Greetings, beautiful party people of the world wide webbernets! I want to talk to y’all for a bit about short tempers and impulse control. I spend a lot of time with my friends playing League of Legends, Titanfall, the occasional hour or two of Grand Theft Auto Online, and so forth and while I love playing with my own group of chums, it’s hard to ignore the fact that some of y’all are just… mad.
It’s not a “real” anger, though – not in most cases, at least. It’s the momentary flare of rage you experience during a competitive match that is so intense and all-consuming that you are, in that moment, capable of taking another human life. Sometimes its only a flash for an instant, while other times it can become something that seethes from you for the remainder of a match. Some people express it by slamming their controllers, others vent it through their microphones with some of the most damning, vile language you will ever hear. Yet for all the different ways there are to express this, one thing remains the same: the moment the match is done, that anger fades.
I call this “CoD Rage,” primarily because I cite Call of Duty as the game where this sort of fury is most prevalent. Yes, there was online gamer rage before then – anyone who grew up on Quake, Unreal Tournament, or Counter-Strike can tell you that. But because of the overwhelming cross-platform popularity of the series, combined with the advent of Xbox LIVE and social platforms like YouTube, which has popularized an entire subgenre of people griefing Xbox LIVE ragers (NOTE: EXTREMELY NSFW LANGUAGE), it’s a pretty safe assumption that Call of Duty has done more to popularize and normalize the behavior than other games.
Okay, maybe Halo helped, too.
But why do we act this way? After all, if you were to walk up to a random person on the street and said they were a “mother[redacted] piece of [redacted] trash [redacted] [redacted] [redacted racial slur],” whether you were 13 or 30, you would almost surely be beaten into a mushy pink pudding – and you’d deserve it. So why do we feel it’s okay to do online? I don’t think there’s one reason. However, there are a number of factors that do come into play.
1.) The competitive edge. If you’re playing Call of Duty, or League of Legends, or any other game with a heavy multiplayer focus, odds are you’re a competitive person. Being a competitive individual, you want to win – who doesn’t, right? So when things go wrong, you tend to become frustrated. When you find yourself on a streak of losing, or you find yourself being completely outmatched game-in and game-out, that frustration builds and, eventually, you let it out.
The frustration may be unavoidable, but how we choose to vent it is entirely on us.
2.) The personal disconnect. You see, part of the reason why people feel so comfortable in aggressively describing all of the ways they would like to defile my mother is because it’s difficult to register through a television, or a computer monitor, that there are actual living people on the other end of that microphone or chat window. On some level we’re operating on the assumption that we’re shouting at the game, unaware of the possible effects we have on our fellow players.
Some of this stuff can grow very, very personal, and when we cross that line and make somebody uncomfortable we lose sight of why we’re all playing video games in the first place. This is an activity that brings people together – it should never, ever be used as a shield to fling bile at each other.
3.) The power of anonymity. While you can argue that this ties into the previous point, I think it stands apart. Some people revel in the fact that they can be as mean, and inflict as much abuse as they wish, and not have to worry about any real-world consequence. At worst their accounts are banned, but very rarely are any steps taken that prevent them from simply creating another one and continuing their behavior.
I’m looking at you, League of Legends.
4.) Anger is addictive. …no, I’m serious. Anger releases dopamine which is a chemical that our bodies produce which, TL;DR, makes us feel really good. It’s a feeling that can be influenced by most recreational drugs and alcohol, and it’s also released with the adrenaline that accompanies anger. Now, the science isn’t 100% conclusive on this just yet. After all, the brain is pretty damn complicated. But the science is leaning in that direction, and more and more medical journals are recognizing this condition.
So, releasing that anger feels very, very good. It’s why that one friend of ours who is always seemingly looking for something to be pissed about is looking for something to be pissed about. But it’s also toxic, and emotionally destructive to not only those around you, but also to yourself. So… you know, take a breath.
5.) Some people are just… the worst. I hate to say it, but “thems the facts” – some of y’all just suck. Period.
So What Can I Do?
I’m glad you asked, orange text. Unfortunately I don’t think there is any universal “one solution” to fix the issue of CoD Rage. After all, it’s pretty deeply ingrained in all of us – even I’ve succumbed to it from time to time. But we can take steps to not cause so much damage when we do get angry, I think.
For starters, take a freakin’ breath. You want to rip into somebody because their ancestry produced an inferior jungler? Take a breath and re-evaluate how that helps the situation because, 999,999 out of 1,000,000 times, it doesn’t – and you’re not that one in a million exception.
Step away. Grab a drink. Go in the other room. Read a book. Watch Netflix. Do anything that gets you away from the game for even a few minutes. The change of scenery will let you reboot your mood and, in all likelihood, improve how you actually play in addition to your general mood.
Play something else. Not forever or anything, but if you’re playing Titanfall and just having a god awful time with it, turn it off and boot up The Sims or DuckTales or something.
And finally, if nothing else… play with friends. Seriously, never doubt the power of friendship in regards to keeping things light. I’ve played games where I was by my lonesome, dominating, and was still miserable because of my teammates either being awful or being miserable themselves. On the flipside, when you play with friends you can be having your face stomped and still have a laugh about it.
Hell, that’s why we all play games in the first place, isn’t it?