I’m on the cusp of returning to a project I haven’t touched, or been able to touch, since June. A project any distance from which is filled with agony and longing. Everything that’s stood between me and the book—every single obligation, no matter how pleasurable on its face—has had to bear no small amount of resentment on my part, because always there’s this thing right behind my eyes whispering to me just how the next scene is going to unfold. I’ve been thinking of that next scene for four months straight. Through most of a summer, most of a work stoppage, through personal and professional tumult, through time spent with loved ones, I’ve been thinking about that scene.
A strange and beatific thing with this work-in-progress is that it’s the first in a very long time where I haven’t been thinking about rules or technique. I haven’t been thinking too hard about pacing, about the proportions within a scene of action and interiority, like the bread-ingredient ratio to a sandwich. Indeed, the engine of the whole thing has simply been the question “what makes me feel good.” There’s this trust that if I just chase joy, then everything I’ve internalized over the entirety of this career and the dozen-plus novels that came before will be right behind me, will infuse the work. I won’t have to think about pacing on a macro or micro level, I won’t have to think about whether or not my sentences are too long or if the physical attributes of characters are adequately described. It’s a bit of a full-circle moment. In the beginning, when I wrote novels, it was simply a matter of putting in what I thought was cool, what I wanted to see in a book. It was about making me happy, and I think I’ve finally returned to that place. Does this sentence feel good? Never mind its profusion of subjunctive clauses. Does this scene feel good? Never mind the flashback or the flash-forward that interrupts the action.
Some of this is down to the fact that, on the days when I worked on it, I would read random pages or scenes from different novels than were my usual fare, half in a desire for osmosis and half more in a facsimile of prayer. (Oh, Dostoevsky, Patron Saint of the Maddened, intercede on my behalf so that something true may happen in my writing today!) While working on this book, I would read snatches from books published long ago, the books of which people often say “nobody’s writing stuff like this anymore” and exhale smoke from their Gauloises. It’s not insouciance, but rather the singular pursuit of pleasure. Joy as guiding principle. And I think this is the moment I’m trying to gesture others towards when they ask me for advice and I say, “write write write.”
Sure, there’s that aspect of going to the gym, or practicing that jumpshot alone for four hours on a Saturday morning while everyone else is sleeping in. But I think now that it’s more about trust. Really good jazz players know what they’re doing and they can trust themselves when the moment for improvisation happens to make something good out of it. It’s freestyle rapping. It’s boxing. You empty your consciousness, and learned behavior copulates with instinct to give birth to flow. And you get asked after your set, after your match, your cipher, what was going through your head when you did that magical thing, and you can pause for a moment in wonder, then grin with satisfaction at the person holding the microphone, lean in and say “nothing,” knowing it’s both truth and lie in the same instant.
About a month ago today, MK1 launched Early Access and right before it went wide, I finally dove in, but what made this carmine expedition back into the world of fighting games more meaningful was the personal mandate to game online. Also, some of the trophies required online matches and the completionist in me couldn’t say no. In the run-up to this and in the wake of the latest Street Fighter that just dropped, and with Tekken 8 on the horizon, I’d been texting with other writer friends who, to my joyful surprise, were quite active on the circuit and our jokes about getting me online started to sound more and more serious, more and more like promises. They’re all Street Fighter heads, so I can yet stuff down the fear of having them mix me tf up in our first match together, but I know our dance is imminent, so perhaps in preparation of going toe-to-toe with them, I’ve been throwing down with strangers.
You learn a lot about yourself gaming online. A lot.
My first pairing and my default for much of the game outside of a ludicrous(ly enjoyable) story mode was Li Mei with a Frost Kameo. Beyond Basic. Pretty much a factory-settings pair, especially given that Li Mei was one of the six characters available in the Beta.1 I liked Frost because she was good for setting up launch combos as well as allowing me to reset if I was in a compromised position. She’d gotten me out of plenty a jam. And even though I felt I was treating Li Mei much like how I treat Scrivener—in that I’m only ever using about 2% of its functionality—I felt I was becoming competent, if not good. And then it came time to go for those online trophies, the first of which requires playing five full Kombat League sets, Kombat League being what they call Ranked matches. Ranked Matches are to Kasual Matches what Sukuna is to Itadori, which is to say demons, more or less, triumph.
Though I’ve managed to guard (jealously) a winning record in both my Kasual and Kombat League matches, I’ll never forget my first KL match against a Baraka-Cyrax player. Without getting too into the weeds, this was perhaps the newest obscenely powerful trend among players (there were a lot of Raiden-Jax’s in the beginning, and Sareena, too, was a popular Kameo). The thing about Baraka-Cyrax is that even if you magically block everything, the relentless chip damage alone will have you uninstalling the game. Before each match, the game shows you each person’s record, yours and your opponent’s, and I’d made the mistake of assuming that if a person had only played, what, 4, 5 KL matches, they were about as green as me.
Fam.
The way this man mixed me up. I don’t think I got a single round off him. There were moments during a round where I simply did not touch the ground. And I would stare in abject horror as the hit-counter on their side of the screen just went up and up and up and suddenly, 50% of my health was gone. But I stuck it out because I wanted that g-d trophy.
