The Ghost Of My Name
About passion and its children: growth, loss and hindsight.
Some unfortunate souls have been forced to read my last article, where I talked about the fact I’m doing, for lack of better words, pretty poorly. The funny thing about depression, though, is that it’s very easy to get used to it. At some point feeling bad becomes the norm, and you just accept that the day is over, go to bed and move on to the next day.
In my experience, there is one thing that counters this: passion. Passion comes in many forms — I love videogames, for example. But videogames are a “passive” form of passion; something you enjoy and get something from, but not adding anything of your own to it. Nothing wrong with that, but most people (I assume, at least) need a sense of “worth”. Worth comes from many things, and I’d say those things can be summed up as growth and self-actualization. In my previous article I mentioned this a few times, but I mostly talked about the final step, the part where I tried to find that sense of worth in my friends (and failed rather spectacularly — if nothing else, I’m very good at failing). There’s, however, a very important part of my life that has led to that step trying to find that worth elsewhere, and lately I’ve been feeling the fallout of those years crawl up my spine, keeping me awake at night. So here we go with another pointless ramble about depression, but from a different angle: this time we’re talking about what’s arguably been my greatest passion for years, fighting games, and how they contributed to reaching this point of my life.
As a lot of people I played fighting games casually here and there. A bit of 3rd Strike, a bit of XX Reload (why is that version the one sold on GOG…?), just playing arcade mode and wasting time. The first online fighting games were Street Fighter IV and Blazblue Calamity Trigger, but saying I “played” them is very generous: I thought I was hot shit for being able to go through fireballs on reaction with ultra and my best combo in Blazblue was doing a single special, so let’s not count those.
My first real fighting game was Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. For the uninitiated, MVC3 is a bit of a weird starting point. It’s a 3v3 game, which means you play as three characters: one of them is on the screen and the other two can come in to help with special assist moves. To put it in simple terms, this means that the game is a lot more chaotic than, say, Street Fighter IV. This choice would define a lot of my thoughts about fighting games going forward. The reason behind it was simple: Phoenix Wright was in it. I love Ace Attorney and I loved the idea of beating someone up as Wright. So I picked my three favorite Capcom games and made a team: Phoenix Wright, Frank West (Dead Rising) and Nathan Spencer (Bionic Commando). Terrible team, since both Wright and Frank need to “level up” before becoming effective, but it’s not like I was playing at high level anyway.
To say I got good is, well, a lie. What I did learn, instead, is that fighting games are sick. Once you get past the point where you have to learn the controls there’s an absolutely beautiful world of unique interactions, split-second decision making and a combination of theory and instinct that lead to that feeling I was talking about at the start: passion and growth. Learning a fighting game and getting better at it gave me a sense of self growth that I’ve never felt before in a videogame. People get that from all kinds of videogames, of course, but the fact I felt that kind of progress made me feel like I was moving forward for the first time after years of stagnation and letting life run me over with no purpose in sight.
After a while I ended up dropping MVC3. The main reason is the netcode, which can only be described as unredeemable dogshit. I didn’t really interact with the community at all, and I only watched the biggest events like EVO — I wasn’t really part of the Fighting Game Community (or FGC), I was just a random netplayer. That changed when Street Fighter V came out, which was my next game since I got back into Street Fighter IV right as V was about to come out.
Street Fighter V is a very, very different game from Marvel vs. Capcom. Where Marvel is 3 vs. 3 chaos, Street Fighter is slow and methodical. A mis-spaced button can easily be punished by a careful player, leading to what people in the scene call footsies: a careful, calculated back and forth where understanding how to control the space on screen is the number one priority. Out of all the fighting games, Street Fighter is the one with the most appeal; not everyone plays Marvel or BlazBlue or Tekken, but everyone plays Street Fighter. It’s a concept that takes fighting games down to their fundamental traits, and everyone can take enjoyment out of it.
Except for Street Fighter V, that is. On release SFV was a pretty bad game. It eventually got better, but some things stayed, like the awful netcode. I still grinded it pretty hard, to the point where by Season 3 I reached Master rank (roughly top 1000 back then). There were aspects of the game I really liked, like playing Balrog, my main character. The reason this game is important is less about the game itself, though. Rather, it was my first meeting with the italian FGC and with competitive environments in general.
I was “hunted down” by the italian FGC players along with the other italian players queueing up in ranked at higher ranks. I hadn’t been part of a community for a hot minute, and I struggled to warm up to the others at first. Didn’t help that when I opened up about my issues I got called “another rich depressed moron” (unfortunately the rich part is not true). I met some great people, though, and since I was unemployed at that time (thanks, Italy!) they generously pooled money in to send me to a local tournament in Rome back in 2018.
