Turning frustration into motivation
I like to joke that my Patreon supporters get the best deal in the world, because teaching people to play fighting games often involves teaching people how to live their lives, and that $5/month ends up being the cheapest therapy they’ll ever get. As it turns out, the hard parts of fighting games aren’t in pressing buttons or moving the lever, but all the feelings that come out of doing so. I write a lot about motivation, ego, and emotional management because those are the things that people often find the most challenging.
I have learned a lot about these topics over the years, not just through fighting games, but through sports and creative work as well. I usually focus on how to effectively manage anger and frustration, because those are the feelings that often get people to quit (or get the people you’re playing with to quit). Experiencing negative emotions is part of the fighting game experience, and part of the human experience, and dealing with those negative emotions in a way that doesn’t affect others is the best thing you can do for your own health and longevity and that of those around you.
However, “managing” doesn’t mean ignoring, dismissing, or denying these emotions. Fighting games are designed to make people frustrated, and as an individual, feeling these things and managing them is a critical part of developing your practice. If you cannot engage with these feelings in yourself or others, you’re going to have a much harder time working on yourself or connecting to the people you play with. “Toxic positivity” happens when people cannot competently manage or engage with negative emotions in themselves or in other people, and interferes with your ability to connect authentically to yourself and others.
Put another way, frustration is an expected outcome of playing these games, and everyone involved should treat it as such. That doesn’t mean you should be expected to manage someone else’s frustration; we should be getting salty in our journals, not matchmaking Discords, and we need to all agree that “Pretending to ask for advice when what you really want to do is vent” is not it. However, feeling frustrated is not a moral failing; it’s a normal, natural part of fighting games (and pretty much everything). Learning to navigate these feelings is part of the learning process, and asking people to ignore, suppress, or deny these feelings is to avoid the messy human part of this hobby when learning to deal with messy human stuff is some of the most valuable experience you’ll get from this hobby. The bond that fighting game players share is sacred to me because ours is an activity that requires us to navigate messy feelings, both our own and our opponents’; we are routinely exposing each other and being exposed, and this shared practice allows us to form connections from a far deeper understanding of each other than we might have of childhood friends or even our own families.
Of course, learning to manage your emotions is particularly important if you’re practicing fighting games competitively, because emotions can motivate, or they can depress. When I wrote Understanding your motivations and finding clean fuel, I did it for people who found themselves so motivated by frustration and anger that they practically exploded; this is the kind of player who would throw themselves completely into winning a beginner bracket, then disappear forever because the emotional highs and lows were just too extreme to make it any further. When I wrote On protagonist myths, killing your joy, and why I still compete in fighting games, I did it for people who were addicted to the optimism of the shounen manga protagonist and didn’t know what to do once it crashed into the reality that training is a lot harder when it’s not a montage. It’s why I don’t spare the salt when I stream my REV2SDAY runs these days, because I think it’s important to present the full range of the experience authentically, even if that makes the stream less entertaining (or more entertaining, to some of you out there).
I think all emotions can become motivation, and a healthy practice involves taking everything you can and turning it into something useful. I’ve come to dislike describing these emotions as “positive” and “negative” because it feels moralizing, like the Star Wars “light side” and “dark side” of the force; instead, I think of it more as Yin and Yang, two complementary forces that must be balanced. Positive and negative implies that the negative feelings should be erased and eliminated, when the truth is closer to “positive and negative” in the electrical sense; you need both in order to make something happen.
I am not terribly well-read on my Chinese philosophy, but the idea that we have to manage the feelings that pull and push, that contract and expand, the active and the passive, the cold and the hot, the light and the dark, feels accurate to me. I do not think the strongest players would be so strong without using their salt as fuel; I also don’t think a player can become the strongest if they’re solely motivated by frustration and not joy. Conversely, I don’t think anyone motivated solely by joy can become truly strong, but if you do not nurture joy in your practice, I don’t think you’ll last for very long either.
This becomes more true as you progress towards the top, because as the list of people ahead of you narrows, the more personal every matchup detail becomes. I have played countless long sets with RTW over the last few years and lost every single one; my tournament records against Solstice and HypedForSlicedBread are probably on the order of 10 Ls for every W; i have been playing with Daymendou since I started attending Xrd locals 8 years ago, and I do worse against him now than I did back then. If I want to do better in bracket, it’s going to come from a bunch of specific work targeting a set of specific players, and tapping into personal spite is pretty handy for getting the motivation required to lab fuck this guy in particular tech. Fuck this guy in particular is why I have Mixipedia, a recording of Babbaloo’s fuzzy jump input, and a pocket Zato.
In the end, it’s on you to find your reason to fight, and whatever cocktail of emotional motivation you brew up will be what gets you closer to your goal. Everything I do here is a product of the tools I’ve developed from all the other stuff I’ve done, and it manifests in my own practice as well as the community spaces I am responsible for. You may try it out and decide it doesn’t fit now, but perhaps you could see yourself growing into it, or maybe it pushes you in an altogether different direction that works better; what’s important to me is not that people adopt my specific methods, just that they make sure to embrace the human experience instead of trying to avoid or sterilize it.
I hope that writing about this will help people feel a little more comfortable working with more fiery feelings. Learning to manage them and channel them is good for your own growth and progression, and for making interactions with others a little less fraught. And as I like to say, if you’re not here for the people, you’re missing the point.
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Other stuff I’ve written on this topic:
- Finding our reasons for playing fighting games
- Overcoming the ego
- “How can I keep playing fighting games without feeling pressured to compete?”
- On Being Mid and Internet Brainworms
- On protagonist myths, killing your joy, and why I still compete in fighting games
- Giving your fighting game journey a narrative
- Understanding your motivations and finding clean fuel
