"Why Didn't I Just DP"
If you’re familiar with fighting games, you’ve probably shared thoughts similar to the title of this piece or, if you’re anything like me, you’ve screamed it out loud at your monitor while you lose another set of Street Fighter 6.
Fighting games have this interesting property of rewarding you with frustration and regret. You’re never going to perfectly read and execute a gameplan against your opponent and even if you do it will never feel deserved. We always make mistakes, no matter how many times we’ve made them. The beautiful thing about it all is that these mistakes are one of the only things available to keep us motivated to improve. It’s a feedback loop I can’t seem to ever get enough of, but recently something happened that has me thinking. How many regrets can I carry?
I’m a sorry person. I can’t help it. I’ve been blamed for things my whole life, big or small, whether it was my fault or not. I don’t mind it though, but it does certainly lend to a lifestyle of regrets and apologies. As a fighting game enjoyer and collegiate Counter-Strike player, I’m all too intimate with the woes of competition. It’s an environment that breaks you down, makes you pick up new habits and give up old ones, all for the sake of improvement. I could go on and on about the things I’ve changed about myself in order to get better at CS or the other way around, when I’ve ended up ignoring the game for more important things in my life like my girlfriend. No matter what I do, I end up regretting something. In all honesty, it feels gross to even write it down – that’d I regret spending time with loved ones because I’m not improving at CS, like my dedications needs to fight over which one gets my time. However, since EVO this year, I’ve been on a fighting game kick that has opened my eyes. Maybe, carrying these regrets doesn’t mean they have to weigh heavy.
Getting on Street Fighter 6, Guilty Gear Strive, Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising, and Tekken 8, I searched for the game that felt right to me and after landing with SF6, I remembered why my motivation for fighting games are more comparable to a sprint than a marathon. It’s utterly aggravating and despairing. Whether it’s misinputting and getting punished for it or playing against someone who’s on modern controls and knowing that their reactions will always win over my lack of knowledge and fundamentals. I want to get mad at others, but the only reason they play this game is the same as mine, so I sulk instead with the realization that my anger is not only self-directed but stemming from my own disappointing performance.
Again and again and again, I failed and got so angry I could no longer play the game. My motivation ran out like a sudden drought. It had seemed like my regrets from countless lost matches, and even more mistakes within those matches, had left me unable to keep going. So, I took a rather unorthodox approach to fixing my improvement issue. At this point in time, I had only been playing Juri, since I didn’t know who I wanted to play and my girlfriend likes her design, but now I made the decision to swap to Ryu. He’s the face of the game and of the genre to many – his fundamental-oriented play style seemed like the perfect tool I needed to hone my motivation onto tiny mistakes. This way, with Ryu, I’d never make a mistake again.
Surprisingly, I started to rank higher than ever before with Juri and was solidly winning more games with ease and confidence after I spent time practicing on Ryu. I let a misinputted Hadouken that turned into a DP that lost me a match turn into a feeling that I wouldn’t let go. The same went for forgotten combo strings, late Drive Rush inputs, or even something as silly as letting go of my controller too early out of frustration leaving me utterly defenseless on a pixel of health. I was still making mistakes all the time. Every single match was mistake after mistake, even sometimes making a mistake, fixing it on the second go, and making the same mistake again all in one match.
When I finally hit my goal of Gold on SF6, I took a second to think about what let me get here on Ryu, but not Juri despite playing less than half of the number of games on Ryu than her. While I did practice more, I felt like I kept my mind focused on improvement, not just the mistakes themselves. For once, I felt like I could turn my regrets into fuel for the future. It might be even true that all the misinputs and bad Oki weren’t mistakes at all, but just moments to remember as practice towards success. But, what if it happens again? What happens if I’m caught off guard and the regrets pile back up, heavier than ever, and if they do then can I ever truly get them off my mind?
Last weekend, I went through an experience I’ve never had before. I was told that somebody I personally knew had passed away a few days ago. Waves of heartbreak, shock, and confusion all came at once. It was suffocating. Not knowing what else to do, I went out for a walk, cried my eyes out, and smoked a cigarette before sloppily eating a slice of cheese cake with my bare hands. I used all of the rituals I had on hand to help clear my mind – the ones that keep me focused – but it didn’t take me out of that sinking feeling. It took some time to get a hold of myself and I’ve come to a decision about how to come to terms with these feelings. I’ve written something about her as a way of coming to terms with my regrets, accepting their weight.
I’d like to think we were friends, but the truth is neither of us knew that much about each other. We didn’t ever talk much – she had her own friends, and myself mine, but sometimes there was a chance for us to chat. I knew some of her interests like K-On!, which was one of the reasons I ever watched and ended up loving it, and, once, I asked her for help writing an email to a professor. God knows why I asked her in particular, but she was just always around to help and there for people from what I could tell. She was just effortlessly cool like that, at least to me. When I met her and everyone else in this awfully large tight-knit group of people, I was looking for anyone to help keep me sane in a time where I was more alone than ever. She was one of the few people that I can say made it possible for me to feel comfortable and accepted amongst this new group of strangers, and though it was almost certainly unintentional she was partial in giving me hope for the future. Those strangers ended up giving me a home for years, and some of them are my best friends and will be for a long time. I will always give her credit for this, as well as many others, but right now she deserves our praise and attention more than anyone else. I’d like to think we could’ve been great friends, Kana. I’ll always regret not getting to know you better. Rest in peace.
I can’t stop myself from regretting these sorts of things, whether they were mistakes or not. I’ll always remember them, especially the ones that hurt. It’s okay for them to weigh heavy, some of them have to or else how we can remember them. I know I’ll always be trying to make sure I don’t make the same mistakes, no matter how many times I do, because there’s no way to improve without believing in change first. Even when it’s as trivial as misinputting a Dragon Punch, don’t ever let yourself believe a mistake is ever just a mistake – believe that even your regrets can bloom into new hope.