Those who cannot play computer games without becoming enraged at the better performance of other players deserve one response: deliberate efforts to enrage them further.
This remedy bears new consideration in light of the recent incident in which an enraged gamer threatened to blow up 400 schools in Britain. While this is obviously a particularly concerning manifestation of gamer rage; one that requires criminal prosecution, it does speak to the significant number of gamers who suffer rage issues when they lose or struggle to win.
I recognize that most gamers play computer games because doing so offers relaxing escapism that reduces one’s stress. I’m in that category. Yet it’s clear some gamers see the game they are playing as a means of personal validation. Correspondingly, when these individuals lose, they lash out. YouTube is full of videos exemplifying such “gamer rage,” but I’ll offer a personal example here.
Playing Grand Theft Auto 5, I see my gamer self as an arbiter of justice. In GTA 5’s dystopian false world of wannabe gangsters, I like to play as a fighter pilot police officer. So while playing the game online, I tend to be orbiting in a harrier jump jet variant over the ocean that forms the outer perimeter of the GTA 5 map. Here, I wait on the far side of the map for the radar to bleep up with an indication that a gang is attempting to smuggle guns/drugs. When I destroy a convoy of pretend narcotics or pretend illegal guns, the pretend gang who attempted to pretend-smuggle said pretend narcotics tends to become truly enraged. And that’s where my enjoyment comes in: receiving messages from these self-styled gangsters who threaten to hack me or attack me is especially amusing. For we both know that the gang, their goods and the game are not real life.
Yet to the gang, the game is real enough to matter. Thus, the measure of my victory is rendered in the transposition of the gang’s game loss into real life rage.
If you escalate enough against these immature gamer-gangsters, they will eventually “rage quit.” Which is to say, they will turn off their game and do something else. That’s my personal favor to them — saving the ragers from themselves, and helping them find something more worthwhile to do with their time.
