Compete Staff Writer Maddy Myers and I both feel nervous about playing games in front of other people. We sat down to talk about why.
Gita Jackson: Hey Maddy. Both of us have been put in the position of playing games in front of other people. Whether itās at a tournament or over streams, playing a game while other people watch comes with a sense of performance anxiety.
Maddy Myers: In thinking about this Iāve thought back on so many experiencesāgood and badāthat Iāve had trying to play games at big parties growing up, having to psych myself up to grab a controller and face off against a group of guys in a fighting game. As I got older, that experience got way harderāin arcades, once I was old enough to go to the mall unsupervised, and later at official fight nights at gaming stores, and tournaments. Itās been hard for me, every single time, to get myself to play a game in public. The reasons go beyond just āitās embarrassing to lose,ā which is a basic sentiment that Iām guessing all our readers can relate to. Thereās also the fact that I have social anxiety and the fact that Iām a womanāa fact that other people tend to bring up as soon as they see me playing a game in public.
Gita: When I was getting into games, it was through my older brother. Sure, we grew up playing games together on the Super Nintendo and the Genesis and later various Playstation consoles, but all those things implicitly belonged to him. Once he entered teenagerhood and discovered that hanging out with your little sister wasnāt cool anymore, I didnāt get a chance to play games without other people at all for a long time. For a long time the only way I could play games with other people was in social settings, and because I didnāt have a space where I could safely try out a new game and learn how to play it and maybe even fail at playing it a bit, it was embarrassing to go through all that in public. Kids are mean, and if you donāt have a strong sense of self itās hard to put up with constant teasing. And yeah, I was also the only girl I knew who was into games, and yes, all my guy friends who liked them too also loved pointing that out.
In Ceciliaās piece about āOnly Girlā syndrome, she talked to a lot of women who have been the only girl in the gaming groups, and a lot of them lived in fear of not only another girl showing up, but another girl showing up who was better at games than them. If you donāt have space to learn how to play games, then you might find yourself without friends to play games with as a kid. And thatās what happened to me. Eventually I stopped playing games for a while.
Gita: My brother was buying a suit for some reason, and I went with him because there was a Best Buy nearby and Iād heard about this cool game The World Ends With You and I had birthday money or something. It was just at the end of high school. So Iām playing my brand new game in a Brooks Brothers and this adult man comes up to me and asks what Iām playing. I tell him, and he says, āOh, who made it?ā I say, hesitantly, āSquare Enix.ā His reply was, āNo they didnāt.ā Like, I had the box in my hand. By that point I had learned that if you tell a stranger that theyāre wrong about a video game fact youāll get into a fight. So I just said āYou must be right!ā
Maddy: Itās really exhausting to have conversations like this. I havenāt had anything like that happen to me, but I have had the experience of going to fight nights or fighting game events and trying to wait in line to play a game, and guys will keep cutting me in line because they donāt think Iām actually there to play. They think Iām āsomeoneās girlfriend.ā It gets really tiring to continue to assert, āYes, Iām actually here to play, against you, in a video game.ā Itās easier to not play games in public! Itās just easier to sign in online and play people there!
At the NYCC Street Fighter V tournament, a group of guys made the one girl in their group who actually wasnāt playing come up to me and ask me if I was really entering, because I guess none of them were able to ask me themselves. That was embarrassing for everyone.
This stuff happens on a small level in day-to-day interactions too. The Switch is so portable that you could play Zelda on public transit, if you wanted to. But I donāt really want the public to know how hard I find some of those dang puzzles! I donāt want strangers on a train (heh) to weigh in on which item I should be using!
Gita: It seems a lot of our anxiety surrounding gaming in public comes from kids being mean. But now, weāre adults. I stream sometimes, and Iām okay with playing my 3DS in public. But weāre also both in a profession that is really public facing, and the pressure to publicly be better at games than others hasnāt gone away.
Maddy: I play games in public, but I still steel myself. I get myself into a psychological mode where Iām āperforming.ā When I was younger, I just didnāt have the self-confidence to do that; I was a lot more likely to just bail out if things got hard. I wish I could go back in time and tell my past self that actually, she was really good at games and she shouldnāt be so hard on herself when it comes to participating in tournaments and so on.
Gita: A lot of what has changed for me was just meeting nicer people. When youāre a kid you donāt get a lot of choices on who you get to know, but even the guys who I (very very rarely) played Halo with in college were pretty nice about the fact that I had no idea how to play Halo. Once I started to meet better friends to play games withāand more women who had experiences like mineāI found it easier not only to play games in front of other people, but to ask for help when I needed it.
Maddy: I guess I also wish my past self had been a little luckier with finding the right friends. But I bet there are other people out there whoāve had experiences like this, and hopefully reading this will be validating for them in some way.
In order to be really good at any game, you have to feel like itās safe and acceptable to failāsometimes in publicāfor the sake of eventually learning. This is actually a big reason why as an adult Iāve made myself play games in public even though I also find it very scary and nerve-wracking and exhausting.
Gita: Trying and failing a lot of times is really the only way to get better at games. Iām glad that I now have the confidence to put myself out there. Who knows, maybe Iāll start bringing my Switch on the subway, even.
