Perception is a funny thing. When it comes to cultures with
which he have no personal involvement, our opinions are skewed by the polar aspects of said communities. Journalists, then, have an imperative
responsibility to report fairly and evenly for those on the outside looking in,
even in an industry as relatively low-stakes as video games.
First off, a quick preface: I consider myself somewhat of a
journalist. Sure, I’m not breaking news on upcoming games or regularly
attending high-profile conventions, but I’ve done my fair share of reporting on
the gaming sphere. And, as a longtime lover of fighting games, I feel my time
in the competitive scene gives me a unique perspective that very few (if any)
mainstream writers have.
Whenever something negative happens in the world of fighting
games, you’ll typically see a common phrase rumble throughout the community:
“Call Kotaku.” This sarcastic expression started thanks to an unfortunate
incident of sexual harassment during Cross Assault, a reality show designed to
promote Capcom’s Street Fighter x Tekken. Although Kotaku wasn’t the initial
publication to run their story, they were the largest, and many saw it as an
unfair representation of the fighting game community as a whole.
Now, I’m not here to defend or even talk about the Cross
Assault situation in depth. What I do want to address, however, is the way in
which mainstream websites report on communities to which they have no immediate
connection. By no means do I want writers to shy away from the negatives our
scene produces, but at times it appears as if they bounce from one controversy
to another with no interest in what happens in-between.
Nowhere was this disparity more visible than in an article
that landed on Kotaku (not trying to pick on you, I swear!) back in 2013. Noel
Brown, who many now know as the first and only player to have been banned from
Capcom Pro Tour competition, was arrested during Community Effort Orlando for
striking his ex-girlfriend during a heated exchange with her and another
player. A website that largely ignored the fighting game community and its incredible diversity was now
using a black man’s mugshot as the standard for the entire scene.
When these things happen, journalists need to understand the
perception they are cultivating among their audience. Simply reporting on the
incident is, again, not the issue here; Noel is frequently the center of
controversy, and the disciplinary actions taken by both Capcom and Combo
Breaker after his most recent incident are more than deserved. But the damage outlets do by focusing only on
stories such as these spread from website to website at a drastic pace. It’s
not uncommon to see, even during the most benign conversation on fighting
games, someone paint the entire scene as a racist, sexist, homophobic community
with no redeeming qualities because of what they’ve read, not what they’ve experienced.
The fighting game community has a lot to
work on, no doubt. Take a look at any Twitch chat (a constant
stream of embarrassment for anyone interested in competitive gaming) when a
woman or, god forbid, a trans player like Ricki Ortiz appears on-camera, and
you’ll quickly understand why folks might not be entirely comfortable to visit
one of our events in person.
Even then, there’s a lot of good to highlight when it comes
to the fighting game community. We regularly pull together insane amounts of
money for charity, families of departed players, or those simply
in immediate need of support. As a kid growing up in the declining years of the
American arcade scene, fighting games were a way for me to cope with my anxiety
and meet new people. While they don’t balance out the frequent bullshit,
stories like these are a dime a dozen and prove that, just like any large group
of people, the fighting game community can do a lot of good when we put our
minds to it.
To close things out, I guess I just want to say mainstream
media has a long way to go when it comes to covering the fighting game
community fairly. The same weekend Noel was being an asshole at Combo Breaker, a young competitor by the name of Dominique “Sonic Fox” McLean
absolutely annihilated the brackets of three separate games while also dropping
to fourth in what many consider his main area of expertise, Mortal Kombat X. In
fact, the tournament itself was a monumental triumph; only two years in, Combo
Breaker has quickly become one of only a few premier fighting game destinations
in the United States, thanks to the passion and devotion of its crew.
These are the stories we want to see alongside the
nastiness, and as reporters on the front line of video game culture, it’s up to
us to make sure we highlight fringe communities with the utmost respect. At times, negative articles are easier to write, whipping up frothy sentences in a righteous fury (I get it, I really do), but let’s try to actually connect with the communities we report on and, to put it simply, do better.
