Musings on a game of Mechwarrior: Dark Age
The simple fact of the matter is, as much as I enjoy all kinds of games, I am a rotten loser. It’s just something built into my personality, and I’ve never been able to overcome it. I honestly don’t know how to be casual and cheerful about losing a game; I envy those who have mastered that. I sympathized greatly with Jim Kirk in The Wrath of Khan when he stated flatly, “I don’t like to lose.”
Still, I want to be a good sport. Win or lose, I’ll want to play again, and throwing a fit can make it hard to find repeat opponents. So, when the burning feelings of anger and embarrassment hit, all I know how to do is to try to keep them hidden inside, let them sear through me quickly, and be calm and normal by the time I’m asked if I’d like to play again.
Well, I have to face facts… that’s not working very well any more. Shutting down my feelings fails completely around friends who know me and can see right through my mask. Besides, I can tell that my spirit is beginning to rebel against the decades of attempted stoicism; the mask is getting thinner and more transparent with every use.
I just have to figure out how not to let it bother me when I lose. Or give up all forms of competitive gaming; but that’s not exactly the answer I’m looking for.
Tags: gaming, philosophy
Let me know if you come up with a good answer.
Just keep repeating to yourself “This is only a game. It’s not like I’m playing for the fate of the world”.
Ignore this if you are, in fact, playing for the fate of the world.
I don’t like to loose, either; the hardest part of gaming for me is usually convincing myself that it’s just a game. I tend to burn out on things by taking them too seriously, and then it becomes work that I’m doing because I don’t want to loose, not something I’m doing for fun. The problem is, it generally works; when I obsess about a game seriously, I usually can get good enough to win regularly – but not have fun doing it.
I realized the other day that, after having been loaned Armored Core 2, I’d spent almost three hours working with the construction system, the hint book, on-line references, my trusty HP calculator, and some fiddling around in Excel *without having gone on any missions yet*. I pulled out the disk and played some Gauntlet.
The related problem I have is that I’ve gotten more and more disillusioned with zero-sum games as the years go by. That was one reason I liked Legends of the Five Rings; it was possible that *everyone* ended the game better off than they started, the winner just ended up *more* better off (we had several people that liked playing Unicorn, Crane and Lion for honor wins). When I play Civilization 3, I play to make my civilization the best possible; I’ll certainly defend myself, and even occasionally strike first if necessary to defend my people or provide them with essential goods, but my goal is to pull myself up, not push others down.
I could probably ramble on about this more, but this is your journal, not mine. Perhaps during Ifest we can sit down a bunch of people and chat about winning and loosing, zero-, positive-, and negative-sum games, and other things.