Let It Go(?)
I'm gonna tell a story. It's not a story where I'm the hero and it's not a story where someone else is the villain. It is, however, a story about how bad it can feel to carry something for a long time just for the sake of carrying it.
My doctoral dissertation, written between 2009 and 2010, was on competitive fighting games. I went to EVO in 2009 to do observations, and then I did in-depth interviews with competitive players. What I was really interested in was how competitive FG folks turned gameplay into culture; which is to say, how did they build the culture of the FGC out of an approach to play?
Like a lot of academic research, the impetus came from being exposed to something, but not having a strong understanding of it. I'd been playing fighting games all my life, but largely in a single-player way. I was legitimately fascinated by the competitive scene; it felt like people enjoying and engaging in something familiar but in a totally unrecognizable (to me) way. I wanted to understand it better, and I can tell you that everything I saw during my research did a lot to change my understanding and starting assumptions.
In 2013, that dissertation would eventually become the book The Culture of Digital Fighting Games: Performance and Practice (please believe I did not choose that title; I had something much snappier/funnier in mind).
That book is obviously dated (it's been 13 years!), but I continue to stand by it for the most part. Some things have improved for the better; the FGC has done a lot of growth when it comes to identity and diversity-related stuff, internally, and I think that's awesome.
Also in 2013, a friend and I did a short talk at a local games conference in Boston on, roughly described, 'explaining fighting games to non-fighting games folks.' Said friend and I have both sarcastic and dry senses of humor, which definitely permeated the talk, but if I'm being 100% real I don't even remember the content of it anymore. I think we made a jab at the use of "technology" to mean "tactics and combos used by a certain character or in a certain situation" and that's about all I can think of.
Now, on top of this, I had just put out a book (with a $150 hardcover price tag I had no input on whatsoever and which paid me almost no money per sale anyway) that had an entire chapter devoted to misogyny (and, sometimes, racialized stuff) in the FGC, a lot of it focusing on the at-the-time relatively recent Cross Assault situation. The friend who did the talk with me had written a relatively well-known article about the treatment she received trying to go to locals in the Boston area.
The result was when the talk, which had been streamed, made it online... the 2013 FGC decided to make our lives hell. My friend got some pretty serious online harassment about it, and I got a bit of it myself. My book got jokingly negative (and deeply insulting) reviews on Amazon which the platform did nothing to address or remove. People were pissed off.
I have had a long time to think about why, and to reflect on what my part in the situation is, especially from the POV my therapist consistently hits me with, which is "what part of this is yours, and what part of this belongs to someone else?"
The part that belongs to me (I don't want to speak for the friend, who can identify and speak for themselves whenever they like) is largely in comedic delivery. I probably could have prepared a more straight-laced delivery, a few less jokes, fewer jabs. Comedy is one of those things, after all, where a level of trust has to exist before you can tease -- the people being teased need to have a baseline understanding that you're not being malicious. It's believable that for the random FGC folks watching the talk, there wasn't enough baseline trust for it to land without feeling hurtful.
The part that belongs to someone else, though... I'm gonna be extremely real: the FGC in 2013 was hair-trigger about anything said about them, ever. There was a very strong note of "we only get coverage in the gaming press when something bad happens" and feelings of resentment and defensiveness towards any outsiders. Jokes do need trust to land, but it is also possible to make very bad faith readings of things because you're looking for a reason to go on the defensive and act like people hate you. I do think that's some of what was going on, here, in some (not all) cases. Plus, you know... my friend and I had both, separately in our work, critiqued the FGC's gender politics, and that is also probably a contributing thing, here.
This is (to, again, quote my therapist) not about blame, which has strong overtones of judgment; it's about saying "well, these are things that led us here." I do think us being harassed was wrong, but I can be more circumspect about why people were angry. It's just that being angry doesn't justify some behavior. Anyhow.
I'm not really interested in re-litigating this, anyway. Like I said, this is not a story about me being a hero or someone else being a villain.
