Sweet Victory and Sour Loss: The Nature of Competitive Games

First of all, credit where credit is due. Thanks twicefold to Rome, once for helping me brainstorm a new, more descriptive (Ed: Debatable) title for this Blog, and second for writing the post that inspired this one. If you click the linky link, you'll find some thoughts on his relationship with competitive gaming, so I thought I'd follow up with mine.

I've also had a gradual growth to competitive gaming. First of all, the majority of my gaming career has been spent offline-- the first real online game I played wasn't till something like Battlefield 2142, which was all of 4 years ago. Likewise it wasn't till I got my 360 that I had a dedicated online gaming platform that I played with consistency.

That means most of my career was spent single player, and my attention was focused on this. This is why the attitude I had towards RTSs existed. Naturally I had occasional split-screen multiplayer bouts, such as various Smash Bros. games. However, in these circumstances I always had a "home-field advantage" in that I usually owned the game and was playing against others who didn't. For that reason, it wasn't exactly competitive, only compounded by the fact I was playing with friend.

Like I said, the 360 really changed this, and perhaps most specifically Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I had gotten into some online games previously, like Gears of War 1 and Halo, etc, but CoD4 was the game I ended up putting over 100 hours into, and working on my skill set till I'd get games where I'd enter a sniper map, countersnipe with an assault rifle, and pull off 26 kills and no deaths. In general I tend to get really into a single game, and then work on improving it; like I stated last post, it's a little weird in that I'm playing both SC2 and GoW2, but that's helped by the fact I'm revisiting Gears and am refining rather than improving my skill set there.

My attitude towards gaming is interesting; I think I'm usually playing more against myself. The other players are whoever they are; obviously I won't know who they are. I don't usually care how well I'm doing compared to the other team, but how well I'm doing based on how well I know I can do, and compared to my team. Even if my team is losing, if I had the top spot on my team (and am often beating all of the other team 1v1) then I don't feel too bad about the loss.

That isn't to say I don't get into it, though. I suspect I'm not horrible, but I'm pretty competitive. I hate losing, take a lot of fun in winning. I like to think this extends to a less extent with playing with friends, like on SC2, but for better or worse I still get slightly upset at a loss. Usually the biggest frustration though isn't with others, but whatever failures I tend to make, which I feel I'm pretty good at spotting, and hopefully improving.

The reason I say I'm not extreme has to do with things I have seen while playing online FPSs. The key point in this is no matter how competitive I get, I always realize it's just a game. It's something I do mostly for fun, and I realize that my awesome score in a game of Gears has no real world value beyond making me happy.

That's why I get so annoyed at Rage Quitters, which abound both L4D and GoW2. L4D it's somewhat frustrating to always have people quit when you're playing well; how do you improve except by playing people better than you? GoW2 is ridiculous because of the reason I suspect why.

In many games, after the last round ends but before the scores are uploaded, you'll often see that one or two players (usually high ranked) on the losing team have quit. Why? Presumably so their loss doesn't get recorded.

This I don't understand. Seriously people? Does your W/L record on a videogame matter that much that you're going to force up your Xbox and reboot it just so one loss doesn't get recorded? It was the same was in CoD, when I'd look at the leaderboards and see people with obviously hacked high scores (like 9,999% accuracy). My question is always: who cares? Do you think anybody is impressed by these scores; and with Gears, do you think people are actually checking your record? I know I almost never do, and the few times I have it's not like I'm ever impressed or anything. It was like the whole "first" comment meme; congrats, no one cares except your poor battered ego.

I guess what it boils down to is I don't mind that the Aaron-Rome-Me team got placed Bronze; it's a chance to improve. I'm not however going to be staring at the rankings of those above or below us; I'll be looking at us, seeing how we improve or don't, and working to improve that, but what other people do is up to them, and I seriously don't understand the obsession with leaderboards. They could be done away with and I wouldn't care.

I mean seriously, who cares how many shots I've fired? Quit worrying about your accuracy and work on improving what matters, which is your gameplay, not your stats.

-HTMC