I know it’s senseless. I know it’s unreasonable. I know it’s unhealthy. There is, objectively, no reason to be in a bad mood because I lost a game being played for fun that has no stakes attached.
To be clear, this isn’t directed at the person who beat me (unless it’s someone who’s really rubbing my face in it). I want to win, I’m doing my best to win, I wouldn’t ask them to do any less, and I wouldn’t get any satisfaction from a victory against someone who was pulling their punches anyway. My negative feelings are largely directed inward: when I lose, I feel like a failure even though I intellectually understand that you’d have to be a complete tool to judge anyone else so harshly for losing at a game.
I’ve been like this as long as I can remember. I’ve definitely gotten a much better handle on my emotions when I was young, but I’m sure it it still comes through, even if people don’t say anything. It’s not fair to the people I play with, and I wish I wasn’t this way. I actually greatly prefer cooperative games over competitive games because of this, because that way if I lose, the other player(s) is/are in the same boat - we all failed together, so I can’t be judged negatively in comparison to anyone.
Anyone else have similar issues? Anyone who can offer insight as to why I might feel this way?
Just don’t play competitive multiplayer games. Is the occasional rush of the win worth all of the frustration? I play only SP and co-op now.
being bad at things we enjoy is existentially invalidating despite the lack of ‘real stakes’. it’s like having receding hairline, like obviously it’s toxic AF to judge someone in a moral/ethical sense for balding, but as someone who is losing their hair it makes you feel like something is fundamentally ‘inferior’ about you compared to those who are not. you see people that have what you always wanted to have with no effort, they seem like they are just intuitively, instinctually, effortlessly ‘better than you’. one of my best friends has always been effortlessly good at FPS games like that, constantly getting ridiculous scores like 100 kills to 17 deaths in short fast paced multiplayer games like call of duty, and its like they don’t even play more than me, they haven’t been doing it as long as me, i put in at least as much effort if not more so to win, but i can never even approach that level of skill. my K:D ratio is constantly negative, i can hardly ever break even let alone go 3:2 with 100 kills in less than 7 minutes. my thumbs are simply not that dextrous on the controller joysticks and never will be. it makes me feel like my existence is invalidated, that i was stupid for being interested in the things that i enjoyed doing and the games i enjoy playing, that my life is a waste of time that will only end in meaningless failure. i don’t think its even ‘irrational’ as much as it is ‘overly rational’ in the sense of nihilistic naturalistic fallacy vulgar materialism. it’s objectively better to win than to lose, ‘self improvement’ doesn’t matter if you can’t achieve it no matter how much effort an analysis you put into it. i don’t lose in FPS games due to tactical mistakes, they are simply all faster at aiming than me because i am in my mid 30’s and they are younger and have more efficiently functioning nervous systems. I am physically, objectively worse than them in a very real if limited and low stakes sense, and regardless of the fact that it is ‘not an important arena’ it is existentially invalidating in the sense that we all want to be the Effortless Beautiful Chosen Hero that succeeds inevitably and instinctually. failure reminds us that we ‘are not special’, that we have no special talent or skill that makes us unique, that the universe does not care about our success or failure any more than any other random chaotic physics event, that we are just another blank, bland NPC in the background of the rich beautiful successful people’s lives and we will never be like them no matter how hard we work or try because the deterministic chain of causality just did not work out that way for us and its too late to do anything about it.
semi-optimism edit: in terms of actually successfully dealing with these kinds of thoughts, i just honestly ask myself if i really want to live/have lived the way it would take to acquire whatever skill i lack. sure, i might be jealous of the victor’s success in the moment, but am i really jealous of the way they had to live to train hard enough to get that good? am i really jealous of the hours a day spent trying and failing over and over until improvement? would i rather have spent my time playing nothing but a single multiplayer game until i completely mastered it instead of experiencing a diverse array of different games? do i even want to have the same level of memorized map knowledge that renders a thrilling diegetic experience into a context-free standardized ‘playing field’? do i really wish i spent all of my earlier years learning how to draw better or how to do complicated maths or program computers etc. instead of chilling and playing video games and having what scant few social experiences i could manage and studying a larger set of topics and hobbies? the answer to these questions is usually: not really. i might wish to retroactively spend my time on say, pursuing meaningful romantic relationshps instead of whatever i ended up actually doing, but not on ‘more call of duty/halo/etc.’.
You know how Kauffman did humor, where the real punchline isn’t the joke, but your reaction to it?
