Rap Sheet, Chatter’s last seven PTQs: 9th on tiebreaks, Finals, Finals, Top-8, Top-8, Top-4, 9th on tiebreaks. Oh, and a GP top-32 somewhere in there. But guess who isn’t qualified, guess who isn’t as of yet going to even start thinking about leis, tropical fruits, and slack-key guitars?
Predictable answer. But just hear that tone, the begging for confirmation, the idle woe and sympathy-seeking. My mom, to whom I never give nearly enough credit, has remarked to me recently that a “sense of desperation” has pervaded my writing recently, has crept in somewhere deep and manifested itself across seemingly every outlet. Magic columns. Fiction. Correspondence. The letters I send to friends and family back home. Near the locus of my anxiety, potentially its cause, potentially its effect, lurks a budding and powerful frustration at my Magical performance as of late.
I’ve mentioned several times that, in Magic or otherwise, I almost never grew angry at anything before I came to Malaysia. But almost immediately after I arrived here I started feeling it. The frustration, the slow but swelling heaviness in my stomach that deadened my senses. There really isn’t a word for what I’m trying to describe. It’s like intense cognitive focus coupled with sheer intolerance for sensory input, if that makes any sense at all. It’s not really anger, because anger implies some kind of outrage, some utter lack of self-control. And it’s not really frustration, because “frustrated” connotes some amount of being-deprived, which is not necessarily true either. I mean, when you play a game, you either win or you lose. You know that when you sit down. And so a loss doesn’t automatically imply that there was some win out there that was taken from you, that was already yours but for the interference of some variable, that had your name on it only to be stolen away by some fiend, some thief. For lack of a better term, I’m going to call it Tilt.
To be clear, though, I’m not talking about everyday run-of-the-mill poker Tilt. I’m not talking about something that hits you and stunts your gameplay, which, like a gadfly, tics away at your concentration and annoys. I mean something more fundamental. The kind of tilt that follows a bad run, something that starts to creep out of the game atmosphere and hang like dead weight across other avenues of life. The kind of tilt that makes you upset – that doesn’t necessarily prevent you from enjoying other things, that doesn’t dominate any one hemisphere, but nevertheless occupies your attention more than residue from a little innocuous hobby card game probably should. Because it’s hit me. Because I don’t like it. I don’t like who I am when I’m dealing with it, when I’ve become the guy that makes other players not want to come to tournaments. Deriding people, their decks, their strategies, rolling my eyes at ‘yet another misplay’ as I topdeck land after land after land. Being kind of a tool. As the season has rolled on I’ve noticed its effects magnifying, to the point where after yet another winless PTQ top-8 I often find myself unable or unwilling to do anything for several hours, fuming and brooding.
This is obviously not healthy.
I have absolutely no idea why Tilt can come and wash over us like it does, but I will say it can come just as easily from outside the realm of Magic as it can from within. One of my best friends, a former writer for Vogue who will begin pursuing a Psychology Ph.D. in the fall, told me recently that she had been tilting over her inability to find a job. She’s been unemployed for maybe a month tops, but her corresponding frustration with herself has put a strain on her relationship with her boyfriend. She found herself lashing out at him out of nowhere, overreacting to the smallest, most inconsequential provocations. Recognized quickly the triggers, saw easily the injustice and irrationality of her reaction, the unfairness she brought on to a guy who is basically an innocent bystander – but has nevertheless been unable to stop.
The American educational process is an extremely achievement-oriented, feedback-oriented, carrot-and-stick system. This is not a condemnation. But I feel like one of the issues that arose when I came to Malaysia was the tremendous lack of any conventional metrics of success. No perfect grades, no glowing performance reviews, no easy ranked-and-tiered competition. In many ways, it’s one of the best things that could have ever happened to me. I had always found myself very self-sufficient, very self-aware, but I came to realize that seeking some kind of confirmation for the validity one’s own behavior was one of those human inevitabilities that never quite disappears, only dissipates. Having devoted a good chunk of my life to the seeking-out of superlative people, I can confidently assert that the problem only escalates in proportion to one’s own talent. For the girl I mentioned above, ‘winning’ had always been landing incredible jobs, and she had always won. For Magic, it’s easier: are you actually, literally, winning tournaments?
The trouble comes, of course, when the winning stops.
