PLAYER ONE FIGHT!
by
Eliot Schrefer
Player One, Choose Your Fighter!
Name: Blake Bailor
Height: 5' 6"
Weight: 145 lbs.
Fighting Style: Default
Strengths: Towering Self-Confidence
Weaknesses: Towering Insecurity
Difficulty: Hard
My summer of video games led right into the day I met my first boyfriend.
It’s not as dramatic as that might sound. Here’s the breakdown: I played Uppercut all summer, got well past the finger callus stage, and pretty high up the world ladder. That all ended because I had to go to my first day of high school, and that’s when I met Carson Hahn. No cause and effect at all.
All the same, here’s the crux of the whole thing. I should probably save it for the end of the story and pass it off as my big revelation, so that you can put this down, rest your glasses on top, put some tea on, and say “that crazy kid, at least he learned something from all this.”
And you can still say that, I’m not stopping you. Here goes: What draws me to video games is what is lacking in my actual relationships. Video games are only joyous, and relationships are only hard.
When middle school started, I was an unapologetic gamer, but by the end it felt like I had to closet that nonsense. At the right lunch table, sure you could let loose with your Assassin’s Creed theories, but otherwise you had to pretend you didn’t spend half your nights in the Animus.
If I was around someone I wanted to impress, I’d talk bashfully about my years of gaming, how I “used to be a big dork.” This implied that I was no longer that dork. Did it work? Probably not. I still wore Minecraft tees. But as I started high school, I realized it’s not a bad way to gain some nice new friends, making sure I got teased in just the right way. It worked on Carson Hahn.
My favorite thing about one-on-one brawlers is selecting your character. Like on Uppercut, they all have numerical values for how much they’re worth, from strength and constitution down to charisma. Your dexterity isn’t “pretty good,” it’s fifteen. That’s it. You could put it on your résumé.
If Carson were an Uppercut character, I could look up his Blake Receptivity Score before making any potentially embarrassing aggro moves.
My dad thought the Uppercut stats were interesting, and for a time that made me just beam. He would whip through the character sheets I printed off the internet, squinting at them, his hand scratching through his dress shirt to the small of his meaty back. Then he’d laugh and say “Well, Blake boy, I could use these when I interview people.”
I photoshopped some blanks and printed a stack for him. He made them disappear somehow.
The best games are the ones that have a stock of ready-made characters. I don’t care if it’s some hokey low-budget tennis game, where the only difference between players is the color of their shorts. Somewhere in the game’s development, a programmer had thought about each one of these people. These characters had purpose. We should all be so lucky.
My favorite fighter across canons is Chun Li. She’s one of the regulars on the Street Fighter series, the first girl to hit the two-dimensional fighting scene, so to speak. My friends would ask, “So you’re the chick again?,” and back when I was in the closet I’d answer “she’s got great legs” (thereby affirming my masculinity and also referencing her strong kicks), but inside I’d be thinking “this girl had to struggle to make it, the world’s stacked against her, and someone killed her father,” and so on.
She’s a complex character, Chun Li. Although most virtual women wear halter tops and fuchsia thongs, she dresses in a ceremonial Chinese coat that probably has some official name I don’t know. It disguises her curves like a stiff carpet, and she wears what appear to be pit-bull collars on her wrists.
When she defeats her enemy, the game randomly shows one of two animations: she either jumps up and down and giggles or gives you this haunted look and bows her head. These are pretty much the two moods I live in.
Player Two, Choose Your Fighter!
Name: Carson Hahn
Height: 6' 2"
Weight: 180 lbs.
Fighting Style: Open palms, close range
Strengths: Soccer, Popularity
Weaknesses: Unknown
Difficulty: Hard
I met Carson during soccer tryouts. I had never really played soccer (not unless you count digital versions, obvs), but I figured I should get in shape so guys would want to have sex with me, and soccer is one of the few sports short people can play.
As I stood on the field, trying to touch my toes for twenty minutes while we waited for the coach to start things, I stealthily checked out the other guys. If I was going to finally be openly out to everyone in high school, and not just my faithful core friends, there were sure going to be some hard choices to make about who to date first.
Though, who am I kidding? I’d have definitely hooked up with most any of these guys. I’d have hooked up with most any homo homo sapiens. These new soccer teammates were giving off straight vibes, though.
Carson, though. Man, that was not a hard selection to make. Top stats, all the way. He’s tall, and plays goalie with rare talent. I can be very accurate about that because I spent the week on the bench, watching him.
I was equipment manager, which really meant bench-warmer (soccer doesn’t have much equipment, you might have noticed). I made myself Carson’s cheerleader. I couldn’t help it.
Whenever he glanced to the sidelines, I would give him a big wave, and from time to time he would wave back, confused at first and eventually energetically, his already big hands made four inches longer by his gloves. (I can be accurate about their size, as well, because I had his extra pair in my lap and ran my hands up and down the fingers.)
After practice, Carson and I would sometimes hang out with Lisa from the girl’s team. I guess she was his girlfriend? They never used that word, though. Lisa was technically an A+ amazing human being, totally funny and charming, but she’s also one of those people who are “friends with people for what they can do, rather than who they are,” or so I enlightened Carson.
She and I would playfully pull him between us as we walked, and he would let out these peals of baritone laughter. Soon everyone on both soccer teams knew that Carson, Lisa, and I would be together forever.
I haven’t talked to Lisa for ages.
One time after practice, we raided the old yearbooks that Coach kept on his shelf. Carson showed us a picture from two years ago, when he was in ninth grade, so we could see how out of shape he used to be. He gave us these sad eyebrows, like it was some tragedy, but I knew the true message was “I’m so hot now, huh?” Couldn’t disagree with that.