I threw the basketball, not necessarily aiming for him but the general area around his lanky frame. Looking back, he was a lot like me. Dorky, awkward, large glasses; but, somehow, I was always able to attract people to me, for good and bad.
I threw the basketball, not necessarily aiming for him for still hoping hoping it would hit him. The odds of that happening had to be tremendously low due to the way the run-up to the individual bathrooms was situated, with a low ceiling and high guard rail that left a little space made smaller by my distance from it.
I threw the basketball, not all that hard and not necessarily aiming for him but also trying my best not to hit her. I can’t be entirely sure what her name was now, probably something like Ashley or Frances. Despite lacking in all the common attributes one would expect of a social butterfly, I almost always had a group of friends, usually girls. I would almost always fall for them, hard, a poor character trait that’s followed me into adulthood. I don’t know if it was Ashley or Frances because I flip-flopped between the two friends on a regular basis. Now that I think about it, I’m sure it was Frances. He was being a jerk to Frances.
I threw the basketball, not necesarily aiming for him but hitting him all the same. His hands immediately went to his face. He wore glasses. I wore glasses, so I knew exactly what that meant. My stomach sank. He ran towards the school office. Some adult soon approached me.
He was one of those people that weren’t exactly part of the school staff but served on “yard duty,” watching the kids play during recess to make sure we didn’t end up eating each other. One of his arms didn’t work as well as the other due to a motorcycle accident. Every day, when taking roll after school, he would hold his clipboard of names low in the hand of that arm, unable to raise it from the side of his body, and mark us present. I’ve never been super comfortable around adult men but he was a good one and I did around him, maybe because of that arm.
He did his duty and asked what happened, even though he didn’t seem all that interested. This was before I had learned how to Play It Cool, so I was a mess. I quickly explained that I didn’t mean to hit him, and was told that I needed to go to the office. I freaked. I was a good kid except when I wasn’t, and when I wasn’t my folks like to play mind games with me by acting like I was a perpetually bad kid.
I don’t remember what happened after that, except for the fact that a few weeks later I was again called into the principal’s office. He was an imposing man, small but loud, and I rarely saw him on campus. He smiled, and asked me if I had broken the other kid’s glasses on purpose. I said no. Though I hadn’t necessarily aimed for him, I felt this was a lie back then and still do today. I feel that was a mistake.
As an obsessive person, I often focus on mistakes and how I can fix them, lying awake in bed at night or standing transfixed in the shower until the water goes cold, replaying events from my past that have long lost their significance. Unfortunately, this hasn’t manifested itself in ways that would be somewhat useful, but it does make more than a few video games much more enjoyable than they would be otherwise. One of these games is Splatoon.
Splatoon is a game about correcting mistakes. As a semi-competitive title, succeeding often relies on capitalizing on the other team’s mistakes, but to be honest the whole game is really about creating as much of a mess as possible by spraying ink everywhere. The team who has soiled more of the stage is crowned the winner. It’s adorably gross.
Often in my life, I’ve gravitated towards games with similar mechanics. In Civilization II, much like other nation-building titles, there’s a perpetual “fog of war” that obscures parts of the map that you’ve yet to explore. Except, in Civilization II, it’s pitch black. And, no, I don’t mean a dense cloud, I mean literally black. Upon starting a new game, your first settler can’t see past a very narrow portion of land, making them seem as an island in space.
While a fun game in its own right, I continue to be drawn to Civilization II because moving into that pitch black and forcing it to recede was one of the most satisfying video game moments I’d felt up until that point. It was cathartic. I soon became more interested in how to optimally move my units through the darkness than raising, say, the Celts to global domination. I would stare at my kitchen counter, imagining small warriors shifting across and discovering tiny villages surrounded by lush forests. My father’s face when he was yelling at me became the entire world, occupied by chariots and horsemen beating back the darkness of his flesh.
In the same way, Splatoon is about turning otherwise boring locales into a messy, brightly-colored quagmire. As the battles rage on, you stumble upon areas of a different color, still beautiful but not the right kind of beautiful, and you paint over them with your own color to correct the mistake. Sometimes you see other people doing the same thing, and sometimes you paint these other people with your color until they explode, spreading your glorious color even further.
