I know it's senseless. I know it's unreasonable. I know it's unhealthy. There is, objectively, no reason to be in a bad mood because I lost a game being played for fun that has no stakes attached.
To be clear, this isn't directed at the person who beat me (unless it's someone who's really rubbing my face in it). I want to win, I'm doing my best to win, I wouldn't ask them to do any less, and I wouldn't get any satisfaction from a victory against someone who was pulling their punches anyway. My negative feelings are largely directed inward: when I lose, I feel like a failure even though I intellectually understand that you'd have to be a complete tool to judge anyone else so harshly for losing at a game.
I've been like this as long as I can remember. I've definitely gotten a much better handle on my emotions when I was young, but I'm sure it it still comes through, even if people don't say anything. It's not fair to the people I play with, and I wish I wasn't this way. I actually greatly prefer cooperative games over competitive games because of this, because that way if I lose, the other player(s) is/are in the same boat - we all failed together, so I can't be judged negatively in comparison to anyone.
Anyone else have similar issues? Anyone who can offer insight as to why I might feel this way?
This is like the opposite of your usual heated gamer moment.
I get it, though. With me, I feel like my mentality is that losing at a game makes it feel less fun in a way. I've had moments of playing multiplayer FPSes, and if I had an off-day where I struggled to get frags or do anything productive for my team, I'd get this sense of blues and feel that I'm wasting my time doing something that should not feel like the waste of time that it's feeling like. I feel like it should be fun, and it should take my mind off of any stress, but it stops being less about the fun and more about stress at that point.
This usually just gets me to "ragequit," which might not be the most appropriate terminology, though.