Git Gud

Dr. Chris Sanders was awoken from unsettling dreams of pain and humiliation by the unicorn climbing in through his window.

The unicorn proceeded to trip over a table, sending a small assortment of collectible figurines tumbling to the hardwood floor.

“Balls,” muttered the unicorn. “Balls on an uncle-humping chimp.”

“What the hell is going on?” Chris said, fumbling for his smartphone so as to turn on the lights. Unfortunately, the breaker on the power strip that supported his charger had gotten switched off by a carelessly-discarded half-empty twenty-ounce bottle of store-brand Mountain Dew, and his phone could do nothing but display the “plug me in” graphic, helpfully displaying an empty battery indicator and a power cord. It also showed a little lightning bolt, in case you were from the Bronze Age and didn’t understand what power cords were for. By some act of mental gymnastics, Chris summarized that this was a clear victory for Bluetooth home automation.

“Sorry,” said the unicorn, rising to his hind hooves. He was tiny and blue and somewhat rotund, and aside from his signature spiraling horn, did not look much like a unicorn at all. “Just bashed my robot elbow on your table there as I was coming in through the window.”

“I own heavy objects that can be swung and thrown. Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my room?” He paused. “Also, how did you get through the window screen?”

“There was a screen?” said the unicorn, dusting himself off and dislodging one of the smaller of Chris’s Cthulhu Wars game pieces (Spider of Leng) from his entirely synthetic mane. “Welp, guess that would explain that brief moment of resistance and the horrible tearing sound.”

“Wait a second,” Chris said, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. “You’re Baron Mistycorn. From Whimsy.”

“At your friggin’ service.”

“Well, that’s just great.” Chris dropped himself back against his pillows with a muffled thump. “On top of everything else, I’m hallucinating.”

“What? No. Just no.” The unicorn hopped up on the bed next to Chris; or rather, tried to hop up. The actual process was more of an ultimately-successful minute-long struggle for purchase against the side of Chris’s box spring. His objective achieved, the unicorn proceeded to collapse into a wheezing lump on the surface of the mattress. “I am, literally, Baron Mistycorn. Doc Collodi’s original prototype version.”

“Wait. I remember now. Nick said something about you.”

“Nothing good, I’m sure.”

“He said you abandoned your robot body to live in some kind of virtual Whimsyland theme park. He said you were working for some kind of artificially-intelligent girl version of him?”

“That’d be Her Royal Highness, the Princess Aimee. And yes, before you ask, she’s everything you’d expect out of a chick version of Nick Zerhakker. Super lame. Super great with the vidja games. Super obsessed with Whimsy princesses.”

“That wasn’t what I was going to ask. At least while the question of what the hell you’re doing in my room is still outstanding.”

“Man gets right to the point. I can respect that.”

“You just broke into my house. It’s kinda the first thing on my mind.”

“Okay, fine. Here’s the skinny. Remember how you totally screwed the pooch at your little fighting game tournament thing today?”

Chris sat up. “Okay, dude. What the actual hell. You downloaded yourself into a robot body, came all the way to where I live, crawled in through my window, woke me up, and you did all this to remind me how bad I am at video games?”

“Well, yeah,” said Baron Mistycorn. “Some forms of badness are worth revisiting.”

“Screw you,” said Chris, laying back down and turning to face the wall. “Feel free to leave my house at any time. I won’t even bill you for the screen. Just get out and close the window behind you.”

“Judas Priest, grumpy much?”

“Exactly how should I be feeling right now? I just got back from having my butt served to me on a platter by a bunch of snotty little middle school computing clubbers. I took off work and everything to do this. And they weren’t even polite about it. Jesus, what ever happened to respecting your elders?”

“I dunno. Did you ever care about the whole elder-respecting thing when you were a snotty little middle school computing clubber?”

“Not really. That was different.”

“How?”

“I turned thirty, for one thing.”

“Seems legit,” said Baron Mistycorn.

“Seriously, every time one of them said the word ‘scrub’ I wanted to walk over and punch their teeth in. Kids don’t even know their history. I knew scrubs when they were still those little wooden guys in Ocarina of Time.”

