Beating your younger siblings so bad in video games that they cry is a moral obligation

Complex Sports tweeted a video of kids crying and being made inconsolable after their older brothers beat them mercilessly at video games, and it made me reminisce about delivering similar life lessons to my own younger sibling:

As an older brother, beating your younger siblings is a moral obligation. You can’t just beat them lightly, that teaches no lesson. You have to absolutely crush them to the point of tears.

Then you have to mock them to the point that they can no longer express themselves verbally, but only gesture in the general direction of the game as tears flood from their faces. If your siblings don’t cry and heave while speaking gibberish about how their controller is broken or the game doesn’t work, or they don’t get up and walk away and break the controller in frustration, then you haven’t inflicted enough pain on them.

To do it, you have to get to the point where you can tell them what you’re going to do next, what move you’re going to use to finish them, and that you’re only going to use one or two buttons to win. You have to use the weakest character or team available and beat your siblings by so much that they question why they even like games in the first place. That’s when they’ll know true defeat.

In our household, the games of choice were fighting and racing games. There are six kids in my family. I’m the second oldest, and second oldest brother, of four boys and two girls. Since there were so many of us, we needed multiplayer games to keep everyone involved. Most of us are hyper-competitive. (My second-youngest brother isn’t actually competitive. He truly just enjoys playing games with his siblings, so it’s no fun to gloat over him. He reached the state of blissfulness very early.)

We still buy and play the new fighting game releases: “Tekken,” “Street Fighter,” “Soul Calibur,” “Dragon Ball Z” games, “Mortal Kombat,” “Bloody Roar,” and “Super Smash Bros.” Sometimes we would play a Naruto or King of Fighters game, but these games have been with us since our first game consoles.

I beat my siblings so badly that certain characters became outlawed because it was considered cheating for me to use them. I had to start making compromises. I could still use Vegeta in the Dragonball games, but I couldn’t use a whole team of them. No Akuma, Sagat, or Bison in “Street Fighter.” After a few wins, I had to use someone else besides Sub-Zero in “Mortal Kombat.” In “Soul Caliber,” Maxi was off-limits, but I refused to budge on Cervantes. (Cervantes is an evil pirate with two swords and a gun. If any character was ever created for beating your siblings to the point of tears and mocking them, it was him.)

When I made my brother cry so badly that my dad took the Playstation away, we were playing “Street Fighter EX2 Plus.”

I wanted to go through the story mode again, but my little brother wanted to play, too. He complained so much that my dad came out of his room and told me to play with him. It was a reasonable request, I had been playing alone for a long time, but I was annoyed because I was in the process of unlocking every character. So, when he picked up his controller and picked his character, my only mission was to beat him so badly that he would shun the game entirely.

I’ve beaten him badly many times before and after, but that day, I didn’t even allow him to land a move. He tried every character available, but I was ending the fights as soon as they started. All the while, I watched his face go from “I’m going to have fun!” to “why is he being so mean to me?”

At some point, my little brother began crying without even realizing it, and he muttered, “I hate you,” under his breath. That’s when I began outwardly mocking him about everything: the characters he was playing with, the moves he was doing, the ones that he wanted to do, his inability to hurt me, how quickly our matches ended, etc. And of course, I let him know what the score was.

When it got to 45, he was full-on wailing. He threw the controller down and ran to my dad, who came out and glared at me, which made me laugh even harder. All I could say was, “You told me to play with him.” I wasn’t allowed to play any games for a week after that.

There is a purpose to this cruelty: To show your siblings how tough and mean the world is. It’s to make them stronger by hurting them so much that nothing can hurt them afterwards. As an older brother, it’s your job to protect your younger siblings, and sometimes that protection means hardening them through defeat and mockery.

When my little brother told me that he hated me, I felt like Itachi Uchiha from the Naruto anime, telling his younger brother Sasuke, “Foolish brother ... if you want to kill me ... then hate, spite, and survive pathetically, run, and run... and cling desperately to life.”

But I must also acknowledge that it feels good to crush your siblings. It appeals to the darkest parts of our humanity. It’s a recognition that some part of deliberate cruelty is fun. At least with video games, it’s a harmless and limited feeling. Because as Bob Dylan sang in “The Times They Are A-changin’”, the loser will later be to win, and one day the younger sibling will get so good at video games that you’ll end up on the losing side.

When my little brother came home for Thanksgiving break, he brought the latest “Soul Calibur” game with him. He was playing with my other younger brother, and as I was about to leave for a party, I asked him if I could play against him. I wanted to show him that regardless of the time passed and how much video games had fallen out of my routine, that I could still crush him. But as soon as we picked characters, I could tell by his grin that I had walked into a trap.

He beat me so badly that I wanted to kick the Playstation over. And he mocked me the whole time, saying that he was trying out new characters and just messing around as he beat me without taking any damage.

After our last game, he looked at me and said “Your time’s over, old man. The game is the game.” I never felt so low in my life.