The Angry Gamer

Take a drive on a freeway or played golf lately? It really takes little for people to be angry. I’m guilty of it, and some of it is environmental (though still my failing): if I’m in a place where I don’t feel that I have to watch my behavior, then I don’t. Most people don’t behave like that around others. They’ll check themselves.

Since I’ve moved from PC gaming to console gaming, my environment has changed: my back is no longer to my family, and I’m no longer shutting them out. Now, I’m in the family public place. I don’t think it’s surprising that not only has my behaviors changed but so what I play. Gone are the FPS. Gone, for the most part, are the RTS. For the first time, I own a Nintendo console, so I’m enjoying a different kind of game than before. As a result, my frustration with games seems a lot lower–different setting, different games. When I am frustrated, I now practice what I do in other situations. Pause or turn the game off, and recalibrate. I don’t think I’ve been mad at a game now in many years.

I try to teach that to my kids and their friends who play games. One of my son’s friends in particular plays a LOT of games. Unfortunately, while he’s good at games, he’s not as good as he thinks. Two kinds of frustrations come out. First, he is dogged in trying to solve a problem. After failing 8 times to complete a level, he continues to fight through it, clearly getting upset and refusing to let anyone else try. Second, he is frustrated with others in coop games: he has to lead, and he doesn’t accept either others as leaders or what he considers lesser abilities. For example, if he’s not telling my son what to do, he’s telling him to drop out of the game so that he can finish the level.

That’s not necessarily anger, but it’s still very disrespectful behavior from frustration. Understanding that you’re in control of what frustrates you is important. But how you handle that frustration is as important but harder in some ways.

I fall into that category, or rather I did, of people which guttertalk spoke off. The ones who insist on being the ones to play and finish and who want to take matters into their own hands when someone else is not successful immediately. That was me when I was slightly younger, I always had to play and when someone so much as made the slightest wrong move I was infuriated enough to take the controller away from them and “show them how it’s done”. With age came the realisation that I may have been doing the wrong thing and that I’m not the almighty and all knowing gamer while others are simply below me. However, that problem still exists nowadays but not in the same form.

When someone else is attempting to play something and is doing it wrong or not good enough(for me) I keep my mouth shut. I’m still a bit angry at them for not doing it “the way it’s supposed to be done” but I do keep quiet and let them have their fun, figure it out on their own, give them a chance to learn. If they want it I will extremely willingly dish out as much advice as I can to help them (though in reality I’m also helping out myself because I can’t stand when someone can’t do something).

What I’m trying to say is that you’re right in what you said about habits growing with you. They do and while it may not be easy to break them, it may be possible to adjust them appropriately.

P.S. My first time replying but definitely not the first time reading. Keep up the good work!

Chris, this idea is huge. My friend and I – who will be creatively referred to as “Bill” for the remainder of the post – had an incredibly confusing conversation about anger and video games just last week. The reason Bill and I were concerned with this subject was one of our normally well-mannered friends – we’ll call him “Ted” – had been exhibiting uncharacteristic anger during and after games of NBA Live 10.

Before you get excited, we didn’t really come to any conclusions regarding his strange and specific anger. But I think Bill and I may have begun to form a path towards the truth.

Our first suspect was competition, probably because we’d heard it before. The people who get angry after games are “too competitive” or need to realize that “it’s just a game.” This is a pervasive – and generally empirically true – idea.

The problem was, Ted wouldn’t get upset at all when playing physical basketball with the same sort of people. Ted’s frustrations only came out on the virtual court. While competition is certainly a player in the frustrating nature of video games, this distinction proves that there’s something more going on than just an unhealthy desire to win.

After a couple hours of walking, talking, changing topics, and getting back on topic, Bill and I only came to one helpful conclusion: based upon both our experience playing video games, control is an enormous factor.

Control – or lack of control – is one of the things that raises frustration in a gamer, at least in both mine and Bill’s experience. In physical basketball, I have complete control over my play – at least, as complete as any human can have over themselves. During NBA Live 10, I only have as much control as the game gives me. There are plays I want to make that don’t quite work, passes that I thought should have gone somewhere else, and players that don’t exactly perform how I thought they would.

Even though the gaming industry is becoming extremely good at adapting to the impulses of the player, it has not – as of yet – been able to perfectly simulate control. Even in an FPS environment, frustration could abound because the players are not actually as quick as their minds want them to be. The sensitivity of the analog – while coming extremely close to perfect – will never be quite as accurate or quick as hoisting a gun to the correct position with your own two hands.

It’s this disconnect that frustrates me. When I know what I want to happen and it doens’t quite happen, I feel helpless. Helplessness in a competitive environment is certainly not going to make the player feel fantastic; it might just make them angry.

Some thoughts. Take them, use them, discard them, disagree with them, trade them for something more visually appealing. There they are.

I had a few controller throwing incidents as a kid. I thought I’d grown out of that until I started playing Demon’s Souls. I have still managed to not technically *throw* the controller. But let’s just say that it has been put down in a very hasty manner several times. What I’m seeing is simply the concept of wasted time. Old games forced you to play a level hundreds of times before you could beat the whole game. And while you were supposedly learning techniques to get better at it, that’s cold comfort when you’ve worked for weeks to work your way up to the last boss only to die instantly and loose the last 2 hours for nothing. Demon’s Souls isn’t quite that severe, but it comes close enough to make me howl “WHY DID THEY DESIGN IT LIKE THAAAAAAT?!?!” It makes my wife and kids uncomfortable, and makes me feel like an ass. But there is just so much GOOD stuff in that game that I keep coming back to it like a sucker.