Try seeing games like that. Yes youre trying to win, but that objective is just a vehicle for the real objective of having fun. See if you can pull weird shit and win with it. There was a pro StarCraft player who played like this; I forget their name. Basically, find the weird shit that shouldn’t work, and find ways to make it work, instead of standard sensible builds/loadouts/strategies. See if thats more fun on balance. Certainly makes the world weirder for everyone around you.
there’s this one Daigo quote I can’t be arsed to dig up so I’ll paraphrase: instead of focusing on winning, make continual improvement the goal. Focus on what you did better than last time, try to identify mistakes and treat learning from them as the real victory condition.
recommend reading David Sirlin’s book Playing to Win to get a deeper dive into that kind of mindset and common pitfalls. The book focuses on 2D fighting games, but the lessons apply to ALL competitive games. It’s free online: https://www.sirlin.net/ptw
I came here to say basically this. There was a time where i was playing a lot of competitive games. SC2, SF4, league, WC3, TF2, were all in the rotation. I watched a lot of competitive SC2, and as a result a lot of DAY[9]. One thing I took away from his analysis of games was just how important it was to perform self analysis and critique. If you are losing, then that means your opponent is succeeding at something your not. In SC2 it was all about timing and game knowledge. How long does it take to ling rush from start position 1 on map X and is that fast enough to beat out a ling defense. That kind of stuff.
The other thing though that I really took away from his analysis and commentary was how important it is to be sporting. You say GLHF, you say GG, and you should mean it. Losing is the process of learning, in many cases you have to fail before you can succeed, and analyzing your failures can lead to to theories that you can then put into practice. If you can’t gracefully lose, it means you haven’t accepted that losing is how you learn. If all you do is lose and never try to address the why then of course you’ll be angry.
I love the feeling that comes from that incremental improvement.
This book should be required reading before you’re allowed to play any game, IMO. Even kindergarteners shouldn’t play Candyland or Tic Tac Toe until they’ve read it.
With my oldest, when we play games, I always shake her hand at the end and say “good game!”. I haven’t read that book, but hopefully this ritual will have positive developments down the line. She’s 4 so, most games are games of chance anyway lol.
I had to stop playing MOBAs because it brought out the absolute worst in me, part of it is just the nature of the genre where the more you die the stronger your opponent gets and it becomes progressively harder to make a come back. Also that most of the most popular ones take the better part of an hour to finish a match, so not only are you getting your face rubbed in the mud, you’re getting it rubbed in there for a while as your team let’s you know just how much you’re fucking up.
This is like the opposite of your usual heated gamer moment.
I get it, though. With me, I feel like my mentality is that losing at a game makes it feel less fun in a way. I’ve had moments of playing multiplayer FPSes, and if I had an off-day where I struggled to get frags or do anything productive for my team, I’d get this sense of blues and feel that I’m wasting my time doing something that should not feel like the waste of time that it’s feeling like. I feel like it should be fun, and it should take my mind off of any stress, but it stops being less about the fun and more about stress at that point.
This usually just gets me to “ragequit,” which might not be the most appropriate terminology, though.
Not be a Freudian, but what was your experience with competition as a child?
This feels like something that has roots in how you were socialized with regard to competition.
it’s because when you lose it’s because of SOME BULLSHIT that happened. Bullshit is always infuriating
Your self-worth is not tied to your successes and failures in video games.
I’ve had a long, addictive journey with video games and that was the conclusion to a lifetime of suffering inside.
For shooters (halo series in this case) that are team based, yeah. For solo/free-for-all for a moment and then i think about how i could have done things differently or how i was bested
when watching the replay from my enemies POV after i die, i an in awe and honestly admire them for their skill
unless they use or the noob combo or vehicles, i have way less tolerance for that
Most games simulate the act of achieving something and losing breaks the simulation. Not that games aren’t fun or enjoyable and some games are actually pretty interesting like nier automata
I don’t get angry in games, and very rarely in general, but I do break down when I can’t solve or understand something math-related after a while.
Oh me too - mine seems to stem from my anxiety and a deep fear that I’m not good enough or not trying hard enough or something. Totally irrational, but I get locked in to those thought patterns and it’s hard to get out.
I struggle with the same thing, I play online card games and it’s very easy to get super tilted since it’s heavily luck-based by nature. I don’t like feeling like I’ve wasted my time when I lose, I don’t like feeling like a failure when I lose because I consider myself a good player.
I often wonder why it winds me up so much. It might be that I put too much value into my performance, or it might be because there aren’t a huge amount of things in my life that feel like they’re in my control - and when I lose in a game, it’s like “fuck, I can’t even do this” and I lash out.
Point is, you’re not alone comrade. I’ve considered giving up these games altogether because they feel like poison for my mental health, but I believe that the anger is almost certainly coming from somewhere else. It’s not the games.
Does this also apply to other contests? Sports? Trivia? Some people experience competition in general intensely.
