It's Like Falling in Love All Over Again
I've been thinking a lot about what pushes me to stay in this godforsaken, extensible-card-game-infested corner of my psyche despite extensible card games being hostile territory to my brain.
I love it, but you have to understand that my definition of love isn't something that just happens. It's not just the longing or the need.
Love is work.
I could've written about what I'm doing with my extensible card game design reference library. Things certainly are heating up in a bunch of ways, after a long summer lull: Lorcana's big moment (and its attendant lawsuit); the union busting at TCGPlayer/eBay; the way Magic seems to be trying to eat up each innovation, good and bad, that comes from other card games, whether it's waifu art or brand crossovers — or the things only it can do, like having Post Malone get his wallet out to the tune of $2.6 million.
But most of my thought in these few months has been about loving the space. Specifically, not why I love the space, because I know that that moment of falling into it, of being incredibly excited and immediately going into my little space to think through all the cogs of a machine, of the pleasure of the sheer kinetics of shuffling a deck or placing a die or counting chits, that's not something I need to quantify in order to want it.
I have fallen in love with this already, and I'm ready to do so again, and again, and again, thoroughly, despite myself.
So, more than the why, I ask myself how I can love the space. Because: love isn't just the falling; the falling itself is work. Love is showing up every day and doing what you can. Despite yourself. Even if things are horseshit. Treasuring the moments that are smooth and joyful. Working through the problems, one at a time. And, sure, there is a good dose of sitting with yourself and asking: is this okay? am I being loved back? (a question Magic: the Gathering resoundingly answered no to). It is a lot of work trying to think of whether things are healthy or not, whether I should stay or go.
But, I know, right this second, that I'm not leaving.
Right now it's Netrunner. Right now it's the testing group that I'm not really part of, but has acquiesced to giving me a spot helping around while I get remotely okay at the game. Right now it's showing up at Gamescape SF to teach and build whatever community one can over here (in a city which is not truly "doom looping" in any particular sense, but whose prospects were thoroughly poisoned before SARS-CoV-2 was in anyone's breathable air).
Right now, work means figuring out my health enough to get out of the rut it's in. Enough to evaluate ADHD medication, enough to lean into discipline and taking notes, in doing the math very slowly rather than impulse-playing very quickly. Enough to not spike into bad anxiety attacks every time I play a game that feels like having any stakes in.
Right now, indeed, it's figuring out whether I should take the space I already have, whether the effort I'm putting in — incorrectly sporadic, badly erratic, too deep into a confused space no explanation really can lift me out of — is worth it, or even appropriate; if I should carve a learning-focused, lower-level niche in a scene that's full of people who are already so good I, right now, cannot compare. And how I myself can bring in that learning experience, since my learning needs seem to be so much at odds with everyone else's.
Love is work. Broken hearts are work. Broken minds are just as much work: I spent more than twenty years of my life shuffling cards, dreaming to be better, and, as sad as it makes me that I'm not, I can easily spend twenty more.
What else could anyone do, with their limited time, if not put the work in?