Gamer Rage

I'm not even sure this is a real thing to anyone but me, because maybe I have serious issues, but in the event there are others out there who suffer from this, let's talk about Gamer Rage.

Two years ago,  I had to take a break from almost all forms of video gaming, particularly classic gaming.  The reason:  video games were sending me into a blind rage.  I'm talking Wolverine level, berserker, "there's something very, very wrong with that guy" rage.  Think Road Rage, but with video games and no other offending party.

If I think back, getting irrationally angry at video games is something I have been doing for about 15 years, since I first got back into classic gaming.  It would flare up from time to time and then calm down and go away.  Usually it would be enough for me to get really pissed at a certain game, then I would put the game away, switch to something else, and all was cool.  But about two years ago, the rage went from being spikes on the graph to being a haze that clouded my entire gaming experience.  It would take about 10 minutes of one particularly frustrating game to just wreck the whole gaming session.  No matter what games I switched to, the fury burned inside me and would not go away.  Pretty soon, I was getting no joy whatsoever from one of my most favorite pastimes and stress relievers.  I was getting so worked up playing games, that I had to quit.  It was honestly affecting my regular life.  I was getting angry at something that was supposed to be fun and I was missing a critical source of everyday stress release.  It was bad.

So I quit.  I gave up almost all forms of video games.  Classic games had to go, no question.   I don't play many modern games, so that wasn't too much to give up, but I also shut down most of my app gaming.  (Those of you lamenting my departure from games like Smurf Village, Dragonvale and that Mermaid game will now understand that whole thing a little bit better).  I was reserved to playing a few inoffensive app games (Final Fantasy Record Keeper, the main one of late) and Minecraft, and that was about it.  Every now and then I would get the itch and I would dig out the NES or VCS and give it a try, but I could tell within minutes that it would be best if I stuck to the stuff that wasn't transforming me into angry Homer Simpson.

Since it was affecting my everyday life, I thought it was smart to talk it over with the wife.  She's a gamer too and she doesn't experience Gamer Rage, so I thought maybe she had some insight as to why I was having trouble.  "It's that stupid score book you keep and the fact that you won't play a game after you've beaten it or rolled the score.  You aren't having fun playing games anymore because you've made it too competitive."  And she was partly right.  From 2002-2008 I compiled a score book for all the VCS and NES games that kept score (and were worth playing).  During that time I pushed myself to the very limits of what I was capable of on a given game.  For example, my personal best Haunted House score on Game 9 is a completed game using only 2 matches and 7 lives remaining.  That's just stupid and virtually impossible to beat without blind luck.  Using that example, any time I would sit down to play Haunted House, perfection was just about the only goal.  So if a game used more than 7 lives or 2 matches, it was RESET.  As you might imagine this led to a  lot of RESET.  And since the goal is so lofty, lots of RESET built up lots of frustration and lots of frustration led to anger.

I did this to Baseball Stars II because I was mad at Battletoads.  Perfectly normal, perfectly healthy, right?

It should come as no surprise to anyone that one of the culminating factors in my decision to give video games a hard break was my participation in the Atariage.com High Score Club.  I was a player in the club for a couple of years and was having a really good time.  It was just for fun and was great to post scores up against fellow lovers of the VCS.  Then I got fairly high up in the rankings.  At one point I think I was jockeying for first through third place with a field of absurdly good players.  And the desire to be the best was too much.  I was playing games like a fiend.  I was playing games on emulators at work and playing right up to the deadline to try and keep my raking high.  And, I was getting angry when I wasn't in the top 3 on a given game.  So quitting the High Score Club (mid-season, no less) cold turkey was step one in defeating my Gamer Rage.

My wife was right, the level of competition was one of the major factors contributing to my Gamer Rage.  I was playing against increasingly higher stakes, whether it was my own personal best scores or other, incredibly skilled players.  But there was also another component and it seemed to stem from a lack of patience born of the pursuit of perfection.

Every time I played a game, I was expecting to be the best, at the top of my game, right from the start.  Anyone who plays video games at any level knows that some of the best games feature learning curves, sometimes big ones.  You can pick up Centipede right now and play one hell of a game, cold.  But if you play Centipede for 30 minutes or an hour, you'll likely find yourself in a groove where you and the game tune into each other and operate on a commiserate level.  It is at this point you might find that it is much easier to obtain high scores and avoid blunders that end your game prematurely.  Beamrider is a another game that comes to mind which thrives on this groove mentality.  I'm sure you have your favorites as well.

