a thing about versus fighting games as a genre is that for all of the social progress they have seen over the last ten, fifteen years as the most influential figures have made a point of modeling the behavior they want to see and calling out the rapey bigoted shitlords whenever they set foot in a community space, their starting point was so utterly vile that they remain a golden standard of the Online Video Game Experience:
(kelly would get along just swell with our good buddy here, i’m sure)
a child psychiatrist i know, who i think is doing a clinical study on the cognitive developmental effects of llms, happened to run an experiment for the yuks, and—
structurally what makes this interaction even more wild is that they chose to challenge me—and to do this, they had to see how shitty my connection was at the time, and make a personal judgment based on that understanding, in which they conscious chose to put that information aside because they really wanted to fight me even with a shitty connection, to a greater extent than that they disliked those conditions.
so, it’s like—this is entirely a you problem, my man. i didn’t force you into anything. i have no power over how your day is going.
still they felt it very important to tell me that my potentially being poor was bringing down the whole tone of the place.
because yeah, that’s it. i am your misery. raging at me will surely fix your disheartening life.
the Internet is vast and imperfect. sometimes people’s connections can just suck, my man. sometimes they don’t. i don’t control the bandwidth of coaxial cable on a sunday night.
which on reflection, crossed with a previous aside—
a key Kelly Thing i often think about is a conversation we once had about how i could possibly have seen so few concerts or live shows when i was younger.
and, it’s like. girl—different people are different, you know? in the basis of my background i don’t understand how you possibly could see as many as you claim to, but I don’t choose to project my incredulity because i know that you are your own individual.
more fundamentally though, beyond my spending the first 25 years of my life in central maine, in the middle of nothing but forest, with no transportation or agency of my own, where i’d have to drive 30 bleary minutes to replace a gallon of milk, there also was a tacit social factor that at the time i found unreasonably frustrating and impenetrable.
i described to kelly how when i was in college, despite knowing—usually after-the-fact—that major acts did occasionally play within, like, a two-hour drive of where i was, and that a local scene probably existed in some shape, i was never able to figure out how people learned about this stuff and got on it.
this is the mid-’90s, remember, and frickin mosaic barely existed, never mind the web as it would become.
but i did technically know people, and i knew that some of them went to these shows and seemed to always know when something was happening, so i made what to me felt like an obvious decision.
i elected to ask one of these people how they learned this stuff, expecting they would point me to some resource or another as a starting place.
instead they eyed me for a second before muttering, “yeah, i guess i can see how someone might not know that sort of thing,” and turning away from me.
i made clear to her in the telling how this response had always stung in a way i didn’t quite understand but that had injured me for decades nevertheless—so of course kelly ambiguously screwed up her face and replied that that, actually, was the correct thing for that person to say to me.
see, she explained, there was this unspoken social economy to this sort of situation, where if you were supposed to know about events or whatever then you would already just know about them because of the kind of person you were, and if you weren’t aware then you probably didn’t belong—so in effect they were actually being kind to me by shutting me down.
i swear her whole attitude toward me kind of shifted after this conversation; i sure began to clock an underlying tone that didn’t particularly thrill me, inflecting the way she framed the world and regarded human relationships—though at the time i felt not so much alarm as, “okay, uh… guess i should put a pin in that thought. 😐”
so anyway, in a completely different conversation, kelly and i later went back-and-forth for twenty minutes about why my broadband service—which in my then-apartment was totally adequate if unremarkable—sucked so badly.
she especially was mystified why my upload speed was so much slower than download—wich, if you have used the internet before, you may understand is because it is the internet and that’s the way it now and forever has worked—at least, on coaxial cable. upload speeds are always like a tenth of download speeds, for all sorts of practical reasons like traffic patterns and the bounds of physics.
and that’s when it clicked for her: oh, i was on cable? how quaint; she didn’t realize that essential day-one fact of information technology was a thing, because since kelly first got on the internet she had only ever known fiber connections.
…
to be clear, this girl is only four years younger than i, right, so she’s working similar timescale. we’re talking 1990s to present.
so, just, with every cell in my body,
what?
i mean—i know that today, in 2025, fiber connections are slowly becoming less exotic and expensive and geographically restricted, but still i don’t…
how could this absolute fucking top-of-the-line elite service, that until recently was physically or financially unavailable to all but a select few privileged users, possibly be your only window on this practical and existential backbone of 21st century society?
in regard to which assertion, i think… there’s some useful fractal metonymy here in the way that both those conversations played out—a shade of metonymy broadly analogous to the way our sunday buddy at the start of this post told on himself, through the way they chided me for the audacity to exist in their space while potentially being poor, expressing deep confusion how it was even possible i could be there.
as i say, i expect that kelly would grimace at the exchange, and as with her gatekeeping on other clearly sore topics would pontificate down her nose at me about how actually i was in the wrong here because i broke an import social contract by failing to cater to an entitled schlub’s every whim, and i should consider never playing again unless i find a way to afford a top-of-the-line system that is unlikely to embarrass me and everyone else who i bump into. because really, i had no right to take up space in the lobby unless i was prepared to commit to the lifestyle expectations of the rest of the community.
(i also suspect that had i discussed the anecdote with jenique, it would have gone much the same way as with kelly—except with more open disdain at how much i was embarrassing her just by admitting to have been so uncool by what she would assert were objective societal standards i should have known.)