2023 Retrospective

Posted on by peterparker1

A week before Christmas last year, after coming home from volunteering at the Winter Ultimate Arcadian at Xanadu, I learned that a childhood friend of mine had committed suicide. He was one of my first friends I came out to in high school when I was questioning my sexuality. He took his own life with a firearm. Long ago, I remember him telling me with the unyielding enthusiasm one only sees in a wide-eyed incoming college freshman that he joined the NRA. Not because he agreed with what they were doing. Rather, it was the opposite. He opposed their stances, but told me, “you’re never going to make a change from the outside.”

A couple months later, Hitfall, a new Rivals of Aether tournament I co-founded, would become a runaway success. Initially started with the intention of a being a regional for the quickly growing MDVA Rivals scene, Hitfall would surpass my fellow TOs and I’s expectations, catching the attention of the wider competitive Rivals of Aether community and becoming what could be considered a major-level tournament.

In April, I would come home late one Friday night from Bring More Setups to find my parents waiting for me in our living room. Bring More Setups is the simultaneous name and slogan of my alma mater’s weekly Smash local, whose community I have been part of since before the pandemic. My father would tell me that my grandmother, his mother, had passed away. My grandmother, the closest one could get to a modern-day matriarch, would take care of my siblings, cousins, and I during our summers of youth. She had always wished to see her grandchildren graduate college. As time passed and her health began to fail, she resigned herself to being satisfied if she lived to see at least one of us walk, but she never did.

The following month, after almost a year of logistical issues (which were mostly the fault of GMU’s Computer Game Design program, but that is a story for another day), I turned in my final project and graduated from college. I was able to use that final project as a vessel for whatever faltering passion I had left in the world of academia, and took it as an opportunity to present to the world a solution for an issue that I never really had the chance to fully detail previously. However, if not for those aforementioned issues, my grandmother would have been alive to see me graduate.

In early August, my father would pass away from a heart attack in his sleep while on vacation with my mother in Italy. My father had always dreamed of visiting Italy, and had wished to retire there one day. Every so often he would ask my siblings and I if we would visit him and our mother in Europe, once we established our own lives as adults. Since the pandemic, he was quite diligent in his Italian practice, determined to use the language to the best of his ability once he was actually in the country. And for just over a week, he could. For just over a week, he was able to live out his fantasy, traveling the country alongside my mother, with no sign of trouble on the horizon.

Two weeks after my father’s death, and just a few days after his funeral, I would be in Maryland, running the second iteration of Hitfall. This time, Hitfall 2 was intended to be a proper major from the start, and was set as the opening offline event of RCS Season 8. It ended up being just as successful as the first one, if not more so, as we were able to improve upon our scheduling and provide a better overall experience for attendees. We received almost unanimous positive feedback from the community. I wish I could say I felt good about the praise we received, but I was struggling to feel anything.

I felt like I was trudging through wet sand on a beach. Every time I dared to step forward, convincing myself that I was safe, that I was fine, or that I wasn’t exhausted, another wave would reach its crest and crash down on top of me. It was as if the vast ocean of life and all its possibilities was making its disapproval known: I’m going the wrong way, stay down. I’m a fool for calling every small, hefty step an accomplishment. Everything I do is meaningless, is fruitless.

The rest of the year was spent lying on the beach, wondering if another wave would try to knock me down if I so much as made a move to stand up again. As I looked up at the sky, I was forced to consider why I was even walking in the first place. Why was I getting back up? The loss in my life—so miserably juxtaposed with my participation in a community where I have found friendship, belonging, and satisfaction—made me realize just how valuable those things are, and how much I should hold those things close.

I greatly enjoy the bio of Qapple’s Mastodon account: “Competition is synonymous with community.”

It’s crazy to think that I have been attending Bring More Setups (BMS) for half a decade(!) now. I remember the first week I attended was the last week of Smash 4 before Ultimate came out, and I had no clue what the hell I was doing. I used my 3DS as a controller to connect to the Wii U and didn’t know the difference between tilt and smash attacks (😳). I may not compete in Ultimate anymore, but I’m happy of the friends I made through the game and continue to hang out with to this day.

Post-pandemic, I was able to start up a Rivals of Aether bracket at BMS. It has been incredibly rewarding to experience the comradery and passion that has sprung from it. In 2023, I had the privilege of seeing the bracket move beyond me and the community around it continue to flourish. Outside of just our local, the greater MDVA Rivals community has grown so so much from where it once was, and has held strong these past twelve months. We even managed to put out our first regional power rankings!