This is where things get complicated. SFV’s netcode being so bad made me look around for other fighting games. Eventually I found out about BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, a 2v2 game with characters from BlazBlue, Persona 4 Arena, Under Night In-Birth and, uh, RWBY for some reason. A friend of mine back then, who I haven’t heard from in years (if you’re reading this, I miss you), gifted me the game. And I instantly fell in love with it.
When it comes to fighting games, I prefer Marvel’s approach to SF’s. I love the chaos. I love controlling the chaos. I love the moment where you recognize in a split second what’s happening and what you’re supposed to do. Marvel, however, is a bit too much, with certain mechanics that can only be described as complete garbage. BBTAG, on the other hand, had a better balance: it was still very wild, but there was a certain amount of control that striked the perfect balance between chaos and logic. I can safely say it was the most fun I had in a fighting game ever, and that’s when I really, really wanted to start trying.
This long winded background finally gets us to the crucial point: this path of self growth through competitive fighting games made me decide to, well, try and compete. I got invited into the main EU BBTAG community, and on my first tournament I got third, beating some really good players.
This is where things started to go wrong.
When you’re depressed, chances are you have self esteem issues. That was (and is) the case for me. Now, pair that with something that takes time to master. Your ego will, 99% of the time, be directly tied to it. That, too, was the case for me. I started playing the top players in the community regularly, with the purpose of getting better and eventually winning a tournament. By itself this is good — great, in some ways, as this was the first time I felt I had a purpose in years. I wanted this. I wanted something more than just waiting for the day to end.
But despite putting a lot of effort, I couldn’t win. I’d get good placements but eventually I started getting really frustrated with always falling short. In retrospect what really got me was not the losing in itself, but having to hear the comments of others telling me how good I was. When you’re depressed you can’t trust your own feelings, but when you take other people’s words and don’t live up to them the feeling of frustration increases tenfold. That frustration reached a critical point when someone that started playing fighting games with BBTAG (at that point I had at least 6–7 years of experience) could beat me convincingly: what’s the point? Am I just never gonna win?
This frustration eventually reached the point where I’d lash out at others. People that didn’t deserve it just because I was so angry with myself for not living up to the expectations that I didn’t even want, but felt planted into my brain and impossible to remove. If everyone keeps telling me I’m good, then why the fuck can’t I win? What am I doing wrong? Why are people with half my experience doing better than me? I did eventually win some tournaments, but by that point the damage was done: I felt everyone was better than me, and having to hear about being “good”, especially after certain losses, felt really, really awful.
Eventually, with BBTAG 2.0 (the final version of the game) developing a meta I disliked, I ended up essentially quitting the community (there’s a bit more to it but it’s not relevant here). This is the point where I switched to the just released Guilty Gear Strive, a fighting game I absolutely love but also made me realize my weaknesses as a player. The community here was less accepting of my whining about being bad at the game, and I eventually quit it as well and focused on competing.
Competing in Strive was also short lived, as I’d lose most tournaments very early on: the game was much bigger than BBTAG, the competition was extremely fierce and the game really doesn’t play to my strengths as a player. Eventually I decided that being a competitor just wasn’t in the cards for me, and I stopped joining tournaments. This wasn’t all bad: with no one telling me how supposedly good I was and no competitive pressure I could just casually enjoy the game, and focus on “having fun”, whatever that means.
While I do enjoy Strive casually, this decision eventually lost me way more than I expected. For starters, I could never find something else that ignited the same passion. Not for a lack of trying, mind you, but the thrill of a high level match in a fighting game fires up the brain in a way very few things have done for me. More importantly, though, I realize now that I lost the few places I felt comfortable staying in. I miss the 5AM BBTAG lobbies with “the boys”. I miss the memes, the discussions, the inside jokes. I miss having a place I feel I belong in.
Because right now I don’t feel like I could ever go back. Too much went wrong, I caused too much damage trying to be the best player I could be and now I can have neither. I’m not the player I wanted to be and I’m alone on top of it. Last weekend there was a tournament in Austria, and two of the people that I wish I could call some of my best friends (yet feel like I can’t) went there. When they played in BBTAG and went for a “button check” (a pre-match game where they make sure their controller layout is properly set up), they both selected my team in what I can only assume was supposed to be a nod in my direction.
And I’m so ashamed to admit that instead of feeling happy I felt a knot deep down in my stomach. Because I feel like an outsider. Someone that doesn’t belong there and doesn’t have the right to be there. Someone asked me if I’d like to go next year, and honestly I feel like it’d just make me feel worse. The passion is gone, and so is everything good that came with it. Now all that is left is yet another videogame I play to pass time waiting for the day to end.
But hey, hitting Volcanic Viper feels nice, I guess.
