Competitive Gaming Anxiety

I’m no good at competitive sports—I never have been.

Much of this is down to natural clumsiness. My clumsiness—I once, as a small child, managed to slip on a boat and end up with my head jammed between two bollards. At least, in retrospect I believe they were bollards—seems to be irreparable, which suits me.

I understand that people say playing sports can actually reduce clumsiness, but I found all the shouting (mostly along the lines of “That’s your own goal!”) rather distracting.

But I’m not also not very good at competitive gaming, and that’s not down to clumsiness.

Some of it’s down to attitude—I’m both a bad winner and a bad loser, and frankly I don’t even like to play games with myself sometimes. But then most of my family are also game-based gloaters—well, alternately gloaters and sulkers, anyway—so I can shake that off.

But gaming also brings out a sort of anxiety. Especially those games that require you to get to a certain point before you can save.

I’m no good at the strategy-style games that Nick so thoroughly understands. I tend to get attached to my little pixellated men, and no sooner have I started to build up my mighty empire—usually by managing to build a well, and perhaps some hovels—then barbarians come out of nowhere and slaughter all my poor peasants.

The same is true for combat-based RPGs, except in that case it’s my avatar that gets repeatedly slaughtered.

Even games that have no combat breed their own kind of anxiety. Nick introduced me to the card-collecting and card-stealing game Packrat on Facebook—the very same game I was wasting the workday playing when my computer exploded, and which is consequently ambiguously immortalised in my astonishingly bad haikus. That rapidly became an obsession but, although the developers claim you can play it solo, there are various tricks built in to induce you to invite friends, such as restricted access to the markets that sell rare cards. And once you’re playing against real people—especially if, like me, all your Facebook friends are people you know in real life—you start feeling a little guilty about nicking cards off them.

This morning, for example, I nicked a high-end card from a friend—a card, in fact, that they would have had to spend some time constructing from lesser cards—and then felt so guilty that I spent forty minutes recreating the card myself and then dropping it back in their pack. (Hey, if you’re reading, I’m really sorry I nicked your Tangerine Turbo!)

But I like puzzle games. Those I can handle.

That’s why I loved Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords. Any RPG that uses the Bejeweled playfield as the basic combat mode for defeating the evil Lord Bane is my kind of game. In fact, Puzzle Quest became a bit of an obsession, and led to about six weeks’ worth of conversations along these lines:

NICK: Hey, how did your day go? Productive?

ME: Well, I got past the two-headed ogre in the end, and took his battle hammer as my reward. That’s awesome—I haven’t had any trouble with the liches after that. But then I had to get assistance from a fire-worshipping minotaur cult. I had to find the pieces of their former robotic leader, and reconstitute him so he could take back the northlands from Lord Bane’s emissary, and that was a bit tricky—I had to go through initiations and then fight a fire sprite in a volcano, and I just wasn’t getting the right gems, so I couldn’t build up any mana, and anyway he was immune to my earth magic—

NICK: . . . I meant with your thesis.

ME: Oh, right. That. Okay, I guess.

In fact, I’m now excited to see that there’s a sequel coming out this year, although I’m a little concerned about the introduction of the Tetris mechanic—I’ve never been any good at Tetris.

In short, I suspect I’m the kind of gamer that handheld systems were made for. The PSP and the Nintendo DS—especially the DS—have excellent games, but most importantly they’re really designed to be played solo—even if you do want to use the multi-player mode for the DS, for example, you still need to own a copy of the game for each player.

So, they’re ideal for a player like me. The computer players don’t care if I gloat or smacktalk, and I don’t have to worry about disrupting anyone else’s gameplay.

Now, if I could only convince the computer-controlled characters in Mario Party DS that the entire purpose of the game—its whole reason for existing—is for me to win every single time, we’d be laughing.