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Due to the ongoing norm of isolation created by the Corona Virus coupled with the shut-down of my physical office and the mandate to “work from home for the foreseeable future,” I have continued my efforts to devote a couple hours each day to playing games online, both with friends and the anonymous denizens of the internet. As discussed in my previous article, “You don’t Have Time to Analyze Everything,” I had picked up playing League of Legends with friends again (for better or for worse).
Luckily, I’ve managed to reconnect with the things about League I remember loving and stay away from the general degeneracy that tends to plague both the reputation and community of the game. It’s fun to meticulously read up on the stats of all the characters, plan out strategies and techniques and then put them into motion in a game. However, it has been several years since I’ve played the game seriously, and recognizing my own rusted skills, I’ve been jumping on every now and then to play a game with random people in an attempt to shake off the dust.
In one such recent game, while I had managed to do fairly well, one of my teammates took it upon themselves to laboriously articulate the manner in which he was displeased with me as a person including detailing several creative illustrations concerning my mother as a bonus. This is about what I would expect from the League community (in truth, it’s right where it was when I left it) but something about the way I interacted with the situation this time was different. Perhaps its just the years of getting older or even the time and effort Lepcis and I have spent studying games in general, but while being insulted, instead of becoming concerned I became fascinated with the situation. I began to dissect psychologically, what just might be happening to a gamer in this scenario.
We actually lost this game. In fact, we were pretty much losing after the first 5 minutes of the game. Two of our team members (including the one that took such an interest in my immediate family) decided to choose some rather off-meta strategies that ended up not paying off particularly well. The rest of the team played about as well as you could expect from 3 uncoordinated strangers at our Elo, but it wasn’t enough–that’s just part of the game sometimes. In function, it’s completely fine; there always has to be 5 winners and 5 losers and since we’re just playing for fun anyway, it’s not really worth stressing out about. Recognizing that the game was a wash early on, I focused on improving my skills with the character I was playing, focusing on her strengths while avoiding her weaknesses. Overall, I was quite happy with my performance as I felt like I learned a lot and got a little better skill-wise for future games.
I believe it was this positive attitude that helped to allow me to still end the game with a 2:1 KDA, becoming a member on our team that was able to maintain a threat to the enemy team and delay the end of the game by a little bit. In spite of this though, our aforementioned friend focused a considerable amount of his efforts in the previously described deluge of comments. With the scenario depicted, we can finally get to the interesting bit–what motivates a person to behave in such a way?
As I began to break it down in my head, it didn’t take long for the initial surface-level catalyst to became clear. Our friend (Let’s call him Skippy, for no other reason than I find the name humorous), was upset that we were not winning. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to take it step further either; Skippy was upset that he specifically was not winning. Now of course, there could be a whole plethora of alternate catalysts that could spark such a reaction out of someone (after all, the existence of A and B together does not necessarily result in C if D and E are a factor). Skippy could be unsatisfied with his job, or going through a particularly hard breakup with a girlfriend or any number of extraneous events that would heighten the stress of a person. For the purpose of this argument though, I don’t think its unreasonable to discredit these causes, simply due to the prevalence of this behavior within the League community overall. After all, it’s just simply unlikely that every angry player simultaneously had their dog run over that same day.
So what causes Skippy to be so concerned with winning to the point where they would spend a non-considerable amount of time, energy and focus on the verbal assault of another person? Why is winning so important? What does winning even mean?
As logical or rational as we may try to be, we are still creatures ruled in one way or another by our feelings. Typically, the greatest and most common vices in our society aren’t actions that are disconnected with the individual performing them–they provide the performer with an intense sensation in one form or another. It can be a feeling of power from bullying, a feeling of superiority when lying or other darker things. It’s no secret that our feelings overall and intense motivators that sometimes drive us to do things that aren’t really good for anyone involved. So then, what feelings does winning evoke and why are some individuals so desperate to obtain them?
At its simplest level, winning evokes a sensation of superiority. “I have bested you,” or “I have proved that I am more valuable than you,” or “You were not able to stop me.” With this sensation of superiority comes a feeling of power and control. If someone cannot stop you, you can do what you you want. If you can do what you want, you can force others do what you want or prevent them from doing what you don’t want. From this power and control comes a feeling of safety and security. You are safe from the harm of others and you are secure from anyone attempting to change the situation. From this sense of safety and security comes a feeling of entitlement and belonging. You deserve your position because you have proven that you can take it or “earn” it. Because you have “earned,” it you belong in your superior position.
