It’s Not Losing That’s the Problem But How You Lose
The title of this post doesn’t really cover what I’m trying to express but it’s the best I could come up with that wasn’t an essay in itself. Now I’m going to try to be as brief as possible, as I know sometimes I write too much and get bogged down in the minutiae. Hopeful you’ll follow my train of thought. So to begin, some video games have a very specific fail mechanic. If you play Mortal Kombat either against bots or with another player, there can be only one winner. If it’s not you then you have lost. It’s the same in Call of Duty Warzone if you play Battle Royal Mode. Looking to other genres such as MMOs, if you don’t defeat the boss at the end of the raid and your team wipes, then again you’ve lost. But this doesn’t have to be a problem. The player knows in advance exactly what the criteria for winning is. You lose due to the mechanics of the game, the skill of other players or the lack of your own.
As a man of a certain age, I tend not to get too annoyed when I lose playing video games. More often than not what frustrates me is my own incompetence and poor reactions. I am more often than not, the architect of my own demise. And when I play any sort of game in a pick up group, I lower my expectations by default. Sometimes I’ll find myself in a group that plays as a team, follows a strategy and performs well. All of which is done with the minimum of conversation, be it text or voice. On occasions it goes the other way where the selfish behaviour and stupidity of some players actively impede your progress and this is something I find less palatable. A point I shall return to in a moment. Overall failure and losing are an inherent part of video games. Hopefully you learn from your mistakes and “git gud” or something like that. Also, although I’m not exactly enamoured by elitist gaming culture or like over competitive people (they’re so tediously wearing), winning too easily or too often does mitigate the point of certain types of games.
Still with me? Good. I’m nearly at my point. To summarise, losing is an integral part of gaming although you don’t have to like it. It is an important component that contributes to the overall environment from which the fun, enjoyment or whatever else you get from video games derives. It is not malevolent per se. However, there is another kind of losing or fail state that comes via a human agency. It is predatory in nature and happens when you lose because someone decided to mess with you. It’s the gaming equivalent of someone coughing or nudging you when you’re playing darts and about to throw. This manifests itself in PVP and survival games when players predate other new or less knowledgeable players. Or in racing games when one player knows they will not win so willfully causes carnage or tries to block others. I saw such behaviour today while watching someone streaming Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout. At first glance this looks a very benign game but it would appear that players will wait at the finishing line to try and stop people from crossing. Even in a easygoing, fun environment such as this, there are still people who want to fuck with you.
And therein is the issue. Life is problematic enough because some people just aren’t happy unless they’re doing something to others. Do we really need this in our game space as well? I don’t mind losing, failing or getting beaten in a game by its mechanics or more skilled players. But I don’t want to be inconvenienced because someone just wants to fuck with me for the sake of just doing so. And this is where I trot out my standard argument about how being a paying customer changes the dynamics of gaming. Forget notional ideas about freedom of expression and emergent gameplay. The moment money is paid, I expect rules and parameters to constrain others bullshit shenanigans. The same way when I go swimming at the sports centre and racing competitively, no one is allowed to enter my lane and mess with me.
Irrespective of what genre(s) of game you play, I think we can all make the distinction between losing in an intended fashion IE falling foul of a game’s fail state mechanics and having something done to you by some asshole. It’s paradoxical that developers will always sing from the rooftops about the superiority of playing with and against real people and then subsequently being utterly flabbergasted by the fact that people treat each other abominably. But players will happily indulge in sociopathic behaviour if given an opportunity. Look at the recurring problem with aimbots that plague popular FPS games. As for losing “building character”, that’s a bogus term and a flawed philosophy. But losing in the manner discussed is an object lesson in why so many problems in life are just people problems. As a society, we still await a solution to this, although judicious use of a claw hammer as a correctional tool is a good place to start.