The problem was, every time I played a game like that, I expected to just be in the groove, from cold. I wasn't giving myself time to warm back up into a game I perhaps had not played for years.  I expected that I would be right back at my peak level just by plugging the game in and holding the controller.  From an outside perspective that certainly seems ridiculous, but from inside the mind of a gamer, driven by competition, even internal, this was just how it should be.  I know I can clear the first maze on Jr. Pac-Man without losing a life, therefore losing a life on the first maze is absolutely unacceptable.  Seems nutty, right?  But that's where I was at.  It was not going well at all and I didn't see any way clear of that mindset.  I once ripped the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (NES) cartridge from my system and launched it at the window (nearly breaking both) because I couldn't get past the barrels rolling through town. (and that game is riddled with glitches that actually make it impossible to beat!)

Several years ago, I participated in an experiment during my time at NintendoAge.com the goal of which was to determine the Top 25 most difficult NES games of all time.  Long time fans will recall the fruits of that ultimately unharvested labor were borne out here at EF.  (I'm proud to say it is one of the most popular features on this blog, still to this day people read it and talk about it, yay me!)  During that project, we were tasked with playing a good-sized list of NES games in order to determine the difficultly of the games and how to rank them.  The parameters of the experiment required us to play each game for a minimum of 5 hours of total game play.  Doesn't sound like much, but consider that two of the games on that list were Ikari Warriors and Conan.  Neither game lasts for more than about 45 seconds per play.  So imagine playing the same 45 seconds of Ikari Warriors, dying almost immediately, 300 times.  That required a LOT of patience.  And you know what?  I very nearly beat Conan and got way farther in Ikari Warriors than I could have ever hoped or wanted.  Why?  Because I stuck with it.  I pushed past the frustration and anger and annoyance that those games generate in absurd quantities, and I really got to know them, inside and out, and I really, honestly played them.  Sure those moments of clarity don't come until about 3 hours in, but they do come.  Honestly, that's how Uncanny X-men for the NES became one of my favorite games for that system.  I just stuck with it long enough to find the fun.  You can read all about here, if you missed it.

Considering the sources of my Gamer Rage, and the experience detailed above, I decided to try some new tactics to see if I could put the joy back into my gaming sessions.  First, I decided the score book would stay.  I worked hard for those records and they weren't going anywhere.  Keeping scores is part of my video game heritage, from my childhood days of gaming with my dad.  I couldn't give that up. However, I have some new rules for playing any classic game.  First,  I must play it a minimum of 5 times.  If I can't warm back up to a game within 5 attempts, then I just move on, play something else. Second, no RESETS.  No matter how dismally a game starts out, I play it through.  And that means play it through.  I'm all too tempted to get angry again and just run my ship into the asteroids 3 times so I can start over, but that doesn't help the situation.  It's like pinball. Pinball is a game of one ball. It really is.  You can play all 3 (or 5) balls in a pinball game and score all of your points on a single ball.  So if that first ball drains, you don't just TILT the machine.  Video games are much the same way.  So you die on the first maze on Jr. Pac-Man?  So what?  You may go three more mazes without dying on your next man.  I realize that this sounds like common sense to you non-enraged gamers out there, but for people where I was a few years back, this is a real coping mechanism and thus far I am happy to say it is working.

That isn't to say I don't find myself reverting back to the Incredible Gaming Hulk from time to time.  Of course I do.  You don't just fix a problem like this with an overnight epiphany.  However, I am back to where I am enjoying classic games and my gaming sessions are lasting much longer.  Those of you following my Atari 2600 Score-a-long over on the facebook page are seeing the results of this.

For me, at least, Gamer Rage is a real thing and it is something I, a lifetime gamer, find myself grappling with.  Honestly, I'm not a super competitive person, but in this one area, I found that I was vulnerable to that tendency.  I don't know if anyone else out there is noticing this as part of their gaming experience, but if you are, I strongly advise that you take a break.  Take a step back, look at how you are playing games.  Think about why you are getting angry during game play and consider what might be triggering it.  Then figure out how to combat it.  There are going to be strategies for setting the rage aside and returning the fun to video games.  If your games aren't fun, why are you playing?

Atari 2600 Reactor: One of the Greatest Video Games EVER?

