Why are the communities of competitive games so notoriously toxic? Culture. I think books could be written about the 'cultures' of certain games, but basically, the culture of competitive games places too much value on rank and prowess. And this has a few consequences.
People react to this cultural pressure in different ways. The way we see this most often is people throwing temper tantrums at teammates for poor performances - the logical end-result if someone's worth is largely based off of how well they play. Or maybe they feel cheated of a rank, or number, because the matchmaker put them with someone who they consider lesser. This is a direct insult to them - seeing the game subtract from what literally defines their worth because of someone else feels awful.
This is where what I call de-'sweating' comes in. It doesn't seem to me that there is competition for the thrill of it anymore, but merely to dunk on the other dude across the screen. I don't know realistically how this happens, but the emphasis needs to move, or we get situations where kids sling racial slurs at each other because they couldn't win, and taking that therefore as an insult to their self-worth. Or burning themselves out at age 19 playing 9 hours a day trying to improve to a certain level, so they feel better about themselves.
Ladder anxiety is another common manifestation of this. But that's not the main concern, which is that the laser focus within these communities on your ability to play the game well, and not on competition itself or sportsmanship, fosters the awful environment within these games. De-'sweating' just means rank doesn't matter. It should be a tool for fostering fair competition and even play.
lunchtime text dump over
I remember a billion years ago when I was in middle school there was a kid who was super good at sports. Think about the stereotypical kid whose dad coaches the baseball, basketball, and football teams that his kid plays in, that was him.
So my non-sportsball ass was standing too close to my sportsball playing friends one day after lunch and I got roped into filling space while they all played basketball. Supersportsball guy was playing as well, on the other team.
For reasons inexplicable, I was able to steal the ball from him several times, not because I was good but just from shear dumb luck. And he lost his fucking mind. I'm pretty sure he was about half way to throwing punches.
It was freaking crazy that this kid who was the star athlete on the actual school's sports teams that actually played in competition, couldn't handle having a bad day while playing a pickup basketball game just to burn time before the lunch bell rang.
I guess its nice to know that people who play video games aren't all that different from the meat world jocks after all...right?
One spring when I was in high school, they did renovations to our gym. Since we couldn't use the changing rooms, the PE teachers just had us walk around town for the duration of the period. That was the most I ever enjoyed PE, because I didn't have to worry about my performance. I just enjoyed the sunshine and shot the shit with my friends.
Those "dad coaches" can be quite toxic as well. Once in a 5th grade baseball league, my coach said he was gonna sic his dog on me if i didnt start trying. In hindsight it wasnt a super serious threat but it spooked me at the time because the dog was there and off leash, and i had a mild dog phobia back then.
A lot of toxic ideas about competition probably stem from parents whos who desperately want to feel like theyre winning but can only do so by pressuring their children into being perfect and living vicariously through them.
Literally everyone thinks that they're a temporarily embarrassed eSports megachampion now. Or at the very least, enough people do that it makes it harder to play just for fun. Partly I'm sure it's driven simply by the existence of ladders and matchmaking, but mostly I think it's driven by the fact that a significant number of people really want to escape their lives and see the possibility of becoming a top level player in their favorite game as one of the remaining viable ways to do that. They might not even consciously realize that that's why they're taking the game as seriously as they do.
Here's my two cents.
Think a lot of people don't have much control over their lives apart from video games. When your teammate fucks up when you're having a good game, it removes that element of control. Also people don't have proper goals and ambitions out side of the games, so they become hyperfocused on ranking up and get weird and obsessive.
Also, free time. This is especially true for me personally. If I get home after a long day and just wanna chill to some vidya, but someone else griefs it, they're wasting my limited amount of time. Especially in competitive games where you can't just quit and go find another match, or where you know your team is doomed from the start but you still have to play out a futile 40 minute game. That shit sucks. I've never been a rager, and I can't be asked to flame my teammates, but whenever I've said 'fuck this' and shut my computer off mid game it's because of that.
