These Crayons Taste Amazing
The Tao of Eddy Gordo and the Folly of Digital Self Improvement
Out of a roster of something like 30 exquisitely rendered Ken dolls and Barbie dolls that make up the Tekken 8 roster I’ve decided to play the one character so braindead that a literal bot programmed to do nothing but press a single button again and again achieved an online rank just below my own. Eddy Gordo is a character for the crayon eaters. Not broken in the sense that he’s destroying the balance of the game at the competitive level, but merely unorthodox enough to enrage people who think it’s some sort of moral failing to play “cheaply.” That a video game is obligated to be “fair.” That losing to someone who doesn’t know or care about the frame data and has never completed a single combo trial reflects poorly on their opponent instead of on them.
My advice to this sort of person, if any of them ever read this, is to stay mad about it. Close the game, run off to your preferred subreddit, or your self-esteem support Discord, and vent post about how Harada is incompetent and how Bandai-Namco dropped the ball with Tekken 8 and how much better Tekken 7 (a game you also suck at) was. It warms my heart when you one-and-done me, deny me the traditional best two out of three set. It means I’ve mentally broken you. Get off the ranked ladder, playa! Too real for you out here!
Since I picked up Eddy, I learned something obvious. If you wanna get better, the first step is to get worse.
Confessions of a Scrub
I am a scrub. I’m self-actualized and comfortable in that status. But for so many fighting games now I’ve clung to the hope that I’d “get good” at some point. When my schedule clears up, that magical heaven-time we all delude ourselves into believing in as a salve against the monotony of adulthood. Once I get there I’ll get in the lab, get my execution sorted out, learn my optimal whiff-punishes, anti-airs, launchers, low-pokes, frame traps, I may as well have been pretending I was gonna start learning a foreign language. That would at least be worthy of bragging about if and when I did devote two weeks to it with no discernible improvement.
No, that shit is for suckers. Dropping Steve Fox (filthy Englishman, cowardly counterpuncher, worst character model in the game) for Eddy Gordo (Brazilian Chad, Capoeira master, I can turn off his awful Killmonger haircut) has improved my life immeasurably. My skin is clear. I hear pulsating phonk beats everywhere I go. My saliva tastes like Acai. My win rate is through the roof. That’s really the key thing. I’m sick of being mature about losing. If I’m gonna drop money on a game that could otherwise be spent on a steak dinner or a cool jacket (or a pair of Tekken 8 branded Nike Foamposites) I want at least as much dopamine from the game as I would receive from the steak or the cool jacket or the Foams. I get that dopamine most when I win. I can get it from a loss. One of the things I love about fighting games is how great it can feel to lose a close set against a player who is just objectively better than you. But such matches are few and far between. The path of the online warrior is a slog. What exactly do I gain by approaching it “honestly?” I’m gonna get dick-punched by matchup checks, terrible wifi, and flow-chart masters whether I meet it on its own terms or not. Honor is for chumps. Toxicity rules the ranked ladder.
Getting “Good” At Video Games and Other Ways to Waste Your Life
Why exactly are people who play video games so enamored with the concept of “getting good?” It sounds reasonable enough until you realize the true sweats, those as serious as a heart attack about mastering their chosen diversion, are comparing themselves to pro players. The asocial misfits with narrow, listless eyes, flat affects, and fast-twitch reflexes to rival a scared rabbit. Remove this from the context of videogames and you’ll realize how asinine that sounds. No YMCA hooper measures themselves against LeBron James. No weekend guitar player thinks they’ll surpass Jimmy Page. Yet Call of Duty lobbies are lousy with guys who’d donate a kidney to join FaZe Clan. Fortnite kids aspire to be Ninja or Bugha. Fighting games, having an older, more organically formed, and (tho I’m biased) frankly cooler culture of professional competition, are by no means immune. It’s another thing I love about the FGC. Anybody, even a scrub like me can roll up to Evolution in Las Vegas, pay the entry fee, and get seeded into a pool that may include some of the best players in the world. They’ll cook you, but of course they will, video games are their job.
I blame Twitch, for a lot of things, but especially for this. Kids see Shroud or XQC getting paid, answerable to basically no one (that they can see) and aspire to transcend the workforce to the status of professional NEET. Even longstanding stream lolcows like DarkSydePhil or LowTierGod pick up weird cargo cults, enamored by the perception of freedom from professional accountability and power over a captive audience. Even single-player games aren’t free from the optimization mania. Used to be a badge of honor to beat Dark Souls or some other punishing FromSoft dungeon crawl. Now it’s not worth writing home about unless you do it without getting hit, or blindfolded, using a Dance Dance Revolution pad, or a racing wheel, or the Donkey Konga bongos.
For people who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like, of course. If you get persistent enjoyment from the grind, ranking, speed-running, community challenges, then you’re free to spend your time that way. You purchased the product, enjoy it as you see fit. In this era of nebulous, tenuous digital ownership, it’s the very least I can do to show solidarity. I simply don’t see the point. I’m serious about enough things in my life, I don’t want to be serious about gaming. I’m here to have fun. Everything else is secondary at best.
But know this: I see through some of you. I see you grumbling, groaning, making excuses, breaking controllers, punching walls. I’ve seen you since I first logged on to XBOX Live in the 8th grade. In all that time you’ve spent getting good, you’ve gotten miserable in proportionate amounts.
I’m free from that now. I’m beyond delusions of skill. I play stupid, and I know I can take a game off you. You might win the runback if you have the patience for it. Stupid is easy to counter once you’ve seen it a few times. But that’s the beauty of it, undiscovered stupidity is very hard to predict. You’ll moan, you’ll make excuses, you may win the set at the end of it all. But I’ll have that one win, and the win matters a lot more to you than it does to me.