Exposure to a Community
Yu-Gi-Oh was a card game I started playing when I was in 1st grade. It started with a fascination for the anime which became an enjoyment for the card game, and many years later turned into a place for me within a community. This community that I eventually became a part of helped me cultivate an understand about myself and helped to shape the person that I became in my late adolescent and early adulthood years. The game itself was something to do that was fun, but the sense of community and the interactions that I had with a group of friends that shared a common hobby gave me a means to develop my understanding of how to interact others. By the end of my journey within the Yu-Gi-Oh community, I was imbued with a sense of identity that was led by my moral compass, molded by the experiences and exposure to those I interacted with.
Meeting people is difficult but more than that, having a conversation with someone you do not know and replying with a genuine and critical response is difficult. Granted, I am not a particularly social person, but I am sure most people can agree that it can be awkward to talk to someone that you are meeting for the first time, or have so little in common with. This is a discomfort that I encountered when I began actively playing Yu-Gi-Oh in my senior year of high school and often went to local stores that hosted tournaments. When you go to the same place weekly, you eventually run into the same people, and at first, I thought it would be socially normal to eventually befriend them and talk to them regularly. I would show up and try to talk to the folks, but it was always kind of awkward. As you might imagine, it was painful and arduous to have an entire fake conversation about nothing; I did not really know any of these people, we just happen to have a single hobby in common. These conversations were often very surface level with neither of us learning any real information about each other or anything we talked about. A common theme and the main reason for this was that these conversations were just the complaints or boasts about a recent highlight of theirs in Yu-Gi-Oh. I found myself reluctant to take anything in from these interactions because I felt and currently do feel that in conversation, anyone can say anything that is not fact-checkable and therefore not be bound to any obligation of truth. That is not to say that I think people regularly and deliberately lie, but particularly in a gaming community, stretching the truth to favor yourself is not uncommon. Phrases like “got unlucky” to belittle the opponent’s accomplishments were so commonplace, whereas phrases that acknowledge the opponent, such as “They were just better than me” are seldom said. Statements of this belittling nature shift the blame of losing onto something like luck, instead of admitting defeat. Even in the real world, something like lying on a resume to get a job is not uncommon. A study from Zippia, a career advice website, states that “30% of people have lied or “bent the truth” on their resume” (Morris). This study was done on 1000 people with varying age and education levels. Bending the truth is not exclusive to any community and that rampancy may seem like a normalcy, but I believe that it should not be and to blindly believe these half-truths can be potentially damaging to any relationship. For better or worse, as a result of being a part of this community and having encountered these partial statements countless times, the importance of taking in information with a grain of salt and processing it with my own understanding of who is saying what about who has bettered my assessment of what I can trust.
I was cordial with people that I frequently saw at stores but was reluctant to start conversations with people because of the emptiness of the foreseeable content, which made it difficult to join in on interactions. Despite my reluctance to be open to most people, I found out that I shared a mutual friend with a few of the people that I was acquainted with. Whenever I would go to Yu-Gi-Oh stores, I would unnaturally hang out with these “new friends”. It felt almost like a social pressure to hang out with them. Because we shared the same hobby in Yu-Gi-Oh and had a mutual friend who played the game, we should become friends. This was the implication that I got from the situation. I may have read too far into it, but I felt obligated. I am glad that I forced myself, or rather felt forced to do so at the time. Having had so many of what I deemed as meaningless interactions within the community, I had assumed my new friends would fit the mold, somehow bending the truth. I was shocked to find myself enjoying their company. Not that they did not complain or anything, but their company was not about that. I had projected what I thought they would be like based on my shallow interpretation of them. Meeting and generalizing people with the intent for them to fit a role in your life and attaching a label to them from the get-go is inorganic and maybe even toxic. This might seem obvious, but this was the first time that I consciously had that thought. If I impose my idea of an “acquaintance” or ”friend” onto someone, then I will never treat someone as anything more or less than that label that I have attached onto that person, regardless of what the other person wants. I was a part of the Yu-Gi-Oh community, but I had made the misconception of generalizing the members of the community as something like a “Yu-Gi-Oh friend”, as in someone that is not a real friend, but someone that I only associate with for the game.
Yu-Gi-Oh is a zero-sum game and like many trading card game communities, is riddled with salty players who are eager to blame someone else for their loss. Being called a cheater is not uncommon but being known as a cheater by getting caught tarnishes that person’s reputation. I was caught and banned for cheating in an official tournament. Every win now would have a little asterisk attached to it. I never actually cheated, nor even intended on it, but the tournament officials thought that I did. Upon getting disqualified, I could write an apology letter, like an admission of guilt. In it I wrote that I did not cheat, and any implication to suggest that I did was a mistake. I thought that being true to myself was the correct thing to do here; I could have lied and said that I was sorry to potentially avoid punishment. If I were to admit that I was cheating felt like a concession that I was a puppet without a free will. To say that I made the just decision might be tooting my own horn, but I did not damage my moral compass as a result. The fact that I can say that I did not cheat, nor did I falsely admit to cheating, gives me comfort in knowing that I did not lessen myself for the sake of a lesser punishment. To be fair though, it is unfair for me to say that I made the right decision. Maybe someone who cared for the game more than they cared about their image would have written that letter in a heartbeat. I can personally look back on my banning and say that I do not regret what happened, and I think that is important. Do not just take the easy route, take the actions that you will not regret in the future. As Wayne W. Dyer states in Your Erroneous Zones, “You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with” (Dyer). Being able to live with myself now is more important than having an easier past.
When I started playing Yu-Gi-Oh with strangers, it was just a hobby that I had no intention of using as a social gate way to meet people. But as I continued to play, I met more and more people, some I got along with, some that I did not. I learned how I prefer to interact with those that I do not, while befriending those that I did get along with. Through the community that I was exposed to, I was able to have a discover myself and to better my understanding of the world around me. The experiences that I faced in this community helped teach me to be me, trying to live me best life and not concede anything to lessen the person that I am.
Works Cited
n.d.
Dyer, Wayne W. “Your Erroneous Zones.” Dyer, Wayne W. Your Erroneous Zones. New York City: Avon, 1977.
Morris, Kathy. SURVEY: HOW MANY PEOPLE LIE ON THEIR RESUMES? 3 March 2020. <https://www.zippia.com/advice/how-many-people-lie-on-resumes-survey/>.
