[the_logos]

Martial arts generically or grappling in particular? Stand-up Punching/throwing is completely different from grappling/ground-fighting/wrestling. The major difficulty is that the 'states' you get involved in necessarily involve constraining someone else into a state.

So, if you and I are fighting, for instance, and I enter into a cat stance, you're not really affected by that directly. You can still do everything you could do before regardless of whether I change my stance. In grappling, that's not the case. If I have you in the guard, you are constrained to being in my guard until you escape or until I switch to a different position like side-guard or mount. (The details of what those are aren't important, but they are each positions where two of you are on the ground struggling to either achieve better positional dominance, escape and stand up, or make the opponent submit via battering, joint locks, or chokes.)

The difficulty, to my mind, is that grappling involves lots of tiny alterations mid-move based on how your opponent is reacting. This is more or less unlike kicking and punching where you're pretty much throwing your fist/foot/shin/knee from point A to point B. If your opponent doesn't block or avoid, he gets hit. Pretty simple.

If I'm in your guard, on the other hand (meaning you are on your back, with your legs clinched around my waist as I sort of am kneeling between your legs), and try to escape by, say, peeling one of your legs off my shoulder and ducking my head under so that I'm now outside of your legs, there are at least a dozen responses you might make in the split second, and a dozen responses that I might then make to that response, etc etc.

Look around at some of the great fighting games out there (soul calibur, tekken, etc) and you'll find that none of them really involve grappling beyond the absolutely trivial level. It's just really hard to simulate with the input devices (keyboard+ mouse or console controller) we have available.

--matt