You Never Enjoy a Game

“Now I know how my brother feels when he says how all his friends are so much more successful than him,” was the worst thing I’ve ever said.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” No, you weren’t supposed to apologize!

We were walking together, around November 2024, right by the Michigan Union, perhaps heading to class. Countless times, I said, “I’m so proud of you!” but only once did I let that venom escape my soul. We were talking about money. I should be no one to complain—thanks to a combination of my high academic performance in high school and my family’s low income, I got a full ride scholarship to one of the Big Ten colleges, so I was living really good actually—but did she just say she’d make more money over the summer than I’d ever made cumulatively my whole life? I wondered when I started caring about that stuff.

In order to score an internship at Roblox—perhaps one of a computer science (CS) student’s biggest cataclysmically vaunted daydream—my best friend Skye continuously threw herself at the grindstone, turning herself into a dustbunny via Leetcode and other ferocious job-prep tools for who-knows-how-long, culminating in a threatening decision. We planned a sushi dinner at Totoro for Skye’s birthday, but when the recruiter asked Skye if that exact day was a good time for a call, she accepted, despite my pleading to set her foot down. It paid off for her.

I didn’t want to believe I had to sacrifice myself so ultimately to achieve. I’d often revel in life fluff, kissing complacency goodnight every night and befriending that black void I saw as my future. I gladly bare-minimized getting A’s (or A-’s or that one B of shame), ignoring the holes bitten through my chest and all the dustbunnies with holes they bit through their own chests. With the way my peers like Skye mutilate themselves for work, I needed to feel satisfied, yet evidently by what I said, I wasn’t.

That 5th semester, that moment of hearing about the “more,” sunk my heart and chilled me and broiled me, and even though I tried smothering those insecurities, I essentially told my best friend that I despise her for succeeding—I wondered, “Do I feel that threatened?”

In high school, I had defined goals: get the highest AP CS A exam score, achieve a Distinguished Academic Student award, matriculate into a prestigious college, and get a higher GPA than Eliot. He was my benchmark, and I believed I was his; I thwarted Eliot’s academic advances on me, and he thwarted me back in a symbiotic ouroboros of thwartage. We were rivals.

Eliot and I took AP CS P together. The class was perhaps 20 strong, and while our teacher marched our progress forward like an autoscrolling video game, there was no invisible wall stopping us from dragging each other for a roadtrip to the end of the course in half the time.

Our progress bars for the course were neck and neck the whole way. When I was a lesson behind, I got serious for a week, and when I was a lesson ahead, I had to watch out for when Eliot inevitably caught back up. For all I cared, we were the only two people in the class.

We finished the final lesson with half the semester to spare, and Eliot said, “So now what do we do during this block?”

“Guess we just get to be silly for a little over an hour each day,” I said.

“Oh! How about I bring in a board game called Catan? You’d probably like it.”

More chances to shove him into the dirt? “Ooh, I’m game. What’s it about?”

I can’t talk about rivals without mentioning Pokémon, though. In every mainline Pokémon game, the player character has at least one “rival” who they team up with and fight with, both with the goal of becoming the Pokémon champion, but my favorite example is Hop from Pokémon Sword and Shield, an energetic, cool-coat-wearing, young boy.

I first played Pokémon Shield when I was a sophomore in high school, and even though Hop says, “I've watched every match that Lee's [the Pokémon champion] ever had! I've read every book and magazine he left behind at home, too! I know exactly what to do in order to win!” the player in video games always wins in the end, so Hop always loses. Hop says, “The sting of defeat and joy of victory... I guess going through both is the key to the two of us getting stronger, right?” but all he did was lose—how could he get better by only losing?

15-year-old I thought Hop was a loser and I was a winner. I, being the player character, beat Hop every battle, and I scored near-perfect every exam, and I believed I out-performed Eliot every competition, but how could I get better by thinking I’m only winning?

