clear out the refire time whenever a player projectile is destroyed. At a distance, holding the fire button would produce three evenly spaced projectiles, but up close it would produce a rapid stream of projectiles.
What if you don’t want to wreck people’s wrists?
If you want to discourage mashing, then there are a variety of methods. If players are mashing to hit a tight window, you could just make the window really really tight. Alternatively, you could add a generous buffer to make the window more loose, removing the incentive to mash. Quake did this with the jump action, making it trivially easy to spam bunnyhops, removing the need to bind jump to scroll wheel. The Dark Souls series has a massive buffer for all actions. King of Fighters has a buffer for special moves as long as you hold the button down, allowing you to chain or link special moves with ease, as well as get easy reversals. Smash Ultimate has the same infinite button hold buffer, but for all actions, however it will prioritize certain types of actions over others, which can be frustrating.
A more pedestrian method to discourage mashing is simply to cap the amount that mashing can affect the given action, or to cap the rate at which mashing is effective. Vanquish has many mash Quick-Time Events, but they have a capped rate of progression, and are trivially easy to complete, so they don’t really demand thumb-destroying amounts of mash from the player. Marvel Versus Capcom 3 has many super attacks that get more powerful when you mash, but max out fairly easily.
If you really don’t want players to mash, you can add a lock-out window. An invalid input could lock you out of pressing that button for a duration, or invalidate the window, such as in rhythm games, where pressing the button too early will cause you to “miss” the note. If the button is contextually available for a duration after pressing, such as with Ukemi rolls in Smash Bros, then you could have the contextual action primed for 20 frames after pressing, then locked out for the next 40. If you’re trying to trigger a freely available action at the soonest possible moment and this type of lock-out window exists, it can feel really punishing.
Pursuing the optimal mash
Naturally, because mashing is a useful skill in many games, players have investigated ways to mash optimally. In fighting games, there is a technique called double tapping, or triple tapping. You perform it by lining up your fingers and running them across the button, one after another.
Plinking was a technique in Street Fighter 4, where inputting a button followed by a lower “priority” button on the following frame would allow you to get 2 presses of the higher priority button on back-to-back frames. This isn’t the same as mashing, but it had a similar effect, making the window for tight inputs effectively wider. Street Fighter 4 had many 1-frame links, combos where moves needed to be input without any gap in time between them. The plinking technique helped loosen these up, albeit by introducing a difficult technical skill in its own right.
In many first person shooter games, there are ways to accelerate to higher speeds in the air, without dealing with the friction of the ground. In order to maintain these higher speeds, jumping exactly on the frame you touch the ground became a big deal. This technique is called a Bunnyhop across many games. In order to bunnyhop consistently, many players took advantage of the ability to bind jump to the scroll wheel. By scrolling the mouse, you could generate hundreds of jump inputs in a short period of time. This is especially effective on mice with unlocked scroll wheels, freescroll mice. This technique even shows up in Mirror’s Edge, which has a bug that lets you jump in mid-air for a single frame, as well as a bug where a certain elevator door will open faster if you spam the use key as fast as possible.
Mashing is always going to be a part of video games, all we can really do is plan around mashing by being cognizant of how players leverage mashing to get an advantage.
Celia Alexis Wagar's CritPoints 