3 Ways That Rage
Quitters Hurt Themselves The Most
By Casey Douglass
The game is barely
minutes old, a blank canvas on which the victor will eventually write
their dominance. Someone falls. A sound chimes, and an icon appears with
a line through it. That person has disconnected. Your heart sinks.
Your task is much harder now. Like dominoes, your teammates begin to
fall. Another disconnects. The game seems already lost. You sigh.
If you’ve played any
online competitive video-game, the previous scene will likely be
familiar to you. Any game which sees people play against others runs
the risk of being blighted by drop-outs, disconnections, and rage
quits. Not everyone who leaves will do so in a rage, or even become a
serial rage quitter. Sometimes games crash, and at other times, life gets in
the way. It’s the serial rage quitters that I want to focus on
here, someone who likely has no idea of the ways in which they are
compounding their own misery.
A “satisfying” rage
quit seems to involve a number of elements, but each contains a seed
of misery that will eventually bite the quitter in the backside:
Hollow Victories
First is the idea that
you are getting one over on your inept teammates or the other side,
somehow depriving them of something or punishing them for a perceived
misdeed. While this maybe true, they might actually come away from
that game having had one of the best games of their lives. In my own
experience on a variety of games, a rage quit on the team doesn’t
mean the end of the game. It might make for a harder game, a game in
which the odds of you winning are reduced, but there is still fun to
be had in trying to turn things around. And if you succeed... you’ll
probably be so satisfied that you’ll be beaming from ear to ear.
This is an experience a rage quitter will likely never encounter.
Hair-Trigger Emotions
Another element to a
rage quit is the changing of feelings in the quitter. Whichever
emotion might have been slowly (or thunderously) building, such as anger, frustration or hopelessness, it will be replaced by the above
mentioned feeling of smug satisfaction at “getting one over” on
the remaining players. Okay, congratulations Mr or Mrs R. Quitter,
you’ve just lowered your tolerance for any “unpleasant” emotion
going forward, and set the trigger in your brain to engage at even
milder situations.
Having worked through
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I know a fair amount about thoughts,
feelings, and the actions we take to alter them. One of the first
things I mastered was the idea that if we give into one thought, one
time, the chances are higher that we will do it a second time. This
is due to all kinds of stuff like neural plasticity, habit forming
and reward mechanisms etc. which is a really interesting Google
Expedition if you fancy it at some point.
As far as gaming and
rage quitting, if you rage quit after a certain thing happening,
maybe you die to friendly fire in a first person shooter, the chances
are reasonably good that this will trigger you again more easily next
time it happens. While you are in this “games have to go my way”
frame of mind, you will slowly expand your “Conditions in which I
Quit” list, and if you don’t find some degree of self-awareness
beforehand, you'll find that what you need
to happen in a game to have fun will become an increasingly narrow
band of possibility. Basically, rage quitters, by escalating their
quitting behaviour, reduce the chances of finding any fun or
enjoyment in a game that they really want to enjoy.
No Chance of Improvement
Finally,
a rage quitter might justify their leaving as “I can get into a fun
game more quickly” or something similar. Yes, this might be true,
but even if this new game meets your growing criteria for fun, have
you improved as a gamer? In so many competitive events, whether
games, sports or even a quiz night at the pub, it is often possible
to learn far more from losing a game than from winning. A rage
quitter, by leaving the game early, kills dead any chance of
improving their skills, tactics, or mindset, and simply lock
themselves into the cycle of continuous annoyance at the game and the
other people that play it.
Turning It Around
Is
any of this what we want from our gaming hobby? To reduce our chances
of enjoyment? To not grow or improve as gamers or even as people, to
stunt our ability to be civil and to enjoy competition with others in
a healthy way? That sounds like a very sad reflection of what gaming
should be.
We
can’t control how other players decide to play a game. We can
control how we play
and react to it. Gaming isn’t always fun and joyous. You can’t
win every game, or
even have fun every
game, but what you can do is take the losses and the frustrations as
part of the whole package, learn what you can from them, and enjoy
the games that you can.
If you see someone rage quit during a game,
beyond the irritation and annoyance, see if there is a little sadness
in your heart for someone who could soon find themselves adrift from
their favourite game.
If you are a rage quitter yourself, as an
experiment, the next time you feel the urge to leave a game, stick it
out and see what happens. You might come out of the experience
pleasantly surprised, even if it is just at the way that your
feelings may have changed or mellowed as the likely defeat played out. Who knows.
Thanks for reading :).