Lunging into freshman year of college, clutching nothing but friends Eliot and Warren who matriculated with me, clutching not even expectations or goals, clutching only hopes, I felt dangerously content, walking in and out of examination rooms thinking I was the best because I could get A’s in 100-level courses. I had no reference point for what high-achieving people did in college—no bachelors-holding parent or college-attending older sibling to look at, so my mind began searching for anyone important to compare to.

Warren was a mutual half-friend of Eliot and me, whom we loved talking to inside of high school classes but never went so far as to play board games together. He always seemed busy ensuring his perfect 4.0 and playing trombone in the marching band, but I figured it’d be good to touch base with him; maybe it was finally time to board game with him.

I texted Warren something like, “Yo, we haven’t seen each other much since classes started, can I see you over at eq?” and before long, I was outside near East Quadrangle, down for some real talk and board games at Warren’s catacomb.

“Well hello there,” Warren said.

“Mm, yeah hi! It’s nice to see you!” I join him as he resumes his speedwalk. “So what do you wanna—!” I said, “...We are going to your dorm, yeah?”

Baby-blue skies and birdsongs juxtaposed my gut feelings as we approached a cozied brown complex erected some time ago: doors dragging and windows towering. Then, we sat in a disproportionately-tall-for-its-width, desked room. Then, dust levitated.

Then I asked, “Wait, why can’t you show me your room? I thought that was what we planned.”

“Well my roommate is home, and he tends to be quite noisy,” Warren said, “Let’s just stay in this room where it’s nice and quiet, wouldn’t you say?”

Only then did my slouching shoulders signal true sitting: “Okay, alright, sure. So what do we do?”

“Well I was going to do flashcards for Spanish.” He pulls out a stack of handwritten, white index cards.

I said, “Oh.” I said it low. The rest of my emotions I didn’t allow to escape; my heart already barricaded my ears and self-worth with cold bricks so Warren’s attack couldn’t affect me too greatly. How dare I want to do anything but work, and how dare he for wanting to do work.

Was this all he was? Someone who trades friend time for flashcard time? What a threatening prospect—I’ve got to have a future even though I don’t do that, I thought, and so I choked on my frustration and left early. I deliberately didn’t message Warren again for the rest of the semester, and I never saw him again.

Warren's work ethic and ambition insulted my own, even if we were in the exact same spot of taking intro courses our freshman year. We could have been rivals ala me and high school Eliot, but while Eliot’s advances were challenges, for some reason Warren’s advances were threats. When I think back to my relationship with Warren, I think back to my lack of ambition in early college: my dangerous contentment.

I was kinda like Hop in that situation, right after he and the player won their first league battle at the Grass Gym in the town of Turffield. After another loss handed to him, Hop says, “We both got ourselves the same Grass Badge, so how come you're so much stronger?!” Warren and I both got ourselves the same high school and university, so how come he’s so much more ambitious?! Although Hop said, “Seems I've got to train even harder from now on,” and wouldn’t give up, I gave up competing with Warren.

I interviewed a CS professor of mine, Emily Graetz, about their experience and perspectives on rivalry. My main curiosity going in was if a professor had a different perspective than a student, but I found myself relating more and more to them as they shared their story.

Professor Graetz said how in high school, they also had a sort of friendly rivalry—always comparing exam scores and other metrics, but Graetz saw theirself as the more-frequently-winning “top dog.” Graduate college came, and they entered a class where everyone seemed to know exactly what was up except them. When faced with either grinning and bearing the comparing theirself to others or dropping the class, they marked their limits and backed off, emphasizing how nobody can know if that was the right decision or not.

Stories such as Professor Graetz’s highlight comparison’s ruthless dichotomy: it can cultivate orchids of growth or wilt wills, but why does it cause one over the other? What’s to blame? When did I cross the Rubicon?

Eliot turned his desk backwards to face mine and plopped Catan on the edge between our two manilla-colored desks and said, “Alright, so basically the goal of the game is to collect resources so you can build the best settlement.”

