competition is so cute

and humans are, too

Recently, I’ve become obsessed with watching YouTube videos of Pokemon VGC (video game championship) matches. For context, competitive Pokemon operates under a doubles format (2 vs 2). Opponents are allowed to develop teams of 6 Pokemon with unique typings, items, and abilities; then choose 4 of their team members to bring into each battle. They then need to battle with 2 of their Pokemon on the field at a time, until a trainer knocks out all 4 of the opponent’s Pokemon to win.

I’m hardly an expert in the most recent competitive meta and have no idea what the best EV spread or terrestrialization type is for each ‘mon. Regardless, I’ve wasted countless weekend hours watching live streams for Regional and International Championships, picking up on the strategy in the moves and team building as the commentators yabber away.

I’ve also been a long-time secret appreciator of the speedrunning community. For further context, “speedrunning” refers to a branch of competitive e-sports where gamers race to beat a game as fast as possible. They’re often constrained by some arbitrary guidelines in terms of what counts as finishing a game or challenge (Any% is the standard category, requiring a runner to complete the base game. Nipple% in Super Mario Odyssey requires you to buy Mario a swimsuit costume and display his shirtless Italian body as quickly as possible).

I became an avid fan of Nintendo speedrunners like Smallant, CJYA, Alpharad, and Pointcrow during quarantine, and I know a lot more about framerules, backwards long jumping, CRCs, and other random game tricks and glitches than I’d like to admit.

Competition is so cute to me because it seems so pointless. We humans care so much about breaking new records, even if it makes no difference to the lives of people outside of the competitive community. We get so emotionally invested when our favourite team shoots an orange ball into a hoop. We marvel at people who can run fast, jump high, swim far, or guide a digital character with effortless grace. The craziest among us dedicate most of our waking hours towards getting good at some arbitrary activity, training our body or mind to handle extreme pressures week by week and surpass what we deem possible.

In high school, my main exposure to competition was through debate. So I found myself thinking a lot about competition after reading Sally Rooney’s essay, Even if You Beat Me. In it, she reflects on how she fought to become the top-ranked European debater, then quit the activity after finding it somewhat meaningless.

“Coming face to face with the irrelevance of your own strivings demands some kind of response. You can wallow in the pretend celebrity if you want, continue attending competitions every weekend and dutifully appearing in selfies with beaming novices, in the belief that you are actually important. Or you can self-justify in the guise of getting some perspective: maybe try thinking of reasons why your particular niche is actually of great cultural significance, or ways in which your skill set applies to ‘real life’. People say that debating helps you in job interviews: that’s one particularly egregious example. But even if any of that could explain why you do it, it could never explain why success matters. Participation in a game, any kind of game, gives you new ways of perceiving others. Victory only gives you new ways of perceiving yourself.

She makes a point. Sure, debate has taught me valuable skills. It’s brought me into a community of smart and thoughtful individuals that I deeply admire. It’s given me confidence in my own abilities and a work ethic towards consistent improvement. It’s allowed me to give back to communities by training novice speakers. But I probably could have found these things outside of debate, doing something a bit more productive, more grounded in reality — perhaps campaigning for climate change policy or founding a non-profit. The activity itself has made little societal or cultural impact. At the end of the day, it is a pointless battle of words with no tangible result or outcome, fought by privileged, travel-affording students from prestigious universities. Should this form of success matter at all?

And you can say the same any competitive activity far removed from the “real world”. Basketball is fundamentally a non-creationary, purposeless activity. So is synchronized swimming. Or competitive Pokemon. Or nanobot racing. Sure, they build character; create communities, foundations, charity events; spawn movies and “hero’s journey” stories, and the like. But these benefits hardly seem exclusive to these competitive activities, and only tangentially benefit the real world.

Regardless of how seemingly pointless these activities are, I know they’ll keep thriving, drawing in new eager-eyed competitors and niche groups of cheering fans. There’s something about the adrenaline rush and joy of competition that gets us on our feet, gives us crazy goals to live for, and makes us happy. In a world that’s full of constant confusion and question marks, perhaps that’s all that really matters.