The real reason I mention this is because there were some people in the FGC who reached out to us, during this whole fiasco, versus shouting shit at or about us on social media. Seth Killian (who I'd spoken to at EVO in 2009 for my dissertation) reached out (and then never followed up, lol... whatever the man was very busy), as did Patrick "PatTheFlip" Miller.
Because he's the topic of the day on Bluesky on the day I'm writing this, and I can feel people's anxiety building: this is not a post about shitting on Patrick, or calling him out, or anything like that. He is, at best, a skein around which I am weaving this yarn.
Pat reached out to me on Twitter. He was nice, a fun guy. We had a good number of mutuals, because he's a pretty big deal in fighting game culture and I had a good number of FG folks in my online social circle. We interacted a bit; I wouldn't say extensively, but it was chill enough. I think I managed to get him a copy of my book, and he ended up writing a short blog post about it in which I think he said a neutral but pretty accurate thing, which is: "if you're already into FGs, the book's not really going to be for you." Which is true! I don't think my book, at the time or now, was necessarily aimed at existing fighting game fans. Not exactly a ringing endorsement but a far cry from FGC folks who were, even then, leaving fake Amazon reviews about how I wrote an entire book because I was mad I lost too often at AquaPazza.
And then, within a pretty short period of time (I'm going to say a month or two), he told me "I gotta unfollow, I don't need the kind of negative energy you got" or something of that nature (my twitter accounts are all gone anyway so I can't know for sure). I'm not betraying a confidence or anything; he said it in a publicly-viewable reply. And that was that!
Now, let's be clear -- I probably did have some negative vibes at the time. 2013-2019 or so were a pretty rough time for yours truly and my relationship to social media, and what I did or didn't put on there, was inextricably linked to that. Plus, really, it's not like he and I were close friends; he didn't owe me anything (and frankly, he said "here's why I'm out" and left, which is more than I got from other people I thought was closer to, so... point to Patrick on that one).
HOWEVER.
At the time, I remember being really upset. It felt a bit like he'd seen a potential convert and, when it became clear that wasn't happening, bailed... or at least that's my recollection of at least part of why I felt hurt/angry. Frankly, it was 13 years ago at this point and I don't really have a strong recollection of my mental state about it all. I do know, though, that this is when what I will call The Grudge started. I knew I was angry at him, and felt used/betrayed, and, well...
Cue THIRTEEN YEARS of scoffing and being annoyed or carefully neutral or changing the subject when he came up. Of rolling my eyes when I heard his books or blog posts mentioned. Just this rolling miasma of negative emotion about a person who, in the reckoning of things, did very little to me. I am pretty sure to this day that Patrick Miller probably stopped thinking about me, ever, entirely after that day on Twitter where he unfollowed. Yet somehow I kept the fire of my grudge going, and going, and going.
I have thought a lot, today, about why, and I think it's not even really about anything Patrick did, and more that he was a recognizable emblem for the entire thing: the talk, the backlash, the online abuse (for me and for my friend who did the talk with me), etc. The two became inseparable, for me; it was if he was the avatar of that whole situation. When he reached out I'd hoped it would be reparative, and when that's not what happened, I got upset.
A lot of grudges, as I've found while dealing with mine, come from this internal place of "I wanted this to go differently, and I'm going to hate everything about it until someone tries to make it up to me." A really fun cocktail of "impossible to change history" and "it's your responsibility to fix this."
A few days ago, Patrick made a blog post his Patreon titled "Thank you, 2XKO". As I don't follow him, I hadn't read it, but a bunch of bluesky posts this morning that were not about the blog post, but about backlash he appears to be getting from the blog post, brought me to it as I laid in bed this morning.
I felt The Grudge start stirring as I was reading what felt like, in the main, a pretty reasoned blog post. The 2XKO situation is pretty fucking grim, all told, and I think Riot did that dev team dirty (including Patrick who was laid off shortly after the game's official release, if I recall right). I could feel part of me looking for a 'yeah, but' I could slide in like a knife to keep the 'must be mad at Pat Miller' thing going.