While I did pick up the concepts quickly, there was no way I was winning against “the iron wall” as he called it, eventually blocking half the board from me with his roads. He probably leaned back in his chair with his arms raised in smug, “get hecked up, loser!” triumph once the game was decided.

“You!” I said.

“Yep, all me!” Eliot responded.

“No wh-? I mean how dare you! Oh you, I was so close to crushing your hopes and dreams and now I have to sit through your victory!” After more banter about my loss, I decided I would silence him by crushing him and bathing in his tears the next game.

Although, my goals were never about the game. I never thought, “Oh, I want to be a master of Catan: the greatest cattle sorceress and wheat enslaver around!” Instead, I thought, “Oh, I want to shove it in my buddy’s smug little face,” and that went for high school in general, too. If I worked faster than Eliot then that was fast enough, and if I scored a higher GPA than Eliot then it was high enough. If I lost a battle, then it was only more reason I had to blow him to smithereens the next time: to wipe that lovable cretin of his pride! Losing my first game of Catan to Eliot was fuel to my vengeance fire.

Although there’s a certain joy to losing—an elusive, acquired taste. Enjoying winning is to enjoying losing as providing examples is to providing counterexamples, and the board game Uncle Chestnut’s Table Gype is my favorite counterexample. Think Chinese checkers but with Mario Party-esque random screwing your friends over.

I was hit up over Discord VC by three of my friends, one of which being Eliot,

“So do you got your account?" Eliot said.

“Uh huh. ParcheesiPro1337.”

“Oh my gosh Marcella. Ok sure buddy. Cool name.” He created an invite for me and our other two.

Those three had already learned yesterday without me, knowing the rules infinitely more than I did. Perhaps they could teach me well, I thought. I alone analyzed the alien board for the first time: why were there quotes on each of the four sides? It was no matter, for this avant-garde board of 32 colorful, sigiled dice was my playground. “So how do I play?”

I entered that game with every expectation of losing. Assuming we all had the same skill level, I had a 25% chance at most. Then take into account how everyone else has played once before and that Eliot beat me at my first game of Catan and that percentage dwindles more and more, but despite the odds, I dropped my eighth piece off at the opposite end of the board and claimed first.

“Wait, what the heck?” Eliot grunted feigned anger, “This! Isn’t! Fair!”

“Nah dude you all were just focusing too much on getting fedora pieces while I’m the one who realized the flames are the best.”

“Grr. Boo. Get off the stage!” Eliot continued, “That’s it, next time you’re going down.”

Next time I did not go down. Nor did I the time after that; I was undefeated, but winning the game was so fun I kept risking my title to play some more, boasting more each increment of my win streak. I didn’t pay attention at the time, but one of those quotes on the board said, “You never enjoy a game till you enjoy being beaten at the game.”

“Y’know Marcella’s in the lead and like, like she always wins right?” Eliot said in the middle of some Gype.

“Un-de-feated bay-bee!” I answered.

“C’mon Yonny,” Eliot said to our third, “What if you like, kept a piece in your home row so she has no chance of winning this time? That’d be funny.”

“Hmmm, y’know what?!” Yonny said, “That’d be… That’d be kinda funny? Yeah it would.”

“What? Heyyy, no! You won’t actually do that, will you?”

On Yonny’s turn, he moved a piece backwards.

“What?! You’re gonna throw to let Eliot win?”

Eliot said, “Yessss!! Y’know this is just kinda what you get for being so mean, Marcella, ya know that?”

I pouted—they had me pinned and straitjacketed while I wept at Eliot’s slow, piece-by-piece, undeserved-yet-funny win. “No, my perfect win rate!”

“Yeah um, I’m just better than you. Get wrecked.”

Something about seeing Yonny’s sacrifice for Eliot’s klutzy trot to the winners row made this response seem appropriate: “Wait, dang you’re so right. That was just a li’l mistake on my part, eh?”

My first game, I expected failure but received victory, yet even though that last game I expected victory but received failure, I laughed more. I loved my friends, and at that moment I truly enjoyed the game for the first time.