It’s not necessarily the lack of winning that will put you on tilt, though. I feel like it’s very first-level to make that mistake, to avoid taking the observation further. To just think “oh, well, he hates to lose.” Not that some people don’t hate to lose, of course, and it is absolutely vital when your momentum does stop to take a step back and think. Whenever you reach a setback, it’s crucial to conduct an honest self-assessment to figure out what the problem is. Are you actually making any mistakes? Is there something – maybe something fundamental – that’s holding you back?
Tilt, though, comes when you’ve made one of these assessments and determined that no, you actually are doing everything you can do correctly. This is one of the reasons, actually, why I think those kind of “Think/Act/Be Positive” campaigns have limited applicability to systems inside which there exists moderate-to-high variance. Allowing ‘no excuses,’ or whatever, has tremendous utility for most people because it removes Bruce-like inhibitors from their cognitive framework. But applying such a metric to something like Magic can be actively counter-productive, because it assumes perfect effort leads to performance causality when there isn’t any, and so you start changing potentially-correct behavior because it hasn’t been getting results inside a very small sample size.
The reason, I think, that we start to tilt so hard in these situations is that – and I’ll say again specifically for Americans, because my experience abroad has put me into contact with people who rarely exhibit this kind of reaction – it’s very unfamiliar cognitive territory to watch effort go unrewarded. It’s like our minds don’t know what to do with the sensory input. Think of how revealing it is that the rallying cry when some opponent does something totally idiotic only to go on and win anyway is “No Justice.” It suggests that inherent to the notion of goodness, of justice, of ‘right and wrong,’ involves a correlation between some objective level of performance and its corresponding reward, even though we knowingly participate in a game with very well-documented dynamics of luck. This from the nation whose very success metric is largely embodied by individuals like Mark Cuban who very obviously obtained ‘achievement’ through what amounts to the real-world equivalent of a tremendous mise. It’s like we subscribe to the rules willingly only to reject them when it’s convenient, and even though all of this sounds so silly as I sit here typing it I know that if I don’t top-8 this weekend in Singapore I will want to go stand in traffic all the same.
The other thing to bear in mind, too, is how subjective the success-metrics we construct really are. In many ways – and I have fortunately (for my own psychological well-being) realized this for awhile – the fact that we occasionally tilt so hard over perceived ‘failings’ is facilitated by the things we consider to be ‘failings’ in the first place. That is, our failings are themselves superlative successes, achievements on their own, and the real failure lies not in our actions but the way we perceive them in our own brain. What triggered this article was that I’ve come within an inch of qualifying eight separate times only to have victory snatched from my grasp at the last second – but, framed another way, I’ve virtual-top-8’d every PTQ in which I’ve played since November 2008, and picked up cash and Pro Points at a GP along the way. For aforementioned girl, a month’s worth of ‘unemployment’ only means that at worst she’ll have to live off freelance writing and ‘work-to-pay-the-bills’ for four whole months before being shipped a grad-school stipend starting August. Man, hard life. Likewise, I’d wager that most tournament Magic players have fewer lifetime PTQ top-8s than the number of top-8s I’ve accumulated in the last six months – not that such a statistic means anything, but you get what I am saying – and probably want to slap me for complaining about it.
Eyes, beholders, etc.
I’m going to outline four characteristics of things that make us tilt, because although up until this point mere awareness hasn’t really helped me out too much, I think that understanding the roots of our emotional development will help us, in the end, control it.
1) The more you want something, the more you tilt
This one is probably the most obvious – gee, when you feel strongly about something, you start to feel strongly about it – but I think it’s important to recognize because it links two disparate yet similar forces: strong desires and strong feelings. It’s very easy for one to morph abruptly into the other. What’s the Eliot line: “mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.” Our wants and our feelings are intertwined, and just as the roots can be stirred, invigorated, they can also be sapped as those wants remain dry and distant.
