We are such meat computers, the way we inscribe the context of every day into our little wrinkly brains. Into our flesh, our skin, our organs.
Every stray word a friend says, every embarrassing memory.
Fighting games always brings this to the forefront of my mind. I find myself thinking "If I do too much of a thing, it'll become me." but just by thinking that I find that it safeguards against too hard of a habit forming.
Everyone has habits. I wake up and water my lawn, thinking the whole time "damn this water could be put to better use.". Yet, I still do it, the water needs to help the grass grow green, because my lawn is yellow, and I can not replace it yet. The city will get mad if it goes unkempt.
The way I water the lawn, the things I think while I do. All of that is a part of myself. When I play fighting games, you encounter this every time.
At first I thought "ah yes, I shall simply treat my opponents like a boss with really good AI in an action game!" and with some opponents, this might work. You see, some people have a habit of what is called "flowcharting". They fall into if then behavior, and some folks have a very strong flowchart!
Treating people like a boss in video game might sound quite respectful, but the truth is it ignores their humanity on a quite obvious level.
People think, they even have an invisible little patience bar, and if you try hard enough to gauge it on a moment to moment basis for long enough? You will start to see the lines of code in the matrix. People are their breakfast that day, the water they drank, the conversation they had with their ma 5 minutes previous.
How good did you sleep the night before? How is work? How is your gut biome? All this, as cheesy as it may sound, factor into a street fighter match.
I learned then, that you must observe the whole person, in all their habit. Not just if they like to empty jump when they see you perfect parry a jump in, but if they like to make pre excuses for the match.
Fighting games are a microcosm of all my little autistic time spent observing people, and it is truly a wonder how much of life you can extrapolate from 99 seconds, First to 3.
I am my own habits, and more and more do I hear ol friendo Sun Tzu in my ear. To paraphrase, to know your enemy is to know yourself. Your enemy sees you, and are not only informed by the context of you, but by your idea of their context of you of them!
It may sound like I'm tying my wrinkly little brain folds into knots, and I truly am! This is the key to winning at fight game, you must become so intuned with your character, the game, the mechanics. So much so, that when you make the choice to block low on wakeup, you do so with the knowledge that your friend is in a very excited mood today, and their good news from work means they have the confidence to press on oki until you stop them. They might still grab you ass or do an overhead, but you informed your decision based on more than just the game for sure!
This sort of thing doesn't occur over a very long time, it's quite fast, but not like some sort of superpower, it's just your memory.
It's not enough to know your character and habits, it's also important to always be discovering your opponent! Fighting games reward a person who likes to wikipedia hole until the sun rises, calling you a piece of shit. Open all the tabs on your opponent. All the tabs in yourself. Their character, their habits, the traps and tricks.
This does however spill over into other aspects. It melds and conforms with your life to form a 6 armed monstrosity, which speaks ancient hymns in tongues beyond knowing to you at 3 am on the toilet.
You start to become more aware of yourself, of the things that trigger reactions inside of you. You start to feel as if everything is just a little mud ball hurtling through the cosmic canvas in just the right space for the earth to have drinking water. You start to pay attention to other people, truly.
There's more relatively hairless primates walking around than you could ever fathom. You can hear the numbers but they're nothing next to the real lived reality of humanity. They all have a context, habits, all that. It seems obvious, but for someone like me, a rural countrygrill with severe ADHD from East Texas, it was pretty earthshaking! The idea that you could spend your waking hours focusing on everyone! The benefits of that are truly endless. You can learn and learn and LEARN! All it requires is curiosity, and the willingness to give yourself patience for your pace of learning. That's when the clock starts to tick, and you truly hear it. On the wall, in your chest, on the sky. IT goes, and it rests for no one. Indiscriminate.
It's the thing I love to do the most. I found it on arcade buttons on a desk. It's living life. Spending my time being on this planet, taking it all in and by choice. It sounds so simple and childish, but it is where I found it for myself. But beware.
It is easy to fall into the trap that fighting games are an endorphin feedback loop of learning and ever growing. Tangible growth at your fingertips! But no, you still gotta live life. It's the taijitu analogy yet again and again. You have to have some of each in the other, and to keep them solidly themselves despite.
Life needs fighting games, and fighting games need life. You must grasp the herbs of the earth. You must firmly hold the grass and love it, as much as you wanna learn combos and spam ranked. If you tie your everything into something like that, you'll eventually face that you're likely to not become the best at it. Therefore, you will have to come to grips with losing, and even at the top of the game, about 50% of the time amongst your peers. You will suffer much less if you say, also play the guitar a lot, or if you read good books and watch good movies. If you have a fulfilling love life or career. You have to cultivate yourself outside of fighting games to truly be able to ENJOY them. It's a game, not a proving grounds for who's the bestest boy/girl of all time. In the end, we are but food for the worms, we all share the same fate. Our deeds go away, so why not try your best to enjoy them? If becoming champion is how you enjoy them, then that is your oath perhaps! Good luck!
That doesn't mean competitiveness has no place, it's pretty much the point. The truth underneath it all is that you must seek to grow for the enjoyment of it, or find a similarly virtuous reason to play them, or they will quickly become a large source of anguish.
You have to seek something else, and it's an appreciation for the simple truth of the world, we're all just animals baby! But we're also more than that, we're alive. Alive and constantly pushing back against that ever encroaching entropy. Ever threatening, ever marching forwards.
There's an invisible timer over everyone's head, and if you pay enough attention, you'll start to see it. It tells you when people are going to block, stop blocking, breathing, and stop.
It's inexorable, it's ethereal, and sometimes you can grasp it, tangible as the hand that reaches. At other times, the opposite, it is a wisp of a vapor on the vast ocean of time.
A little bit of both in each, and vice versa, but still solidly themselves.☯️
Some day, when the world too has passed me by. My bones interred into the filthy soil, by ash or by coffin. I hope that when that day has come, that there will still be people, young middling and old, plodding away at their interest and hobby.
I hope that they are seeing the invisible timers, getting frustrated, feeling defeated. Getting back up, learning, working hard, and marching too towards the sun.
I hope that when their bones have turned to dust, that their children's children too will be learning the equivalent of whatever a DP motion is. Pushing back against that entropy, with that spark of passion in their hearts. I hope so much for that.
This post brought to you by a mental split, and a large edible, courtesy of a mental illness near you ✋😎💖
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