As Hop and the player get closer to challenging the Pokémon champion and Hop keeps losing battles to his rival, the player, I feel more and more sympathy for him. Before taking on the 4th gym in the Pokémon league, Hop’s dismayed that he feels weak for always losing, and after losing again, he laments, “My strategy goes right to pot when I've got all these bad thoughts running through my head… Hrmmm... I tried switching my team members in and out to max out their potential in every matchup, but... We just couldn't get it together somehow... Maybe that's why I'm still so weak...”

Pained Hop can’t help but mope at his defeats, and I can’t blame him: his goal in life, as he’s said nearly every time you encounter him, is to beat his brother, the Pokémon champion, and become a Pokémon master: losing is just an unsolicited threat to that goal.

I’ve always yearned to extend the joy of losing board games to a joy of losing real life competition like applications, scoring lower grades than my peers, and having less ambition than my peers, but in real life, sucking feels real bad and has consequences. When Warren one-upped my efforts, I couldn’t help but mope at my defeat like Hop, and when Skye earned her Roblox internship, I couldn’t help but read it as a threat: “Your dream of being a CS master is mine!”

Senior year of high school, freshly adult Eliot and I wanted to take AP calculus, but an email told us there wasn’t enough student interest in it, meaning no Charlotte High School teachers would teach us. Chances are, we were complaining about it during lunch while playing Super Smash Bros Ultimate. “Can you believe not enough people wanna take calc? Other semesters got to take it, but not us! Why’s the school so mean?”

Eliot responded, “I know right! Just- ugh! And now we gotta take it through like this dumb online school?”

“Michigan Virtual High School. MVHS.” It rolled the tongue, at least.

“Like why do I have to pay for nobody else wanting to take calculus?”

I say, “Guess that just means we’re better than everyone else, huh.”

“Dang I guess so.”

Who else would have taken that course? I thought of another friend: “But it’s crazy that not even Warren wanted to take it.” I couldn’t believe he was just okay with not being the best. Did he not feel as if his entire life’s purpose was under attack by his friends taking the most advanced course you could take at Charlotte High School?

If Eliot had taken calculus without me in high school, there would have been no chance I could convince him I’m better than he—while that wasn’t the only reason I took calculus, not wanting to fall behind my rival was a huge reason to take calculus. I needed to prove to him that I was the master of high school, not him!

Day one of the new semester rolls around and we head to what I could only describe as a babysitting classroom—most people there were taking online courses because they were delinquants who couldn’t pass core classes the first go around, thought still-child-yet-adult me. The room was white, windowless, and crowded, but only three of us seemed to be there for anything other than retaking courses: Eliot and I sat next to each other, and as we’re navigating this whole MVHS thing, a smiling, plucky, blonde boy sees us and says, “Are you two doing calculus too?”

“Oh, yeah,” I figured Eliot would appreciate my answering. I wondered who this mysterious guy I’d never seen before was.

“Oh, psh, phew! It’s so nice I’m not the only one here taking calculus!” he said, “Ah, I’m Adrian P. Are you two seniors?”

Adrian P… My mind unearthed some ancient knowledge from a few days ago, “Yeah, you’re?” The room felt hot, and I didn’t tell him he was semi-notorious for being super “smart.”

He answered, “Ah, I’m still just a junior.”

Finally, that got Eliot talking more: “Oh wow, a junior?! In calc AB?”

“I was like ehhh… why not? I heard it’s hard, though.”

The guy’s initials are literally A.P.; meanwhile, my initials are M.H. for meathead. Why didn’t I take calc last year? I probably could’ve, I figured, if I knew they’d let me. I probably could’ve, I kept to myself as secret. I couldn’t believe that I had already fallen behind—not behind my rival, but behind in becoming the master of Charlotte High School! My face grew hot, embarrassed in front of my rival, no less, as Adrian P. was “P” for “proof” that I’m invalid.

