Human competitive drive, and my recent lack of it

 

Before I start rambling about everything, I would first like to introduce myself, as this is my first Blogspot post. 

Hi. I’m David. I’m 22 and enjoy drinking water. I come from the competitive fighting game scene, mainly Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and have also dabbled with various traditional fighting games, along with the Pokemon Trading Card Game. It’s genuinely been a very cool experience getting to compete, being able to travel to new places and meet new people  -  most of the people that I am lucky enough to call my friends come from video games.

However, recently I have had a significant issue: recently, my competitive drive has been pretty much non-existent. When you play video games competitively and actively want to be good at them, that’s kind of a big deal. Is it burnout? I’m honestly not sure, but what I do know is that at this very moment, I have lost pretty much all of my desire to compete in the various games that I used to love.

I went to CT GamerCon at the Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Connecticut in March 2023. I had an amazing time and even appeared on a livestreamed match in the doubles tournament. It was genuinely a ton of fun! However, in singles I got completely whooped, for lack of a better word, and felt literally nothing afterwards. Whenever I look back at this tournament, I noticed that before I would often use losses as motivation to improve my gameplay - but this time that was not the case. I think that after coming home things started to click for me  - I realized that I hadn’t felt any noticeable improvement throughout my time in the scene and decided to take a long, much-needed break from competitive Smash. During this time I picked up the Pokemon TCG again after not having played since the pandemic hit, and started going to locals for that game as well. I did manage to find a weekly Pokemon local that’s about a 25 minute drive from where I am, which helps things quite a bit, considering all the Smash locals in the my state are an hour drive (if not more).

Thankfully, my local allows spectators, which gets me out of the house every Wednesday night and gives me something to do instead of sitting on my ass all day. It’s nice getting to see the homies and interact with others in a more social setting; as someone who has historically struggled to talk to people and make friends I feel like that’s pretty important. It's very well worth the hour-long drive <3

I think the most important lesson I’ve learned from my various adventures in this type of environment is that a good mentality is half the battle  -  from my experience it’s pretty much impossible to get better at quite literally anything in life if you can’t back it up with some positivity.

Positivity rocks, if I may say so myself.