Splatoon’s various weapons have their own ways of doing this. The basic blasters vary between short-range, rapid-fire paintball guns and more mid-range fare that dole out higher damage in quicker bursts. Rollers and brushes turn you into a fleet-footed soldier capable of covering wide swaths of ground in the blink of an eye. Splatters function as sniper rifles, giving players the ability to quickly penetrate enemy territory with thin, charged blasts.
Of course, it’s super easy to get drawn into the hackneyed first-person shooter trope of “get more kills, get the win,” but Splatoon has built in a way to dispel the notion that obliterating enemies is the way to secure victory. While, yes, splatting the opposing team will keep them out of the fray for a short while, it’s more advantageous to cover the ground and walls with your ink whenever possible, as this is how unranked matches are decided. Apart from being the winning stat, your ink also gives you the ability to take squid form and travel through the stages much faster.
And that’s what it’s all about really. Momentum. Leverage. Each Splatoon battle is an exercise in tug-of-war, pushing into territory the enemy has covered with their color to correct their mistakes. “No, your sickly bright lime green isn’t the way to go, silly. Here’s some blindingly electric pink, that’s the true color!” There’s definitely something to be said for stumbling on an open hallway, freshly tagged by an opponent, and completely overtaking it with whatever random color has been assigned to your team for that round. Sometimes, near the end of the matches, I focus on following a frantic enemy as they eagerly lap up territory before time expires, not shooting them but the ground behind them to completely negate whatever progress they made in those last precious few seconds.
There are a ton of parallels to be drawn between Splatoon’s basic mechanics and the obsessive tendencies that drew me to games like Civilization. Mistakes in these games are far different from their mind-rending, real world counterparts. Making a mistake in Splatoon doesn’t keep me up at night, staring out the window at the moon and wondering what my life would be like if I had actually gone to school. Making a mistake in Splatoon doesn’t turn a hot, steamy shower into a cold downpour as I stand still with my eyes closed for an hour, counting every moment that I let fear control my decisions.
Mistakes in Splatoon are immediately rectifiable. Someone captured the stage’s lone control point before you were able to spawn? That’s fine, here’s an orbital ink strike that will cover most of the area and keep them from winning. And everything in the game makes these efforts in correcting problems a joy instead of a chore. The soft ‘flupflupflupflupflup’ of the paintball gun, the cheery 'bwoop’ your character makes as they fall into their home ink pool, the music that ranges from upbeat pop to the squids’ version of heavy metal–which is still almost unbearably adorable, by the way. Even in losing, while your inkling is shuffling their feet or pounding the ground in disappointment, you are rewarded with points that raise your overall level as well as the stats on your equipment. Nothing is wasted.
Splatoon proves that even mistakes, even setbacks can be fulfilling experiences. And in a world of constant disappointment, that’s a pretty incredible statement to make.
As I lie awake at night, my eyes closed but my brain refusing to let me sleep, even as my limbs ache from a lack of energy and my head pounds with lack of rest, I think of Splatoon much like I thought of Civilization. I count ink spots. I tally up point totals. I finally doze off to the sound of 'flupflupflupflupflup’ and dream of nothing.
i enjoy that every single human’s reaction to penguin is unrestrained delight
And penguins lack large terrestrial predators, so their reaction to humans tends to be, “HELLO STRANGE GIANT PENGUINS, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? DO YOU HAVE ANY FISH?”
I thought I was done crying. I am typing, I can barely see but I am typing.
I remember the first time I saw him, a ball of fluff, tiny but never intimidated. I have no idea what possessed my mom to bring home a kitten for father’s day, but there Cinder, as my dad would eventually christen him, was. We were on my aunt’s porch and he was amazed by everything he saw. He eyed us quietly as his unsure paws stomped the ground.
I was scared. As the runt of a large litter, he was so small a strong breeze would have carried him away from us. But it went deeper somehow, like I all at once knew the immense love and heartbreak pets infect us with during their short time on earth. I was perhaps too young to truly grasp the intricacies but I was still flooded with emotion, every feeling he would pull from me as I grew up.