A competitive ladder is a community created in the service of capitalist profit. Whatever tools or moderation is needed to keep the community civil can be discarded, because they're costs.
Indie and fan-run competitive games are nowhere near as toxic. Speedrun races are downright wholesome.
Fostering this elite gamer attitude is extremely profitable for the companies involved. How else is Logitech going to sell a $150 mouse if they don’t call it the elite gamer pro wireless mouse that’s endorsed by Your Favorite Player™?
The PC peripheral market is absolute trash and for example paying a small premium for a mouse+kb combo that doesn't suck is actually quite important for daily use. The problem here is that quality PC peripherals got shoved to the gaming market because businesses don't want to invest on that shit. If it were up to them you'd be using your old mouse with ball and Office 2002 on a fucking CRT monitor for all they care. The only people wanting to spend on quality setups are people that need it for their jobs, I mean as a professional requirement(e.g CGI farms) or individual content creators, otherwise the only real reason is entertainment because as I said, you don't need a 27in 1440p 120hz monitor for Excel.
So I would not approach it from this angle, I think historically the gaming market is what drives demand so of course they are pandering to gamers, but as I said if every businesses actually bothered with giving people decent peripherals then they wouldn't have to. I'd also say "extremely profitable" is an exaggeration since it is basically 2-3 corporations that make everything and they are not that big, look at Corsair and COVID they reported like 50% yoy growth.
Why? Not because people are suddenly considering themselves "pro gamers" but because having decent peripherals is essential to working at home comfortably and most people don't look at a $30 mouse and be like "hummm great I'll have that", people are definitely willing to pay even a small premium for that comfort, and believe me the comfort is real you don't want to use shitty PC hardware as some form of praxis.
on a fucking CRT monitor
you don’t need a 27in 1440p 120hz monitor for Excel.
Good CRTs from the early 2000s literally could do 1440p, 120hz, low latency with better color than any LCD.
I couldn't imagine letting a kid play an online multiplayer game in the same way they shouldn't watch anything on YouTube or browse Reddit.
children should just not be allowed on the internet. It really does just poison the brain. Boomers also should be allowed on. Maybe no one should be given internet access.
tbf the boomers, with no experience with the internet, got poisoned a lot worse than the zoomers who grew up knowing it's all bullshit.
I don't think that is true. boomers fall for more obvious lies, yes, but the entire way zoomers think has been corrupted by the net's influence.
Games like Blade Symphony, Jedi Knight Academy, and Absolver come to mind as the odd exceptions. There's ranked modes in those as well and people can and will be dicks, but there's also a communal aspect where people can just... sit there and watch other people fight. In fact, Blade Symphony's most popular mode for much of its active life was everyone just sitting in a "free for all server" and utterly ignoring the free-for-all aspect, instead just running up to random people and requesting duels. There's nothing really gained or lost, you get some currency either way for a decent fight I think, but the main goal is for everyone there to improve.
And so what happened was really fun - people started training each other. Freely sharing information, testing things out, constructive criticism, even organized attempts to bootcamp new players joining in so that they can fight the vets better.
There's still that hierarchical mindset that absolutely ends up being the source of much drama, someone on the server is The Best and someone is going to feel a need to argue that it's them and not the people they don't like, but that cooperative aspect of treating an FFA gamemode as a makeshift dojo was really fucking special. I wish more competitive games would have those setups, where you're all trying to improve together and teaching someone else to beat you is as satisfying as winning yourself.
I spent a lot of hours hanging out on the landing platform of the Bespin map watching duels or fighting them. I don't even think I ever got even a little bit good at that game, but the server/community I was with was my formative internet experience. I fukken knew everybody on that server (and on our BBCode forum), compared to today where in every game I play the avatars come and go and I can barely tell one apart from the other. It's like when you read people predicting what the internet will be in the nineties and compare it to how it actually turned out - communities separated only by communication at the speed of light, or individuals separated from each other by an algorithm-based barrier.
Single player competitive games are more fun than team-based ones to me because of all the people who take out their feelings on you because they know they'll never-ever see you again.