This Adrian “Proof” became someone I hated: hardly worth my thoughts—just some skill insult to ignore. At any opportunity, I looked for some comparison to make that proved I was actually better, first by telling myself I’m cooler because I had my friend Eliot in the class together while he was all alone.

Eliot, Adrian P, and I sat in a triangle at our babysitting room, week by week, grinding away learning limits at infinity, derivatives, and so on. Our course was online, self-paced, and allowed for lots of free time if you used your time well. Sometimes Eliot and I would just mess around all class, browsing the internet or playing board games, and our progress would skew slightly.

“Guess who just made it to integrals…!” Eliot smirked while saying that.

I said, “What, already?! Dang, I must’ve been taking too many breaks this week cause I’m still at derivatives. Ugh, now I gotta work extra hard to be better than you again, thanks duuude.” There was a splash of genuineness in the burrito of ironic bitterness because his proactiveness provoked my proactiveness.

“Y’all are already there?” Adrian P asked, “Gosh, these limits at infinity are killing me…” That was my ticket. A breath I didn’t know I was holding finally released. Yeah, as if this junior could be better than me, my thoughts validated me.

There were two games in that calculus class: one I was truly enjoying and one I needed to win. As always, I used Eliot’s stats to say if I was doing good or bad, but when it came to Adrian P., my goals were about proving Adrian P. is bad, even though there was nothing I could do to disprove his ambition and how it was greater than mine. I called his ambition hubris because it was greater than mine.

How must have Adrian P. felt in that environment? Several times he nervously joked about how hard things are or how behind he was, and he was the youngest of our trio. By the end of the semester, Adrian P. wouldn’t be specific about his progress or how difficult he thought the course was. Maybe as I saw a junior who felt like a threat to my brightness, he saw two seniors who were threats to his space he carved out for himself.

I saw exactly how Adrian P. must have felt three years later; I was a junior in college taking a software engineering course. “Exciting!” I thought when selecting my courses for that year, “I’ll finally get to know what my future career will look like!” I remember coming home in tears and texting Skye, “[This class is] making me realize I, in fact, do not want to be a software engineer.”

Project 1 was about testing confusing, industry-scale code locally on one’s own computer; I was expected to be able to test hundreds of thousands of lines of code. “I can get that done in like a couple days,” I thought, “I don’t even have to write any code myself!” Immediately, reality stabbed me when I wasted hours submitting code I couldn’t figure out how to test to the “autograder.” A taunting 70% sneered that I was not a software engineer.

At the end of project 1, when I sent a screenshot of a silly file name in a club Discord server, I was approached by Alex, a senior taking the same class: “Wait, is that EECS 481? Wanna work on project 2 together?”

I’d rather just crash and burn my own boat, I didn’t say. “If you think it would be mutually beneficial!”

I scheduled us to meet at the Central Campus Classroom Building, and there we met in person for the first time: two awkward-smiling bundles of fiber doing their best not to unravel, but for different reasons.

“How was project 1 for you, Marcella?”

“It took way longer than I thought. Those 200-level EECS courses made me think testing was easy…!” I thought I struck common ground.

“Oh yeah I had a bit of trouble on it too, but mostly because my coursework is a bit heavy this semester.” Perhaps not.

After introductions, Alex suggested we set up a shared codebase via GitHub to work on project 2 together, and immediately this person suddenly seemed like an impossible-to-compete-with peer. I said, “GitHub? Yeah I’ve used it but like… once for a 200-level course when we were forced to… Could you please remind me how to use it?”

“Oh uh, sure. Here just…” they began instructing, answering all my questions that probably made me sound stupid.

A computer science major who doesn’t know how to use GitHub. A computer science major who has much less work to do than a senior but is just as stressed as one.

Project 2 was about mutation testing, in which we change one tiny thing about the program and make sure it produces wrong output. Once again, I felt like I was dropped in the deep end, but even worse this time, I felt like a deadweight to my partner who clearly had their act together. They set up our files, started work first, and knew what to write. Meanwhile, I had no idea where to start, failed miserably on the previous project, and didn’t even know how to use the coding language we were tasked to use. I modeled my code after Alex’s, for they seemed like a good example.