“Or a guy that can’t get no love,” offered the Baron, diplomatically. “On account of him hanging out the passenger side of his best friend’s ride, trying to holla at me.”

“‘Git gud, scrub,'” said Chris, adopting an artificially whiny and nasal tone of voice. “Wham. Thousands of dollars of dental bills. Worth it. So worth it. No jury in the world would convict me. ‘Your Honor, just look at this fucking asshat,’ I would say.” Chris shook his head. “I’ve been a gamer for decades.”

“And you still stink.”

“Yes!” said Chris. “How? How is that even possible?”

“Chris Sanders,” said Baron Mistycorn, “you have just taken the red pill. You have taken the first step on the road to understanding the ugly truth about modern gaming. You are beginning to realize that everything you thought you knew about video games is wrong.”

“What are you even talking about?”

“Listen to me,” said the Baron, crawling over to Chris and seizing the man’s face in his tiny hooves. “You. Are. Being. Lied. To.” He dropped Chris’s head back to the pillows. “Big Gaming has peddled you a bill of goods, Dr. Sanders. They have loaded their shooters with auto-aim features. They have renamed the gradients on their difficulty sliders to make you feel like less of a wimp for cranking them down. They have concealed rudimentary gameplay beneath layers of particle effects, elaborately-choreographed fight animations, and sumptuous cutscenes. They have done this to sell you their Big Lie.”

“And that is?”

“That you’re actually good at gaming,” said the Baron. “Fighting games are the last bastion of actual skill in the video game industry. Everything else is horseshit now.” The little unicorn sagged, his shoulders slumping. “Look, I understand. Everyone wants to feel good. Everyone wants that old hit of pride and accomplishment. Everyone likes being a winner. Big Gaming is just giving people what they want. But it isn’t true. And the sooner we break out of the idea that gaming is supposed to be ‘fun,’ the better off all of us will be.”

“Gaming…isn’t supposed to be fun?”

“You are part of the problem, Sanders!” roared Baron Mistycorn. “When that one famous football player scores a field goal, do you think he’s thinking ‘Whee, it’s fun to kick a ball around?'”

“Your knowledge of actual sports is hilariously nonspecific.”

“Five minutes on Wikipedia and you wouldn’t be laughing,” he said. “Don’t get distracted by trivia. Point is, that one guy, what’s-his-face, he doesn’t make that mistake. Just because he’s playing a ‘game’ doesn’t mean he confuses ‘fun’ and ‘demonstrating mastery of a skill via complete domination of his opponent.’ That second thing is what gaming used to be. And that’s what it still can be. With your help.”

Chris screwed his face up. “Suddenly I’m the future of gaming?”

“Yes. And I’m gonna explain how. That fighting game you were playing today, at the tournament.”

“Strifeland,” said Chris. “Unofficial fan-made Whimsy fighter. Hilariously inappropriate. I never got the chance to do the finishing move where Suzy the Skunk gives her opponent rabies and he dies of lockjaw.”

Baron Mistycorn let out a barking laugh. “Yes! Classic. And yet, and yet. Rock-solid underpinnings. Possibly the best-balance of any asymmetrical two-dude fighter in existence.”

“Yeah. No one knows who wrote it. Feels like it was coded by some sort of perfect, Whimsy-obsessed machine aaand it’s your boss, isn’t it.”

“Got it in one.”

“Yeah, that just clicked.”

“The Princess wrote this game, and she’s kept it going for some time now. But she’s giving it up. Says the world is getting shittier and shittier and she needs to devote 100% of her processing cycles to preparing our virtual home to be a safe space for displaced AIs. So this is the important part: she’s offering up the Strifeland source code to the winner of a massive single-elimination tournament, to do with as they please.”

“Okay, but, did you ever maybe stop and think the ‘important part’ is that she’s building a digital ark in advance of some kind of looming catastrophe?”

Baron Mistycorn seemed to try for a dismissive ‘pfft’ noise, but it came out as more of a lip-flapping sputter, on account of him basically being a small cartoon horse. “C’mon, Sanders,” he said. “This is gaming.”