After a bit of that, though, it really just... felt extremely bad. Why was I carrying this stupid thing, this hollow yet dense sphere of negative emotion in the pit of my stomach, for all this time, and over someone who probably wouldn't even recognize my name? That was when I came to the realization I mentioned above: that what I was really resentful of, what the Grudge was really about, was wishing the past had gone differently. Wishing that past events that hurt me hadn't happened.
I have so many other things in my life to feel bad about that are like... current, and specific, and real! What was the point of this? Why keep doing it?
Maybe writing this blog post -- which airs my dirty laundry and does not exactly leave me looking like the nicest or most well-adjusted person in the world -- is part of my process of laying that down and letting the ball roll out the door. This is certainly not the only variation of The Grudge that I've been holding on to, but perhaps it's a sign about what to do with all of them, on some level.
I've learned a lot about trauma in the past 5-6 years, and perhaps most importantly, I've learned (via a trained mental health professional) that so much of what I think is Wrong™ about me -- that "belongs to me" to reference the previous statement -- is scars from things that have happened to me; learned behavior for survival that became so automatic that it's difficult to separate it from things I actively choose to do with full intention. For a long time I resisted understanding that, because it felt like I was abrogating responsibility for what was wrong in my life; it felt bad to say "well, you're like this because people were cruel to you about [x] as a kid."
This is kind of a spurious and cheesy comparison, but I'm reminded of season 4 of Korra, where Toph is trying to get Korra to remove the last bit of metal poison that's in her bloodstream on her own. When Korra tries, she has debilitating flashbacks to the fight in which she was poisoned, and in perhaps the most gentle voice Toph has ever used, she simply says: "That fight is over. Release the fear."
(It's notable that, once the poison -- an extremely small amount -- is gone, Korra's first words are "I feel so much lighter.")
Or, to make another cheesy pop culture comparison: at the end of Star Trek: Picard season 2, Jean-Luc has his confrontation with Q in the solarium of his family home, and demands an explanation as to why Q cares about him so much. It's actually a great scene, and Q has a quote about grief and trauma: "Humans... your griefs, your pains, fix you to moments in the past long gone. You're like butterflies with your wings pinned."
In an ironic way, it feels good to hold on to The Grudge. Moving on can feel like saying "well, none of that was important, none of that mattered," but I don't think that's what it's saying at all. Instead, it's saying "this was important, once; but it's not important anymore. I don't have to wear a millstone as a reminder."
Much like Korra, for a lot of today, letting go of The Grudge has made me feel lighter. I don't have to feel angry or upset or annoyed over nothing. Pat's blog post was just another blog post; I agreed with some parts, disagreed with others, and (I admit) shouted "oh fuck off" about at least one sentence (the one about dissertations; the work lives on in all the work that scholar does after, even if the document itself does not. A discussion for another day!).
I probably didn't need to invoke Patrick Miller by name, here, and if you've read this far you'll understand that this is a blog post about me, not him. I think I felt the need to actually use the name because that's part of letting The Grudge go -- "naming a thing gives you power over it," and all that. Plus, it kinda feels like he might be experiencing, today, a bit of what I did in 2013: people angry at someone or something else, using him as an emblem because he said something publicly. If there's any impetus to stop and ask myself why I need to bother holding on to something for this long, wouldn't that be the exact situation to do so in?
I'm sure Pat will never read this post (and there is no reason to point it out to him; as I said, he probably ceased thinking about me that day in 2013 and never looked back). Even if he did, what would I say that would matter? "Sorry I was psychologically using you as the eidolon of an entire culture during a particularly traumatic social time 13 years ago"? That sounds absurd.
Hopefully, though, this can be step one for me, anyway, of purging the poison of holding on to things for so long. By no means am I saying every long-held bad feeling is without reason or justification; rather, I think today was an opportunity for me to stop and go, "even if I was justifiably upset at the time, has holding on to this for all these years done me any good?" In this case, for me, I think the answer is no. Sorry, again, for the cringey Avatar ref, but "That fight is over and the fear is what's left" is pretty accurate, here. At some point, you gotta let the fear go. That fight is done.