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…