I don't know about you, but I've had trouble finding cute girls in the world who also love to play video games. I've been to a bunch of public gaming events, and while there are women there, they aren't usually the most attractive sort. Yes, yes, get good and angry. Name the exceptions. Yes, they're hot. Go ahead and tell me I'm shallow. Good to go. I'm a dude, and I take looks into account. I'm an awful, awful person. Whatever.  
 
Anyway, earlier this year I concocted a plan to create gamers from whole cloth. I had started dating a pretty Taiwanese girl, and I thought, "You know what could make this relationship even better? Virtual domestic violence." I made an arrangement with her: if she can beat me in three matches of Super Street Fighter IV in a single sitting, I will take her on an all expenses paid vacation to Key West. She had already shown herself to be extremely competitive, so I had a sense she would bite. And she did. Hard.  
 
When she first started playing, she used Girlfriend Fu, i.e. mindless button mashing. She figured the odds were on her side. Didn't happen. Slowly but surely she started learning how to perform the fireball motion, how to perform her character, Juri's, mid-air specials. Then she figured out EX moves. She started reading SRK and watching YouTube for tips. She about lost her mind with happiness when she won her first match. I did too.  
 
Now, I'm no slouch in the Street Fighter department. I was in good fighting form because I had a strong rivalry with another friend going, but that was just normal escalation and pattern recognition. Every week or so one of us would introduce a new combo, the other one would learn how to combat it, and we would generally smash any challengers, my friend and me. But when this girl beat me, suddenly there were stakes. I hadn't really dug into SRK since vanilla SFIV was released, but here I was in the Chun Li forums trying to find everything I could. I watched VesperArcade's excellent Street Fighter tutorials and figured out, yep, I need a stick. That's turned out to be a good thing since you can't do half the stuff OneHandedTerror recommends without a stick.  
 
Then she got two rounds. VesperArcade had warned me (i.e. he warns viewers) that the stick would make me worse before it made me better, and that's a fine thing to say when you're a YouTube video. When she got that second match, shit got real. I went back to the gamepad and didn't look back. Yeah, I sacrificed some combos like Chun's cF into LK combo, but I wasn't ready to spend $3k or $4k over controller pride. To date, she's never gotten more than two matches; the longest we've played was fifty consecutive matches (she got one match that night). It's funny because normally girls would never care when Street Fighter IV was on during a gathering or party. In any given social context when the projector is blazing with battle, there are usually two distinct parties: one group playing SSFIV (or Halo or CoD) and one not. Almost all the girls are in the latter group. When this girl and I play, ALL the girls stop what they're doing and cheer for her. When she manages to land Juri's U2 in the middle of my Chun Li U2, the entire place goes goddamned apeshit... even if this girl loses the round. It's funny what can happen to a game when you raise the stakes. 
 
The thing is, I STILL have the stick. I let her borrow my XBox for the week, and my only controller has been, yes, the stick while I've been playing on Steam. It's MADDENING to lose to players I would crush with a gamepad, but I find myself wondering again if it's time to switch whole cloth. She's a lot better at SSFIV than she was the last time I quit the stick, but so am I. When I quit the stick I could never get above 1200 PP online. To date my highest is 2500 PP.* I know there are a lot of combos I simply can't perform with a gamepad, and I'm at the point where my next plateau is going to be seamless execution of focus cancels. I'd rather hoe that road the right way, with a joystick, rather than learn it on a gamepad and have to figure it out all over again on the stick. 
 
Oh, and if she ever gets a perfect I buy her her own 360 with a copy of the game.  
 
*-- Yes, I'm sure you're better than I am, stranger from the Internet. I regularly get my ass handed to me by players rated 1800+, so I have a pretty good idea where I stand. Not really the point of the post.