Competition in Video Games A.K.A RAGE!!!!!

In one of my previous posts I mentioned the game League of Legends. Now I am not going to go off on my usual rants about how exciting I think the game is, don't worry, I will spare you this time :). In fact, I will not be blogging about a video game as I normally do. Instead, I thought it would be interesting to talk about a behavior that I found to be very common when playing with my friends and even with people online.

Usually on the weekends and sometimes on Tuesdays, me and my friends would gather together under one roof and have ourselves a good old fashioned "LAN party". We would log onto League of Legends and join a game with other players around the globe for some strategic action. As we start up playing, depending on which team begins to take the advantage, slander, obscenities, and threats would soon fill the screen. The loosing team does not, and probably never will, learn to loose graciously. Even when we are winning and are sometimes unfortunate enough to have a teammate die, we too become venom spitting lunatics. This extreme competitiveness is not just prevalent in LoL, but in any video game.

As with any video game, or I should just say game, people are going to be better than other people. Sorry, its just the way of life. But when two people are usually on even footing, competitiveness shows its sometimes ugly face. With every point, kill, goal or win, the two competitive players don't look at it as that there opponent is very good and that they need to learn to adapt to playing against them, but instead, they have the idea in there head that if someone is doing better than them, then it means they themselves are weak and will never be as good as there opponent.

But this is not true, as I said before, there will always be people who are better at things than other people, but those other people can sure as hell try to hone their skills so that they give the better players a run for there money. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. Practice will help develop ones skills in a game to become a better player and who knows, one that might surpass the skills of a naturally talented competitor.

Competition is a good thing, it is what drives us to do better. But never get sore if you loose, because that only means you will learn from your mistakes and become a better player, even if it is by just a little bit, next time.