He was not our first cat.
Sarah was my best friend when I had none. She was a beautiful Himalayan, aloof and skittish and affectionate in the best ways possible. Sarah claimed me with a headbutt that told me I was not alone, I belonged to her. She talked to me as I wrote and kissed my arm. At bedtime, she would crawl alongside me, staying near as long as possible before my ever-moving, sleeping body would make it impossible. I would find her at the foot of my bed when I woke up, and later in the living room on the tallest piece of furniture (“Waiting for the flood,” my parents would joke), and later wherever I was, flitting around my feet, never quiet, always talking, telling me things would be okay.
Near the end, Sarah was not Sarah anymore. She was the thing that lived in the back of the house, never moving from her water dish, crying for help I could not give her. She lived longer than was acceptable and I hate that I was not able to do what needed to be done before existence became miserable.
Although I had resigned myself to Sarah’s passing prior to it actually occurring, Cinder knew I needed someone. This is not debatable. He knew there was a hole that needed filling, and he squeezed his chubby frame into the Sarah-sized space in my heart and made himself at home.
Much like his older counterpart, Cinder became a constant in my life. Though he took up much more space, he was quick to climb into bed with me when it was time to go to sleep, pushing into me in order to make himself comfortable. He would not be denied his space.
Where he was once silent, he began to speak, still quiet but much more than he had offered us previously. He chuffed and purred, every sound he made contradicting the wide frame he had put on over the years. Though previously something of a bully, he became affectionate, climbing into laps (other than my dad’s, who he always had a soft spot for) and pushing into fingers for attention. He still ignored us when we called him.
But, as Cinder pushed into the teen years, things took a turn, as they often do. His back legs weren’t what they used to be, and he frequently called for help when climbing into bed. Though not very athletic to begin with, what activity he did enjoy began to diminish. I found him, recently, collapsed outside my bedroom door, crying. I took him to the vet, head aching from a late winter cold, and shelled out an exorbitant amount of money for a visit that basically told me he was getting old.
While waiting our turn to see the doctor, I sat in the back of my dad’s truck and told Cinder I loved him. He wouldn’t look at me but purred as he watched cars pass on the busy street outside, a world he had never seen and yet was still bored by.
Sarah, like many cats who reach old age, experienced kidney failure. Basically, she was always thirsty and near the end would never leave her water bowl. She was in pain.
Cinder left the living room crying earlier tonight. I met him in the kitchen. Things were not right. He looked at me and for a split-second he was Sarah, right before she lost herself. I knew. I was watching something stupid on television. I paused it, went to my room, and cried. Heaving. Sobbing. I cried and I thought I was done but now I’m crying again. It is officially tomorrow and sometime soon I will lose another friend.
I recently celebrated my twenty-sixth birthday, and became aware of how old I am as only someone who’s completed the first quarter of their life can be. This landmark brought with it two huge changes to my life: one, I am no longer able to rely on my parents’ health care, and two, I can now legally rent a motor vehicle.
I am twenty-six years old and I have felt adrift for much of that time. As I ping-ponged through hometowns and schools and friends, I was left with the entirely human longing for something more but without the personal tools or abilities to attain it. Looking back, my life is a vividly disgusting list of my failures, bulletpointed and arranged neatly lest I forget even one moment. Days spent feigning illness in order to stay detached from the outside world, lying to women I loved because the emotional responsibility left me drained and afraid, the numerous ways I put my own voice, my own needs in the garbage because I wasn’t strong enough to fight for them.
So, upon loading Even the Stars, the free browser game felt oddly familiar in a way. There’s no grand entrance to the game world or an introductory voice over, only you. Adrift. Surrounded by stars and black. Somehow, I was made the main focus and utterly irrelevant, the enveloping darkness at once claustrophobic and spacious, a mixture of two separate sicknesses that made my head spin. Each of the tiny points of light that provided reference to the world around me was a spotlight and I was immediately uncomfortable.
Isolated, I used the mouse to look around a bit, but there was still nothing. Prompts near the top left-hand corner of the screen urged me to travel or check my radio. When the comms gave me nothing but static, I typed “warp” (the game uses commands to perform many of its important actions, giving a nice, tactile feel to the proceedings) and entered a string of six-digit coordinates.