Want also conveys value, and lurking very shallow beneath the surface of this whole ‘tilt’ dialogue is of course the value judgment that comes with starved success. We want things because we believe something important can be expressed by attaining them – and that we value the attributes of the kind of person capable of that success. For a successful professional athlete: driven, strong, talented, committed, able. For a successful Magic player: intelligent, smart, driven again, talented again, well-connected. And if we don’t attain those things: yes we know we know we know that play was correct, because when we did that he was only drawing to two outs but if we did this other thing he could have ripped any burn spell including like even Mogg Fanatic and Keldon Marauders, and but he drew to his two-outer and hit it anyway and really I mean who plays Bathe in Light and boards it in against Wizards how dumb and stupid yeah but just so just one second so what if we’d just etc. But maybe, says that voice, that shoulder-perched imp with occasionally little red horns and a little red pitchfork. Successful people are winners. Successful people are smart and driven and talented and everyone likes them. And guess what? You’re not winning, are you. Tee hee tee hee tee hee.
2) The more you need something, the more you tilt.
The unfortunate thing about a lot of different kinds of success is that once you start climbing the mountain it’s very easy to see the summit. You quickly plot out the path you want to use to get there. If it weren’t for an arduous and long trek through this desolate Tibetan pass and what you swear was seriously some kind of Yeti etc. you’d never even be at this point, but now that peak is just so close you can see it, it is right there. The peak is the wanting, but that entire journey to the base of the hill and the, like, parka you’re wearing, and the expensive spikey snowshoes, and that cool little hand-powered flashlight that you squeeze a few times to make it emit ten thousand (hundred-thousand?) candles’ worth of light – all of that is the need. And the need is legitimate. You’re not going any further without all of that.
The higher up you get in any endeavor, the more difficult it is to simply tread water. One of the most difficult realities for Anna when she left big-firm-law lifestyle was a kind of drawn-out process of accommodation. Man, those suits were expensive. Man, that BlackBerry actually belonged to my company, not me, and how on earth did I ever arrange a schedule beforehand? Man, that condo was huge. And hard to sell. And, um. Expensive. But it wasn’t readily-evident until much later how much fuel a ‘high-powered’ image required just to stay afloat. It’s similar Magically. I’d feel extremely stupid sitting here every week trying to help y’all get better at Magic if I wasn’t able to consistently produce results myself. And now that I’ve recently been able to land a solid testing group for virtually every Pro Tour, believe me, I feel ridiculous all of a sudden not being able to pull my weight.
There was a very telling moment at GP: Singapore when Blisterguy came over to a group I was hanging out with to do some ‘quick-interviews.’ I, being a one-time go-to guy for all things media-coverage, as well as an all-around attention-whore, darted over and asked what he wanted to talk about, sort of smiled prettily and crossed my legs and got ready to, you know, chatter.
“Um. Actually I am kind of, um. Looking for Sam and BK?”
I just did my taxes yesterday, and across the 2008 calendar year I made, between StarCityGames.com and actual cash Magic earnings, roughly $4,000 in good ol’ Uncle Sam earnings. This is no tremendous chunk of change, but is also not too shabby for a full-time-student-slash-government-employee who was preparing to jaunt off to Asia for what he assumed would be an off-year. So continued success at Magic is a very real part of my financial well-being. It’s a legitimate need, at this point. And once that is jeopardized, we tilt even harder.
3) The more you love something, the more you tilt.
I fully recognize that love occupies some weird middle ground between want and need that does not exist between the two extremes, but rather along this like diagonally-inclined Z-axis somewhere in the haze between two planes. It is More Than The Sum Of Its Parts. I am sure that y’all are fully aware of this by now, but I absolutely love the game of Magic. I mean more like I love my parents or I love my girlfriend than I love those new shoes you’re wearing where did you get them, or I love the way will.i.am says “air” in that song. I don’t just mean I love the places that the game has taken me, or I love the people it’s allowed me to meet. I mean there’s something about the game that unlocks something inside of me I wouldn’t have been able to experience or express otherwise. When I was playing High Tide at a GPT for Columbus, I experienced a cognitive euphoria that has so far been in my experience unparalleled, felt that my brain was doing truly beautiful, magnificent things, felt fortunate that I was the kind of organism capable of experiencing this kind of thought process. And like something loved, it’s wrenched itself deep into my psyche, to the point where I’ll wake up assigning mana costs to inanimate objects completely out of context, where (like Ervin Tormos) I’ll fail to turn left at an intersection because my Morphling is untapped.
