« Street Fighter is Dead »

"You are God and I am free; each of us is alone, and our anguish is akin." -- Sartre, "The Flies"

"Boop bop with da' schwoop schwop, get this idiot outta' here." -- Magus1234, Keystone II stream

Inevitably, there will come a time when you stare into the blank look of confusion splayed across the face of a new acquaintance after you tell them that you devote a lot of your free time to something that falls between “hobby” and “masturbation” on the task priority check list. Depending on how much a person masturbates. The question in their eyes is always the same : why?

A few months ago, I was on a first date (ironically enough, at a Golfland). She was a smart, successful accountant with a gig doing corporate payroll taxes. For fun she liked to drink expensive reds on Napa Valley wine tours and shop for designer shoes and handbags with triple digit price tags. I, on the other hand, spend every Friday swilling domestic light beer until time slows and ruining the mystery of Santa Claus for the children of six or seven hundred people between bouts of six button samurai. I was staring down the barrel of having “the talk”.

"The talk" is that awkward series of moments where you pull back the curtain on the fact that you do this seriously. It gets bonus awkward if the person you're talking to has a working knowledge of gaming culture and is aware of the existence of entities like MLG, where they'll attempt to be helpful and respond with something like, "Oh, like those guys that play Halo!" To which you then have to have a secondary discussion on how it isn't really like that, it's more like holding tournaments in some grimey restaurant or in a pool hall and you would probably win a couple hundred bucks at most, which is unlikely. And you sometimes travel to do this in other areas and that costs a couple hundred dollars.

The idea of playing Street Fighter competitively must seem incredibly odd to the layperson. It isn't that they're ignorant of the game; it's pop culture trivia. To them, Street Fighter is something you do once in a great while to make a sacrifice at the altar of nostalgia while roasting a bowl on the weekend. Taking that and transforming it into something you do for hours, requiring an investment of more hours of practice, is akin to someone saying they participate in tournaments where teams build snowmen to see who can do it best. 

Existentialism is a school of philosophy grounded in the idea that life and reality are inherently meaningless, and the only things in it that have actual weight are the choices we make. Sartre said, “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” 

Street Fighter has a lot in common with training for real fighting, or going on a rigorous diet and exercise program, or teaching yourself an instrument. The implicit end game for a Street Fighter match is obvious – win. The stick to which we tie that carrot is odd and long. We are struggling against our natures – our base instincts, our worst impulses, even our very musculature – to grind out that dub.

I wish my gift were strong enough to weave into words the feeling that washes over you after you land mine a player that even you were mentally chalking up as too much. Or the momentary flicker through your brain of the urge to stand on your seat and pirouette like a ballerina fairy princess after beating that local scene boss. You know, how you do. These are the moments where we defied reality and created an outcome.

In a way, Street Fighter is the tiny petri dish inside which we culture the spoiler alert for existentialism, and we don't even know it. It is literally the struggle to forge meaning from the absurd. A lifestyle that on its face has the import of world championship whiffleball inspires and rewards with emotional weight we spend the rest of our lives trying to replicate in other areas.

Take to heart the fact I am not advising you to forsake hygiene, let your lease lapse, move into your mother's basement, and fuel Akuma benders with Cheetos and Mountain Dew Game Fuel. Yet take a moment to examine not just the social norms that look down on how you choose to dedicate yourself, but rather the idea of social norms, period. Why should it be that you would feel awkward telling a new friend, or possibly some girl that you may want to curse eternally by exposing her to your nude genitals, what you do? Where does it go from talking to “the talk”?

Absurdity abounds, growing verdantly all around us. Two days ago, I watched a woman use Bing to search for “Google Maps”. I once watched a woman allow her six or seven year old son to urinate himself for lack of motivation to take him to the bathroom next door, since the bathroom where we stood was out of order. Two words : Jersey. Shore. 

The intersection between Street Fighter and the thinking of Camus and Kierkegaard is broader than we think. Facticity is the idea that we must accept what we are without allowing what we are to define us; rather, we must acknowledge our past play, our current limitations (and strengths), and incorporate them into the effort we make to become better while at the same time realizing that they do not mean we can't become better. The things that happen to us can be used to our advantage. When we realize we have created a standing facet to the match we are currently playing, we can exploit it. When someone realizes you tech throws like a bum, you can then start actively reminding yourself to tech throws while at the same time creating situations to draw out throws you can punish, i.e. neutral jump as your opponent wakes up. 

This is different than engineering an outcome by training someone to attempt to throw you, which is a viable strategy. Your poor skills instinctively teching have created this situation, but you can use it to your advantage if you can identify it in time. 

Street Fighter is the absurd. You are using almost primitive systems of levers and switches to control the digitized movements of millions of pixels in a contest to measure who between yourself and either another person or an artificial intelligence can do so with more proficiency. Oh, and those millions of pixels join up to form into a Russian man that wrestles bears, a telekinetic megalomaniac that strives for immortality via personality transfer to clone bodies, and a boy that grew up lost in the jungle... so he turned green and learned how to channel direct current electricity. 

Yet, as we've said, from the absurd, often despite the absurd, we originate, and then we chart a course. Be proud of what you do. I know we're biased, but it's pretty awesome. How is it any more absurd than collecting the adhesive paper sold by the government to represent the fact that you've paid for the service of having a letter or package delivered? Or gluing pieces of paper to other pieces of paper that are bound in a book to commemorate the passage of events or time? 

A lot of us play as the absurd. Every single thing we talked about last week would qualify. All the stupid we do in a match would qualify. We recognize that and battle against it. All the time you spend in training mode, all the casual you play... “grinding”, “leveling up”, they are the process of making a choice to be the best. 

Yes, the link between the rigid school of philosophy and dicking around with your buddies and beers is loose. At it's core, though, Existentialism can be summed up into the following phrase : "Fuck it, let's do it." To me, that phrase also perfectly exemplifies the community, especially here in NorCal. Throw some passion into your game, make the choice to acknowledge it for being silly, celebrate it for being so, and be proud of being a stick jockey.

That night, I decided to, without shame, inform this girl of exactly how I spent my Fridays, and no, we would not be having a second date on this Friday, because I don't miss those sessions. We stopped seeing each other a few weeks later. To this day, funny enough, when she's had a few too many glasses of that expensive wine on a Friday night, I'll put down my Bud Light to read the texts she sends me in between shouting over a microphone how I want to see more squirrels while waiting for my turn on the buttons.

Be who you are and be authentic. Play how you play and play authentic. Maybe, just once, spin like the ugliest ballerina.