Kizi Fan Group Ltd

Compete Staff Writer Maddy Myers and I both feel nervous about playing games in front of other people. We sat down to talk about why. Gita Jackson: Hey Maddy. Both of us have been put in the position of playing games in front of other people. Whether it’s at a tournament or over streams, playing a game while other people watch comes with a sense of performance anxiety. Maddy Myers: In thinking about this I’ve thought back on so many experiences—good and bad—that I’ve had trying to play games at big parties growing up, having to psych myself up to grab a controller and face off against a group of guys in a fighting game. As I got older, that experience got way harder—in arcades, once I was old enough to go to the mall unsupervised, and later at official fight nights at gaming stores, and tournaments. It’s been hard for me, every single time, to get myself to play a game in public. The reasons go beyond just “it’s embarrassing to lose,” which is a basic sentiment that I’m guessing all our readers can relate to. There’s also the fact that I have social anxiety and the fact that I’m a woman—a fact that other people tend to bring up as soon as they see me playing a game in public. Gita: When I was getting into games, it was through my older brother. Sure, we grew up playing games together on the Super Nintendo and the Genesis and later various Playstation consoles, but all those things implicitly belonged to him. Once he entered teenagerhood and discovered that hanging out with your little sister wasn’t cool anymore, I didn’t get a chance to play games without other people at all for a long time. For a long time the only way I could play games with other people was in social settings, and because I didn’t have a space where I could safely try out a new game and learn how to play it and maybe even fail at playing it a bit, it was embarrassing to go through all that in public. Kids are mean, and if you don’t have a strong sense of self it’s hard to put up with constant teasing. And yeah, I was also the only girl I knew who was into games, and yes, all my guy friends who liked them too also loved pointing that out. In Cecilia’s piece about “Only Girl” syndrome, she talked to a lot of women who have been the only girl in the gaming groups, and a lot of them lived in fear of not only another girl showing up, but another girl showing up who was better at games than them. If you don’t have space to learn how to play games, then you might find yourself without friends to play games with as a kid. And that’s what happened to me. Eventually I stopped playing games for a while.