With EVO 2024 Finished, I Highly Recommend Fighting Game Ego-Death
Anyone who has played a video game has probably at some point experienced the simultaneously embarrassing and divinely justified feeling of raging at a game. Maybe Consort Radahn has killed you one too many times with his mile-wide field of orbital lasers, or maybe Baba is You is a little too conceptual this level, and you can’t quite figure out what precisely the fucking bit is vis-a-vis completing the level. Whether you’re slumming it in Favella trying not to get instantly gunned down for the 18th respawn in a row or struggling to figure out which of the switches in Ocarina’s Water Temple is next so you can finally leave it behind, sometimes that feeling of anger just boils over, and you either need to take a step back and do something else (unlikely) or suffer it out so the wave of catharsis can wash over you like the come up of an exceptionally potent drug.
Nowhere is this truer than competitive multiplayer games, and especially fighting games. For a lot of people, the world of a competitive game can too easily get wrapped up in feelings of self-worth. “I play this all the time, why am I still bad,” “They aren’t better than me, why am I losing,” “That’s MY main, I should know EXACTLY how to beat them.” If it isn’t a matter of simple abject rage, then its a matter of embarrassment and inferiority. Someone else playing Street Fighter just watched me fumble around like an idiot, and now they get to run off with the bag and an ego boost. It’s a sucky feeling.
I’m not a psychologist. I don’t want to pretend like I know what’s wrong with everyone who can relate to the feelings mentioned above. For me, it was a matter of dedicating too much of my self-worth to my identity as a ‘gamer’ and a gnawing inferiority complex I fight every day of my life, and likely will till the day that there’s no one left to fight it. I distinctly remember one night, after losing match after match after match after match in Project M at a gathering of friends going back to my car and just kinda… crying. It was stupid. I knew it then as a 17 year old kid when I was berating myself for feeling that way, and I know it now as a 26 year-old man who would give anything and everything I have to talk to that kid.
It wasn’t long after that that I decided I had a problem regulating my emotions when I was competitive and promptly quit competitive games. I hopped into a little Overwatch 2 when that dropped, I played a little of this and that casually, but when I started feeling it bubble back up my throat I eventually just quit completely. I clearly couldn’t handle it. Losing wasn’t fun, and winning only felt correct. It didn’t actually feel good.
Some of you might think this is kind of pathetic. I’m willing to agree. At the very least it seems silly doesn’t it? Its just a game for 99% of us, and for the people who are actually competitively skilled in these games, well they have their own issues and actual stakes in the game. I’m glad so many of you are unburdened with these problems and can look on being unable to understand the depth to which people like me are affected by something as stupid and innocuous as losing at a video game. But that kind of just makes it harder. Of course the rage isn’t really justified. We know; its almost more embarrassing than the loss. Doesn’t make the feeling less real, and I know enough people who have needed to take a walk around the room, pay for a new electronic of some kind, or apologize for lashing out at a loved one to believe that just ‘getting over it’ is useful, actionable advice, especially when giving it up might mean the much more existentially terrifying concept of learning more about yourself.
I’m fortunate enough to have found my own out. I quit relatively cold turkey and found other things I like. I have a good family that supports me and good friends to do other stuff with. And from it something wonderful happened for me. I picked Street Fighter 6 back up again recently after finally failing to resist the siren call of fighting games (thanks Maximilian Dood) and the game was… fun. I was grinding ranked, spending some time in the lab cooking up some basic combos. I was losing and the game was still FUN. In killing my gamer ego, the game became fun. A LOT more fun. And sometimes I can still feel it. That hot iron core burning a pit in my stomach, annoyed at losing a match. But I just… let it pass. This isn’t the only thing I have, and even if it was, being bad at it doesn’t mean anything but exactly that. I’ve even made it all the way to Platinum as a result of my work (I play JP though like a filthy zoner, so maybe I’m carried a little).
I can’t promise the same results for everyone else. Everyone is different, everyone has their own problems, each with different roots. This is what I needed, and I was fortunate enough to be able to give it to myself. But I CAN promise that looking for a path out IS worth it. The game can be fun again. You aren’t permanently fucked up, or broken, or eternally pathetic for struggling with this, and you don’t necessarily have to give something up forever to redefine your relationship with it. Just do your research, lab out the strategies, and execute as best you can.