My birthday, 01-14-89.
The screen shifted and I was squeezed into a narrow beam of light before being displaced above an alien planet, cold and green and pink. A sun, whose name I could only imagine, drifted up from the horizon as I realized I was finally in direct control of my ship. It hovered, soundless, pushing forward at my discretion. The planet beneath me, my ship, spun backwards, uncaring.
Before long, I happened upon a windmill. Unlike the three-dimensional surroundings, the structure showed that it was impossibly thin as I passed, following me as if eager to hide that fact. The radio screeched amiably when beckoned.
“Something seemed to draw me away, to make me search for…I don’t know what.”
It was at this point that I realized I was now being afforded the ability to disembark, which I did close to the windmill. Though unable to make my away across the planet on foot, this gave me a closer look at the building and allowed me to stay awhile. I was asked to write a journal entry. I did. What I wrote isn’t important but I was acutely distressed by the game’s inability to process commas. I warped.
So edgy, 66-66-66.
This world was empty. A solitary moon orbited on the outer edges of my view, slow but often eclipsing the sun. I don’t know what to say about this place other than the colors of the planet made me uneasy–dark browns and greens, uninviting.
My continued trips around the universe resulted in a menagerie of experiences, from empty space like where I began my journey to planets with towns for visiting. At one point I happened upon an asteroid field, its radio broadcast some alien language, stern but motherly and possibly out to make me crash upon the surface of some unmoving, rocky obstruction in the black.
I thought of my mother. Over the years I have learned to absorb the character traits of others in an effort to find a space to occupy, and as she is the person who gave me life I believe I am mostly my mother in a different body. Wound tight, quiet, always ready to burst–her emotions were born of being raised by wolves where mine were only inherited, learned. She was relatively young when I was born, and I don’t believe she was ready. We learned to give each other space early on.
As I’ve grown up, she watched me latch onto these behaviors but did nothing, only recently realizing that I was not well. My family looks the other way and pushes onwards in the face of trouble, usually giving issues the opportunity to feed upon whatever insecurities we hold and grow stronger. I was not capable of handling the most basic of situations, I told myself, but that’s a battle I’m starting to win.
I ate alien fruits, 28-12-20.
I became aware through my various warps that I had a fuel gauge, and that fuel gauge was now closer to empty than full. I warped again.
A lifting musical chord timed itself perfectly with the rising sun on the planet I now silently observed, an atmospheric touch that gave me the greatest thrill thus far. The globe was mixtures of light and dark hues, the latter gripping the surrounding space and almost merging completely. It was a valley of pockmarks, dips, rises, valleys that formed the face of something too big to comprehend. Towns and cities passed underneath me but I had no more use for them as I watched the landscape shift.
And then it appeared. An orb, but not. There were pentagonal holes, revealing the spherical marker as hollow. This was not a town or a city and I had to see it for myself. It watched me.
The alien artifact was different from other landmarks I had visited prior. While the stay and leave commands were the same, I was also given the option of contemplating.
I’m not sure if I’ve harped on this enough, but my brain is pretty fucked. Whenever it happens to latch onto a painful or horrific thought (either through memory or imagination), it doesn’t want to let go. The images that flash through my mind basically go to war with my rationality, conjuring scenarios that, while catastrophic, rarely have any basis in reality.
This quirk in my thinking has the added detriment of making me deathly afraid of giving voice to my anxiety, fearful that the worries will become realities should they enter the physical realm. Writing this now, I stop, but I benefit from the extra half-second I’ve been gifted and move on. Contemplating is something I try my hardest not to get caught up in because the twists and turns become too much to bear at time. Unfortunately, my life is contemplation.
I typed the word out and waited. I hit enter.
A lot of my worries deal with death, either for me or the people I hold dear. The mere idea of no longer existing is one that keeps me awake at night. I think of people who died before I was born, before my parents were born, before theirs were, and I get sick. Just like looking up into the night sky, the immensity of time is nauseating.