I am sure you can see the parallels between this and other things-that-tilt, whether they be relationships or jobs or sports or hobbies or creative pursuits or whatever. When emotions mix and intertwine they bleed over into one another, and the bleeding and blending makes no sense, just as it makes no sense that a couple can go from seeing something so superlative in one another that it is worthy of love, to seeing qualities in the other that are so debased and defiled that the very mention of their name evokes literal illness. Emotions demand means of expression and – that may be it right there, actually. The level of Magical dialogue I undergo here is just on a different level than when you’re with people like Sam Black, Brian Kowal, Adrian Sullivan. Magic is just perceived differently. And without that same sort of consumptive experience, that emotion becomes vetted in results, in my ability to participate in the game’s highest level. It transmutes, in a way, into something entirely separate.
4) The more you expect something, the more you tilt.
I have, fortunately, never felt that I was entitled to a match win because of some perceived, abstract measure of merit. There’s no such thing as deserving a win in Magic. As I mentioned earlier, we accept chance as inherent to the nature of the game, and there’s no point denying that to try and craft some notion of skill-exclusive performance independent of that. But – and I am not saying this categorically, but rather specifically right now with regard to the piloting of my seventy-five-card list of the Mono-U Wizards deck against any random opponent in this, the 2009 pre-Alara Reborn Extended format – I would expect to win. As in, I would bet overwhelmingly on myself, even as a distant observer. And so therefore, when those expectations are confounded, the harder the reality is to digest.
…
I will admit, too, that in my personal case the tremendous tilt may be due to something as simple as the subtly-perceived emotional distress that comes with existing at the center of two incompatible, distinct, mutually-exclusive universes. I am a stopper in an hourglass whose hemispheres are filled with Malaysian and American sand, jostled between the two, seeing only one at a time. Here and there a grain slips through, a Magician at a Grand Prix, an old friend come to visit. But the longer I’m here – the more I come to love this place, the people who have been almost incomprehensibly good to me – I yet realize that on some fundamental level it’s not mine. It’s Arif Kamaruddin, who even now is probably reading this on his lunch break, calling me out on a ‘-la’-emphasis at GP: Singapore, a “That didn’t make any sense there… noob!” that made me realize, well, no it didn’t. The constant ever-present prepositional: “… for a white guy.” The askew glances cast my direction, when discussing Malaysia’s political situation with members of the NGO community, when, meaning “Malaysia,” I say words like “we’re,” “us.”
Before this past weekend’s PTQ, a bunch of the ManaWerx Magic crew had hit up a club to celebrate this guy Jia’s birthday. The times were good, the company was better, but heading out around 3pm we encountered a slight problem: our ride, Sean, had his car-clicker crippled by the rain. This meant he couldn’t turn off the alarm, meaning he couldn’t start the car. Cue two or three hours worth of fumbling and misadventures across which every conceivable obstacle could have arisen. I am talking the most random twists of happenstance: my friend Victor, generous enough to finally just give Tim and I a ride home across town, getting his credit-card physically stuck in the reader at a gas station, eaten, rendering him correspondingly unable to pump gas, correspondingly unable to go anywhere at all. I am brewing up a veritable storm cloud at this point, PTQ merely four hours away, sweaty, exhausted, zero sleep, when all of a sudden a certain song pops on the radio.
As with most things about our relationship, my girlfriend is an exceptionally, exceptionally talented singer, while I am exactly good enough to get by without totally embarrassing myself. As such, we’re rather fond of karaoke, and she’s always on the lookout for potential duets. A couple months ago she sends me “Lucky,” by Jason Mraz, as a possibility, and I sort of laugh it off: no way I can hit anything up there in that range. But it’s a kind of nice, catchy pop song, the kind of song that’s good at closing out end-of-season television finales, and it’s the song that starts playing at the end of this series of epic fails outside of Victor’s car at 5am on a Malaysian Sunday morning. And I’m not one to quote lyrics for meaning or for value, not one to try and wrap up my entire situation inside somebody else’s words, but for once the sentiment was entirely appropriate, might have been exactly what I needed to hear at that point in time, might just be at least part of the key to getting myself out of this emotional dissonance into which I find myself falling more and more:
– Lucky I’m in love with my best friend.
– Lucky to have been where I have been.
– Lucky to be coming home again.
Lucky enough to win the PTQ? Well, not this time.
But, let’s be real. Lucky. So so so so so incredibly, beautifully lucky.
Zac