“You want me to compete in a fighting tournament for the code of Strifeland? Why don’t you do it?”

The Baron rolled his eyes. “Don’t get me started. There’s like five reasons. One, I’m officially a vassal of the Princess, and she wants it completely out from under her roof. Two, I’m pretty sure the tournament is open to humans only. Be over in two seconds otherwise, victor being some random AI with a tool-assist script running. That’s not how Aimee wants this to go down. Three, she’s kind of a huge asshole. That last one counts as three reasons, so yeah, my math is solid.”

“No, I get you. Nick’s easily three assholes, so distaff Nick probably is too.”

“So you see my point. Anyway. The Mender-Fairy wants Strifeland, bad. Even now, she’s scouring WhimsyCorp’s entire company directory for the best Strifeland player she can find. If WhimsyCorp brings home this particular bacon, they’re going to make it an official product, with all the bollocksing-up that implies.”

“They want to sell Strifeland? As a product? The game where you can chuck your opponent on the Dragon’s Peak roller coaster and watch them get decapitated by a low tunnel?”

“Yeah. And they’re gonna clean it up and mess with the balance and make it all nice and easy for the Y7 demographic and they’re gonna friggin’ ruin it forever. Be like painting Bob Ross happy little trees all over the Bathers at Asnières.”

“Okay. I assume you just named some guy’s great painting that it would suck to ruin, fine. But there’s a big, outstanding question we haven’t addressed.”

“That being?”

Chris threw his arms wide. “Why me? I stink on toast at this game! You said it yourself. My failure today is worth celebrating.”

“Putting words in my mouth, Sanders. I said it was worth revisiting. That doesn’t mean I came here to mock you. It means it’s worth looking at.” The little blue unicorn fumbled around in some kind of satchel and eventually emerged with a phone and a tiny projector. He shone it at the wall. Instantly, slightly-distorted footage from one of his early matches began flickering across the white plaster. It appeared to be his bout against that braces-wearing redhead who played Cunningham Pig to the exclusion of all other characters, one of his few wins of the day. “Okay, here. So this is you, maining the skunk girl.”

“Suzy. Yes.”

Chris looked on as the weirdly-lithe animated anthropomorphic mustelid executed a complicated series of reverse backflips. It had been a particularly difficult sequence to master, and the significance was apparently not lost on the Baron. He chortled and pointed with one hoof. “See? See? Friggin’ brilliant, man.”

“Thanks?” said Chris, who had not entirely adapted to being suddenly complimented by the abusive little unicorn. On the projection, Suzy unleashed a series of disabling musk cloud attacks, rendering her opponent choking and helpless. A relentless flurry of uppercuts followed. Cunningham was knocked into the murky waters of the Barbados Pirates dark ride, whereupon he was promptly butchered by skeletal cutlass-wielding ghosts. Suzy blew a kiss at the camera, the curve of her upsettingly-human breasts distorting the lettering on her violet “Eat, Spray, Love” t-shirt, and the narrator (a pitch-perfect recreation of Deems Taylor) declared her the winner. The picture blacked out.

“Flawless, man,” said the Baron, his voice thick. “Just flawless.”

Chris narrowed his eyes. “Are you crying?”

“Naw,” said the Baron, sniffling. “Just venting water out of my eyes for stress relief purposes. It’s a robot thing.” He wiped his face with the back of one hoof. “So. After this, you started to suck. Can you tell me why?”

“Well, yeah,” said Chris, a tightness building in his chest. “This is about when the kids started throwing the word ‘scrub’ around. Said it was cheap to spam the musk spray over and over again. I tried to lay off the spray move, and I got my butt handed to me, so I guess my fundamentals aren’t up to snuff.”

“Sanders.”

“I mean, if the only reason you’re winning is because you’re using one cheeseball move over and over again, it probably means that—”

“Sanders!” the Baron shouted. “Do you even frigging see what you’re doing? You’re blaming yourself for their lack of skill!”

“Yeah, but if there’s a move in the library no one can defend against—”

“Quarter circle forward, quick, strong, quarter circle back, quick, strong,” the Baron rattled off.