Both Hitfalls were successes in ways I couldn’t have imagined. It took me a long time to actually process what we accomplished and the overwhelming response to both of these events. I’ll still see players use the Hitfall custom colors Jaz, Nemmy, and I made. I’ve been jump scared by footage from the events popping up in YouTube videos. I also got to put so many faces to names and got to know so many people from the wider community for the first time. I’m still amazed (and thankful) players traveled across the country to attend! Shoutout to the Upstate New York scene!

In all my time playing Smash and Rivals, I never felt like I really gave myself the time to try being solely a competitor. In other words, not focusing on anything else but playing and competing. Even before getting into platform fighters, I had always primarily been some flavor of manager, organizer, or administrator. With work on the next Hitfall not beginning until late November, I decided to use the Autumn to focus on competing and improving as a player. I set goals, did VoD reviews, took notes, entered online brackets, etc. I did very much improve as a player during this time, and actually met my goals. Secondarily, I wanted to use my experience at larger in-person tournaments to better inform my decisions as an organizer. I don’t want to become that sort of tournament organizer that stops entering events as a player and loses touch with why they played the game in the first place.

The first out-of-region major I attended was Riptide. I’m really happy I was able to go because it allowed me to just take my mind off of everything that was happening in my life at the time. Also, it was honestly relieving to just joke, laugh, and play the game at a tournament and not feel the responsibility, pressure, or time crunch of running said tournament. What an incredible experience, and I will do what I can to return in 2024. Thank you to everyone I hung out with that weekend for making it memorable.

I wanted to go to TAPS, but I was hesitant. With Riptide, I had already planned (and put down money) to attend before my dad passed away. Now, however, what I felt I needed to do the most was be at home with my mom. I decided that since it was a one-day affair and I wouldn’t be going very far, TAPS would be my last out-of-region tournament of the year.

This is the main reason why I didn’t go to Heat Wave 6, despite everything else lining up for me to attend. I’m very glad that Jen and Jaz were recognized on the TO compendium and got the chance to fly out to Arizona with Nemmy (though I’d be lying if I said I didn’t experience a bit of FOMO lol). Both of them absolutely deserve it. I hope I can make it out next November for presumably the last Heat Wave of Rivals 1.

With the year winding down and the Hitfall team is gearing up for our next event, it’s time to shift my focus back to being a tournament organizer. I will still enter tournaments of course, but going forward I won’t be devoting the same time and effort towards improving as a player that I have been over the last few months. Keeping up motivation as a player is hard (wow, who knew!) and my passion lies in crafting cohesive, creative events. I can’t wait to see both new and familiar faces in 2024 🙂

Well, outside of Hitfall and the Rivals of Aether community, what else did I do in 2023?

  • As mentioned before, I finally managed to graduate college! My final project was a presentation on the esports industry profitability issue. This issue has been the elephant in the room for some time, but in 2023 it really reached the forefront of the discourse surrounding the industry. I’m glad I got the chance to articulate my thoughts on the matter, since it’s a topic that I still don’t think many people who follow esports or participate in the industry are properly educated about.
  • Stellar Stoats, aka the game development group I’m part of that formed in college to create our collective senior capstone game, continued to work on said game, Eras Rising, post-graduation. Somehow, against all odds, the Stellar Stoats team got Eras Rising up on Steam Early Access. You can play it now in all its unfinished glory for free!
  • This was my first year fully stepped away from GMU Esports! It’s an accomplishment in a roundabout way, and quite honestly I could write a whole separate post on the topic. I simply wanted to mention it here because GMU Esports was a huge part of my life for so long, and there was a time when I was deeply embedded in it. Now, I get to see the program stand on its own two feet and watch new hardworking individuals push it even farther. Just last month, I got together with some friends on the GMU Esports Experience Podcast to reminisce about old times and gawk at how much things have changed.

In retrospect, I actually managed to do a lot this year. I think I only really began to internalize that when writing this post. I originally intended this to be how I let people know what has gone on in my personal life. While I am typically reserved in that regard, and will continue to be, I wanted to share what has happened since it has subsequently affected my decisions and interactions with others. This post still serves that purpose, but in recounting the past twelve months and reflecting on everything I have gone through, I feel I have a greater understanding for why I keep getting back up, and why I keep marching forward.

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