Julie bought me a copy of Injustice 2 today because she’s the best. :*
I’m about to play for a while, as soon as I finish a few tasks I need to get done here. But as I was thinking about Injustice (the game, not the concept, which I talk about all the time), I was thinking about Esports and my origins in the sort of tradition of what my students do.
I’m not that great at the games they play. I am okay at Hearthstone (but really, who isn’t if they play a little; it’s not hard to be “alright” at Hearthstone, but it’s way different to be as good as my players), but MOBAs and FPS are not my thing. I was once pretty good at Doom and Quake (when they were just Doom and Quake). But that time passed me by.
I am awful at Smash Bros, though I like it.
But I have a history with fighting games and with competitive online gaming. My expertise, if you will, is in looking at identity formation and collaboration in World of Warcraft. I was, for the time I did that research, a progression raider in a relatively elite guild (who I can’t name here because it’d remove the anonymity from my book, but I called them Flashpoint). My history goes deeper, though.
I was once a Mortal Kombat master who rocked the arcades. How much so? Let me give you two stories to chew on.
- Picture it: Muncie, IN, 1994. It’s summer, and my friend Ben and I are at Journalism Camp at Ball State University. Ben has an art class, but my editing courses are over. It’s 2 pm. Ben and I stop to play a game of Mortal Kombat II in the student union. I select Baraka. I beat Ben in two rounds. He says “goodbye” to go to his evening workshop. I tell him I’ll see him a little after 8, when he’s done.
And I play. And people line up. And I play. And play. Ben comes back at 8:15 and is shocked to see I’m still at the machine. He asks me how much I’ve spent.
The answer? 50 cents. I haven’t lost. I played an oncoming stream of people for 6 hours and change. I gave someone my game and walked away so we could go get dinner. - Now picture this. It’s the summer of 1995, a year later. I’m out of high school and working at Wal-Mart before going to college. This story gets weirder, but not the part I want to cover today. Working at Wal-Mart doesn’t net a man a great deal of money, so I find myself looking for ways to finance my hobbies. I hang out at the local truck stop, since my mother for a short period drove truck, and I play MK there. One night, a driver, watching me finish MKII on a quarter, says “I bet you $20 I can beat you.”
I take a calculated risk. I don’t have $20.
I take the bet.
I beat him. He offers double or nothing.
I beat him, again.
I expect he’s sharking me when he wants to go again, then I realize that if we double up again the best he can do is win back his own $40 and that’d be terrible game shark move.
I beat him again.
He offers to toss in another $20 if I’ll teach him what I’m doing. So for ten minutes I model for him how to counter people with Scorpion, all the little tricky moves that can stop just about anything anyone tries.
Another person comes in to play. I step back and watch. The trucker wrecks this player with Scorpion. Then again.
I leave with a smile. Over the next four months I finance my comic books, video games and fuel for my car with MK and Tekken arcade and truck stop winnings.
So I’m not an Esports star, by any means, but it’d be an Injustice to say I don’t know where the spirit of Esports comes from.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have so many combos to learn.