My next couple of sets with different players actually weren’t nearly as bad. That first drubbing reminded me of my first time sparring back when I boxed semi-regularly. You’re all nerves and your shoes don’t fit right and you move too much but you get hit that first time and you realize you’re not made of glass. A few more hits and you realize you’re not made of brick either. Still, I went into those next sets duly humbled but eager to get my get-back, and then the moment happens when your earlier suspicions are proven true and you meet someone even greener than you, and now it’s your turn to be the bully. That poor Liu Kang.2
By the time I’d finished those sets and some additional Kasual matches by accident, I’d run the full gamut of human emotions. I’d stolen defeat from the jaws of victory and vice versa. I’d been punished, I’d held my own, and I dominated, and then when that notification rings in your headphones and the achievement icon pops up on your screen, you raise your head, your shoulders heaving, and you close your eyes, basking in the sense of accomplishment. You played online and you survived.
There’s another PvP mode called King of the Hill where a bunch of you are thrown in a lobby and you all get your shot at defeating whoever the King is at any particular moment, then, once you win that match, it’s your turn to defend the throne against all comers. Because there was a trophy attached to dethroning a King, you know what I had to do.
By this point in the game’s life, you’re seeing a lot of Smoke’s, and one funny thing that happens in this very online time of gaming where YouTube videos proliferate of gamers at almost all skill levels but especially the pros and near-pros is that you see one particularly damaging combo and then EVERYBODY is doing that combo. It happened with Raiden, a particularly frustrating 17-hit humiliation machine, and now it was Reiko with a Darrius Kameo, and you knew as soon as you got scooped up in that first command grab that anywhere between 40 and 60 percent of your health would go the way of the Dodo. Anyway, whatever triumph I might have felt from my Ranked wins paled in comparison to what I felt when I ascended to the throne. It was magical. Now, there’s a bit of luck involved as your chance of victory is heavily contingent on the lobby you get thrown into, but if there’s five or six of you and you somehow come out on top AND manage to defend your throne at least once or twice, well, the only thing that ever tasted better than that was Mom’s jollof rice.
I was never a PvP type of gamer. Shooters were for story mode, and that one quest line in Elden Ring that requires you to get absolutely bodied by people who have already gathered up Radahn and Malenia’s moveset while you’re, like, RL 19 was the most exasperating part of the game. And though I’ve actually worked on a COD game, if you see someone claiming to be me in a COD lobby, it is a lie. Bold AND bald-faced. Yet here I was, standing across the screen from something other than the CPU.
It can be hard sometimes to watch pros fight on YouTube and not wonder what it would take to be like them, if there was some shortcut, a certain amount of hours spent in the lab that might spirit you to that skill level. But somebody in a comment on a TikTok once said that “you gotta get washed before you get clean” and I’ve been thinking about that koan, that nugget of wisdom, ever since.
There’s a section in the tutorial for MK1 that teaches you about combos. The general instructions have you practicing a bunch of characters, including Scorpion and Johnny Cage, but then there are character-specific combo challenges, some of which will forever be left unfinished by me. What was so maddening in the beginning but that I’ve started just barely to get the hang of is just how fast you have to press these damn buttons. My brain just can’t keep up, and I no longer have that juvenile celerity, that neural plasticity, that hoovers up knowledge of a thing, that makes it part of one’s body. So there’s nothing left but to practice and practice…and practice and practice and practice. But then somehow, your body catches up to the speed of the game. Your fingers, your thumbs, they learn timing, and by learn, I mean they memorize the speed with which the game happens. Pigs will do barrel rolls among the clouds before you hear me opine about frame rates and refer to the X’s and O’s on my controller by numbers, but memory does start to accumulate in the muscles.
Which makes the relation between writing and playing MK1 pretty evident. There’s a lot of fun that can happen in the thinking-through of a thing, in the learning of a thing; in fact, few things beat for pure dopamine content the moment when you do a thing you hadn’t been able to do before, a thing that once upon a time felt so beyond your ken, your ability, as to be ever unreachable. But I think what I’m rediscovering is that there is oh so much fun to be had in the having-learned, the having-thought-through. When the lessons have been internalized and your body can move to the game’s, the story’s, speed.
I’m sure once the drafting of this novel is in the rearview and the work of editing it begins, I’ll be able to see what was at work in my mind when, those star-points in a character’s emotional journey that create the constellation of their arc or the decision-making process behind why long sentences here and why shorter, clipped ones there. But for now, it’s enough to just have fun. To live in this space where the ass-whoopings were a thing of the past and where victory isn’t a one-off but a thing that happens to you again and again and again, a continuous string, a 22-hit combo where neither of you touches the ground.
Currently reading: [redacted]
Currently listening: Copkilla - Satxri, Morokiri
Along with Sub-Zero, Kitana, Liu Kang, Kenshi, and Johnny Cage. But they allegedly nerfed tf out of my girl, and it’ll be a long time before I forgive NetherRealm Studios for doing bae dirty like that.
It wasn’t during that set but during another that I prompted my first “Quitality.” To this day, a moment of perverse pride that on my first day online, I’d sufficiently given the business to prompt bloody forfeiture.