My game is Daytona USA. My friends and I developed our skills over the course of years, dropping $40 on 40 races as often as we could afford to do it. We played against each other frequently, and against a larger group of maybe a dozen people who we met there. All of us shared the techniques we learned with each other.

Every once in awhile we would run into someone who would beat us. I remember one guy in particular. His driving was better than average, but to us it was basically garbage. Yet he was consistently beating us on the Advanced course. (It was infuriating, because the game would have the players select the course, but would always default to the easiest course selected. He couldn't touch us on Expert and new it, so always chose Advanced.) So I observed him for awhile, and I learned that he was absolutely killing the final curve of the course. I figured out how he was doing it, showed my friend, and we never lost to that guy again.

We were good. We handily beat a rather famous NASCAR driver one morning. His skills didn't translate. One friend left the state for awhile and came back bragging how he won a Daytona USA tournament. We destroyed him by a matter of about ten seconds (then showed him how we were doing it). Everyone who beat us had their techniques analyze and assimilated and never beat us again. And yes, I'm bragging, but my point is, our muscle memory and technique was basically perfect by the end. But we kept playing and it kept being fun.

The game was no longer about technique, or muscle memory. We all had that down. It was now a chess game. We had the same pieces, and we had to decide how and when to use them. The game was no longer trying to hit the turn perfectly. That was a given. The game was to figure out when to pass, whether to take a cheap shot, whether to slow down because someone is drafting and you want a third player who is more aggressive to come and take shots at him, etc. etc. Planning was basically the entire game at that point.

So, while Street Fighter is NOT my game, but I imagine for high level opponents, it's very much a mental game, too.

Fighting games have a large dexterity component, but actual game high level players are playing is very rock-paper-scissors-like. The important skills to win are having a strong understanding of what the payoffs of both players' options are in many situations, predicting your opponent's decisions based on their tendencies, and trying not to be predictable.

Fighting games, at a relatively high level anyway, are much more than muscle memory. Muscle memory would be the bare minimum to actually compete.

Analysis of Daigo Umehara vs Momochi, Stunfest 2015

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKj5NMnc05Q

That's not really true; execution is a factor but playing mind games with your opponent and deep knowledge of what they can do is important to high-level play. Saying Street Fighter is about muscle memory is like saying being a quarterback is about throwing a ball. But sub out Tetris or something if it makes you feel better about the analogy.

Sure but Street Fighter is a very specific type of game.

Take something like Civilization that requires tons of research, planning and critical thinking. Those types of skills are more applicable to other things outside of the game.

I think the difference is just in status: being an excellent chess player gets you respect from a more respectable-looking crowd than being excellent at Street Fighter. Neither gets you quite as much widespread adulation as being good at golf or Formula 1 car driving, while both get you more than being good at Candy Crush. But ultimately they're all just games.