In my mind, that’s about where I would assume a basic unguided train of feelings would end. Winning makes us feel like we’re in control. Winning makes us feel safe. Winning makes us feel like we deserve to be. These are incredibly powerful and in many ways, necessary parts of what a person needs to feel in order to be a mentally healthy person. The need for these feelings are so powerful in fact, that people will subscribe to artificial sources of them, harm others and even willingly become ignorant or blind to truth in order to obtain them.
Fear, lack of confidence, suicidal tendencies, depression, self-loathing–all of these things can stem from a person that does not feel safe or does not feel like they belong. By-and-large, most humans consider these feelings to be undesirable. We avoid them at all costs and trying to help another who is feeling these sensations is an intense and emotionally exhausting experience. As a human race, we try to stay away from these things as far as possible… to the extent that following the train of feeling back to their source, we will react violently when we are threatened with the prospect of a losing a simple game.
Skippy wasn’t really afraid of losing the game. He was afraid of the feelings of uncertainty that would come from the loss itself. He was afraid of feeling like he was not in control or that he wasn’t superior. He was afraid of not feeling safe and afraid that he didn’t belong. This fear led him to victimize anyone or anything near to him that would allow him to displace as much ownership of the loss away from himself as he could–including a teammate who was attempting to help him avoid the loss as much as possible.
By displacing responsibility of the loss, you displace the feelings of lack of belonging, safety and power to another. You are able to dodge these conceptions by attributing them to another target. You still belong. It’s their fault that you’re suffering. You don’t deserve this. You deserve better and have done the work to earn it. It’s their fault you didn’t get it. We see this kind of logic all the time, especially in politics. Whether its Nixon and the Red Scare or Trump and his fear mongering of Hispanics and Asians, the us vs. them mentality allows subscribers to artificially feel a sense of superiority and belonging by turning a blind eye to reality.
But, this doesn’t end there, because we’re going to head out of political squabble territory and back into the much more comfortable realm of gaming. Given this psychological breakdown of winning, how should we actually perceive victory? How can we appropriately identify the meaning behind “a win?”
To put it simply, “a win” means nothing. A win means that a series of causes and effects occurred that lead to predetermined “end-point” as defined by a human or group of humans when they wrote the rules of the game. The truth is, these causes and effects on their own are meaningless. The worlds luckiest person can have no understanding of them at all and win every single game if by chance they happen to make all of the right decisions. While in practice this will not happen, the concept remains the same–you can win a game that you “don’t deserve” to win. You can lose a game that “don’t deserve” to lose. In this context, winning and losing is meaningless. So if it’s meaningless, what does matter?
What matters is knowing why you won or why you lost. What matters is understanding how each of your actions and the actions of your teammates added up to create the resulting outcome. But ultimately what matters the most is your own personal improvement.
It gets said all the time (and often in infantile messages aimed at yet-to-be-schooled children unfortunately) but the idea that you should not compare yourself to others to determine your own worth is absolutely true. Comparing yourself to another person to determine your own value is inherently flawed, especially when in the format of a game. Just because you managed to meet a an appropriate series of end-conditions as defined by the rule-writers over another person means jack-squat on its own. You shouldn’t be happy just because you won a game. In isolation, it only means that a mechanical process of cause and effect ran its course.
Instead, what matters is if you improved yourself. Did you learn more about how to play the game? Did you gain a better understanding of a certain aspect of the rules? A certain character? A particularly difficult matchup? Did you learn what did work? Did you learn what didn’t work? Did you improve when compared to the last time you played? Did you avoid a particularly troublesome mistake that you’ve kept making in the past? Did you make even the smallest of steps forward?
These are the marks through which you should measure your victory. If any of these are true, then you have actually accomplished something. You have actually obtained something through which you deserve to be happy; through which you deserve to feel a sensation of belonging and safety. Your best measure is yourself. No one else matters, because you’re not living their life and they aren’t living yours. All of us–every single one of us–is not equal in some way or another when it comes to skill. If we measure any part of our skills to another, one person will always come up short for any number of reasons and these reasons should be irrelevant to us. What matters instead is your own self-improvement. Your own self-progress. Your own self-worth.
Next time you play a game, don’t worry about whether you win or lose. Worry about how you can improve from the last time you played. If you have to compare yourself to anyone, compare yourself to yourself. After all, you shouldn’t be happy just because you won a game. You should be happy when you’re becoming the best you can be.