Here is how we can stop ruining gaming for ourselves

Insecurity is an insidious and cruel little human emotion we have to wrestle with on a daily basis. That feeling of not being good enough or the fear that people will perceive you as pathetic or a failure. It’s a natural emotion that all of us feel and I particularly felt it during my many years as a gamer. Games inherently have a close relationship with failure because it is also what sets it apart from other mediums. Pac-Man can get killed by the ghosts, Nathan Drake can take a swan dive into the side of a Scottish cliff or Master Chief can throw himself with a sticky grenade and the universe is doomed.

Back in my childhood, I explored every game I could get my hands on and naturally, I would totally suck at first. I’m no savant or gaming prodigy, so there were many deaths and retries, but the fun was to keep trying until you beat it. Getting better bit by bit, facing each challenge as it comes. And that ecstasy after you’ve overcome a challenge that has been beating your ass for days is one of the main reasons why I fell in love with games in the first place.

But as I grew older, games got significantly more complicated than killing some big turtle dragon at the end of a castle. New mechanics were introduced every year, the general skill level required steadily rose and with the dawn of online multiplayer, you now had to contend with everyone else too. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, I’d even say it was a natural evolution, but with this came a lingering feeling of inadequacy. There was now a ranking system attached to the fun and no matter how hard you try, you can’t be number one in everything.

The Xbox 360 introduced something called Gamerscore that was literally a point total of your achievements across all your games. Watching that number climb was like crack to me. It was a numerical representation of how skilled of a gamer I am. When I saw someone with a lower score than me, I felt like the superior gamer. But what did this “superior” gamer do to get those points? He played children games like Shrek The Third: The Videogame and Avatar: The Last Airbender while using guides written by other people to get the most points possible.

It was all very toxic and led me down a weirdly obsessive path where I didn’t play games for fun, but to achieve something. To be the best, no matter how droll and soul sucking it may be. In multiplayer games, I would look up what the most broken builds were and try to emulate what the pros were doing. This was all insecurity at play here. I tied my self-worth to how good I am at my hobby and when I couldn’t keep up, I would cheat and take the path of least resistance. While my Gamerscore and kill counts were high, my spirit couldn’t be lower.

Then a couple of years ago, I decided that I will stop using any form of outside assistance in my games. No guides, no walkthroughs, no “top things you need to know” videos, just me and my abilities. It was a drastic and scary change for me, but one I was prepared to undergo. Even though most of my accomplishments thus far were fraudulent or heavily guided, I still picked up some skills and understanding that I wouldn’t otherwise have.

I used to start games on the max difficulty and scour every inch of the environment for anything I could’ve missed. This made playing games both frustrating and anxiety-inducing. Not really something you associate with fun videogames, now is it? I’d use completionist guides that felt like they were written by a dry piece of toast and I’d end up relieved to see the credits rather than feel any sort of joy.

Now I couldn’t care less about artificially inflated difficulty and collectibles. It’s all about the discovery and if I miss anything, that’s okay, as long I’m making progress. I cannot be perfect in every game I play and accepting that fact gave me freedom again. If I’m messing up, I try to figure out why, not immediately go to Google and find a reddit comment that solves all my problems.

My insecurity was replaced with adaptiveness, my anxiety got replaced with curiosity and my love for gaming gradually grew instead of stagnating. However, I found the most interesting findings to come from my experiences in multiplayer games. I’ve been noticing a slow shift in player skill throughout the years, namely everyone has become incredibly good. You can blame it on me becoming old if you want, but people weren’t hitting these types of shots in Call of Duty 4. I was there when the ancient bullets were shot and the best players in those lobbies would be considered mediocre these days.

This can be attributed to the obvious like bigger player bases and people understanding mechanics faster, but I think that’s just a small part of this. Whenever a game comes out, there are people playing for 20 hours on launch day, data miners going crazy and crappy gaming sites posting the most braindead guide articles you’d ever see. The meta is figured out within hours and anything that is seen as a slight advantage gets abused to high heaven until a patch comes out. Those same people that exploited the game will then turn around and say it’s trash or a dead game, completely oblivious that they’re the ones doing the damage.

I had absolutely no idea what the metas were in the games I was playing. This was an obvious disadvantage, but also a unique opportunity for me. The meta changes so often that I sometimes found myself on top of it just through sheer guesswork. Usually I experiment with everything until I find what is most fun for me personally. Following a meta feels to me now like you’re taking the road most travelled, which is also the most boring. The road where you’re never interfacing with anything unless it gives the most optimal results. Doesn’t that sound sad to you? And for what? A big old rank that nobody cares about?

And don’t even get me started on the toxicity. Everyone expects you to know everything immediately when playing a team game and when you inevitably mess up, it’s a slew of slurs and calling you an idiot. It’s like trying to learn how to sing on the stage of a packed Sydney Opera House filled with racists. Nobody once thought to maybe help out and mentor a new player so that the game you seemingly love so much can get more activity? Why has winning become more of a priority than our humanity? I can tell you why. Insecurity. It’s the devil that made me lose my passion for games, so I should know.

Once I let go of those insecurities, the fun started returning. That feeling I was chasing as a kid is the same feeling I’m chasing now, funnily enough. I ruined gaming for myself by turning it into a status symbol and I see so many people doing the exact same thing. But I have hope that people reach a point where they’re exhausted and embrace being naive and open to surprises again. Like anyone, I love to win, but if it’s at the cost of my own enjoyment and that of others, then I’d rather lose a thousand times while I have a smile on my face.

You don’t always have to be the best. Someone else much younger and smarter than you is going to be the best, let’s be real. Don’t let insecurity get you like it did me. It’s an old saying, but perfect truly is the enemy of good. Do what you love doing. And if you happen to love being at the top of the leaderboard, do it on your own terms. Not because you saw a broken build on YouTube. Respect yourself more than that.