“Huh?”

“Cunningham’s super combo break can do it. That’s just one of the eight ways to get out of a spray lock. Lot of people don’t know that. Those kids you let beat you today didn’t know that. Suzy’s musk cloud attack isn’t unbalanced and impossible to counter; it’s that people don’t know how to do it.”

“Yeah, but. Fighting against someone who’s doing the same cheap move over and over again? Someone like—”

“Someone like you, back when you were actually winning.”

“Someone like me! Yes! Fighting against someone like me isn’t…”

“Say it,” said Baron Mistycorn, his voice low and dangerous.

“Well, it isn’t fun,” Chris finished, suddenly finding himself unable to meet the unicorn’s gaze.

“And there it is.” Baron Mistycorn flopped down on the bed. “Chris Sanders, is that move a possible move within the code of the game?”

“Well, yes. Of course. By definition.”

“And was there any ad hoc rule laid out at the beginning of the tournament that prohibited it?”

“No, but—”

“No,” said the Baron. “It was a legal move that you were intimidated into not using.” He shook his head. “The scrub is a dangerous creature, Dr. Sanders. He makes up rules where none exist, then enforces them through social pressure rather than by actual authority. When anyone dares to challenge the scrub, he projects his identity onto them, using that shame as a tool of ultimate leverage. Truly the worst of all humans.”

“So, like, serial murderers—”

“The worst of all humans,” Baron Mistycorn said, slamming his hooves together decisively. “You aren’t the scrub, Sanders, but you were in danger of becoming one. You’ve already proven that they’ve infected you with their way of thinking. Had I not come here tonight to intervene, you would have completely internalized it and started preaching that same message to the next person you played against. Thus does the infection spread. Scrubhood is a flippin’ pandemic. Serious Walking Dead-level crap. I reached you just in time.” He sighed, his eyes going distant. “Others weren’t so lucky. People I cared about. Doomed forever to be shadowy half-gamers and filthy casuals.”

He sat up, bringing himself back to the moment. “Strifeland has the power to save people like that. Its powerful, delicate complexity can bring them back from the brink. It can make people understand that there is always, always a way out of whatever cheapass move your opponent throws at you. It’s all there for you to learn. But it’s in danger. What Strifeland needs right now is a hero, a dude who is unafraid to use whatever unfair-seeming insane troll combo he can find in order to win, a dude unafraid of the jeers of his opponents, a dude unshackled from the tyranny of ‘fun.’ A dude who will do anything, within the rules, to win.”

His eyes focused, gimlet-like, on Chris. “Chris Sanders,” he said, “are you a bad enough dude to rescue Strifeland?”

“Sure,” said Chris. “I’ve got a little spare time.”

The Baron threw his arms around Chris’s neck in a wordless hug. The only sound for about a minute was the sound of the little unicorn thumping Chris on the back in a manly fashion.

Eventually Chris pushed the Baron away. “So, what happens now? You teach me to ‘git gud,’ right?”

“Pah,” said the Baron. “The uncultured words of a scrub. ‘Gud’ is not a concrete state of being you can achieve, Sanders. It’s like the ‘war on drugs.’ You will never achieve the victory of getting ‘gud’ because ‘gud’ is not defined. No one should strive to ‘git gud.'”

“So, what? Instead, I should ‘git…'”

“…better.” said the Baron. “Or, as Michelangelo, an extremely bad dude of the Renaissance put it: ancora imparo. ‘Always improving.’ You feeling like shit about being in your thirties? This confirmed fag said it at eighty-seven.”

“You’re as weirdly knowledgeable about fine art as you are weirdly ignorant about football.”

“I am a thing of hidden depths,” said Baron Mistycorn. “Just like Strifeland is. And if you come with me, I will show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

“Okay, but,” said Chris. “It’s the middle of the night on a Thursday. Can it wait for the weekend or something?”

Baron Mistycorn thought about this for a moment.

“Yeah, yeah, sure. That’s a fair request.”

“Okay.”

“So,” said the Baron. “Can I crash on your couch for a few days?”