Project 2 was also horrible, but it went much better with Alex—I worried that what they were thinking was that it was horrible and went even worse with me. When we submitted, they asked me, “Wanna work on project 3 together, too?”

They had such faith in me even though I felt like I hadn’t delivered. They thanked me for my efforts and celebrated our win with me. They thought it would be mutually beneficial to continue working together, even though I didn’t think I had anything to offer.

The next semester, I was overwhelmed with curiosity—just why did they keep working with me that whole course, I wondered—so I caught back up with Alex. “I wanna know… It's a little bit self-indulgent, but, what did you think of me?”

“When I worked with you for project 2, I would say, you were, ya know, consistently doing the work,” they said, then mentioning how despite my lack of experience, I came in with the right mindset, “In that sense, I thought it would be worth it to help you as much as I can.”

What I couldn’t see during the class is that, suddenly, it became a game I enjoyed being beaten at. I knew I couldn’t compete with Alex’s intimacy with the topics, so I focused on what I could do: improve.

I had mentally removed myself as a combatant in the situation and labelled myself as a pupil, and Alex was my benevolent sage. Eliot was my rival I wished to beat, but Alex was my sage I wished to impress; that somehow massively upheavalled my mindset in the class.

Towards the end of the game, Hop’s mindset is also massively upheavalled. The player and him are facing off in the semifinals of the final Pokémon challenge: he is your last blockade to facing the Pokémon champion, and you are his last blockade. Only one of you can have a chance of becoming a Pokémon master. Then, like an underprepared and bombastic undergraduate in her first upper level CS course, Hop essentially says that this ultimate loss is making him realize he, in fact, does not want to be a Pokémon master. His final words of defeat are these: “You know, even when [the Pokémon professor] was saying that you and me looked like we could become heroes, I never really felt like one… But you, mate! I think maybe you really could do all sorts of great things! Good on you.”

“Quitter!” I called Hop as a toddling tyke, flummoxed by his floundering. Did he not feel as if his entire life’s purpose was under attack by not only failing to beat his rival, but having his dreams of becoming the Pokémon champion stolen by his rival? From the perspective of seeing Pokémon Shield as a real world with real people, Hop’s giving up makes no sense, but from the perspective of seeing Pokémon Shield as a video game with static characters with hard-coded limits, Hop’s giving up seems mature.

I asked Skye about her experiences with competition, and one of her responses demystifies Hop’s reaction. After being asked about competitions she’s sought out recently, she said, “Everyday I do the LinkedIn games with one of my coworkers, and we [...] informally compete on our score. Sometimes he beats me, sometimes I beat him. It's just something we do for fun, really.” Then, she said how she feels like she’s reached “ceiling in [her] performance,” frustrated with her perceived inability to improve. “I'm looking to improve myself in all different kinds of aspects,” she said, “and when you’re unable to improve, [...] that makes the competition less fun.”

Hop had a hard-coded inability to improve any further, so rather than writhing in agony over not being the best, he congratulated his rival on their triumphs. In high school, when seeing the junior Adrian P. being in the same advanced course as myself a grade earlier, instead of accepting my inability to take calculus earlier than he, I writhed in agony. In college, when seeing the sophomore Skye score an incredible internship while being a grade earlier, instead of leveraging my relatively low experience into a high ceiling for impressing Skye with my improvement, I pouted like a tween late to a birthday party.

Skye and I were programming together for a web development class project, and I asked her, “So wait, what is the ‘__init__.py’ file supposed to do again? Why are there so many? Like, how many times do we need to initialize the py?” After she verbally laid out a red-stringed corkboard and cheese-grated her time into my caesar salad of knowledge, I re-mixed my salad and thanked her. I knew I didn’t have the cheese to my salad, but she did. Soon enough, I’d have a uniquely specialized cheese-grater for __init__.py files, too.