Yeah, you heard me.  You can keep your War of Duty 9 and your Halos and Grand Theft Criminals and whatever else passes for a video game these days and give me a good ol' classic from the dawn of gaming:  Reactor.

Reactor might just be one of the best video games ever for one very simple, but very important reason:  it's unique in almost every possible way.  None of the grist mill games above can even pretend to say that.  Reactor is a game that requires quick reflexes, intense concentration, lots and lots of luck, and a willingness to completely abandon the idea of strategy.  Let me explain:

Reactor is a game born of the Cold War.  Nuclear Winter was an ever-present threat and the mystique around nuclear energy was never higher.  The fear that a nuclear reactor might go all Chernobyl on your butt was as real as the duck and cover drill.  So what do we do when we are scared of something?  We make a video game out of it, to help us feel like we have some measure of control over the situation.  No different from the duck and cover drill, actually.  Maybe that is over analyzing the situation a bit, or maybe not, but either way, Reactor comes to us from a culture very occupied with nuclear possibilities.

The point of the game is damage control.  You have a reactor on your hands that is about to go critical and ruin everyone's day in a radical way (how you like me now?).   It's up to you to get in there, literally, and get a handle on the situation.  Nuclear particles, you can decide what that means, are loose and bouncing around like mad threatening to melt down the core of the reactor.  It is your job to smash those particles against the walls of the chamber and also to use them to knock down the control rods that will calm the core and prevent meltdown.  However, there is a catch:  you can't touch anything except the enemy particles.  Contact with the walls or the core and it's Fissionville for you.  Imagine the game of Operation except instead of removing the medical issues you had to smash them against the sides of the game board without getting buzzed.  All of this might sound tough, but what makes it truly insidious is that the particles push back, and hard.  So while you are pushing them, they are pushing you and you find yourself in a dance toward destruction.  More on that later.

So you have to smash the particles and knock down the rods to keep the reactor core in check.  See while you are playing bounce house with the neutrinos, the core is steadily growing outward from the center, threatening to engulf you and all of Western culture.  Oh and on alternating levels the core turns into a swirling vortex that can suck you inside and smash you to bits.
The game is called "Reactor," but it should be called "Constant Challenge."

So the very premise alone is pretty unique.  The closest thing I can think of that is similar is Mutant Virus for the NES, but that has far more puzzle elements and takes a different part of your soul when you lose.  There isn't even a game on for the Atari 2600 generation of consoles that is like this game.  (I realize Reactor was an arcade game first and console game second, but I am focusing on the game I know and love and fear)

At its heart, Reactor is a finesse game AND a twitch game, requiring precise control and the ability to make sudden and erratic adjustments purely on instinct.  This is at least partly why I am terrible at it (I really really suck at finesse games, see also Gravitar and Thrust +), but even though I am a dismal player, I am drawn to this game like a drunken moth to a blowtorch.  Despite being a game that wants random chaotic perfection, it is also the kind of game that demands you play one more time because you know this time you will be able to avoid the stupid mistake that caused your game to end the last time.  You won't be able to, of course, but you are left with the feeling that you might.  You won't.

And why not?  Because there is no successful strategy to playing this game.  There just isn't.  Forget what the instruction manual says in the back.  Forget what legions of nerds on Atariage tell you, there is no strategy for playing this game and succeeding.  The only thing you require to do well at Reactor is absurd reflexes and infallible instincts.  Sure, you can deploy your decoys by the bonus chambers to rack up major points.  Sure you can clockwise rotate the vortex swirl to knock out particles in the vortex levels, these are all great things to do, but knowing that you should do them, and being able to actually execute those strategies is completely different.
The core of this game is a dance, as I mentioned above.  You and the upwards of forty nuclear particles (that come at you in waves, not all at once) engage in a dance that is part dare and part aggression.  The particle charges at you, you dodge, it dodges, you lunge, it dodges, you dodge, it lunges, you bounce off one another, maybe it hits a wall, maybe it is destroyed, or maybe it just lunges back at you and you dodge, and it dodges, so you lunge, and it dodges, then it lunges and you lunge and you miss and so on and so on, and so on.  Eventually, one of you hits the wall and is destroyed.  Sometimes it's you, sometimes it's the particle, but that is the only way the dance ends.  If the particle is destroyed, then more appear to resume the dance.  And you are often dancing this dance with three to four partners, not just one.

Yes, the particles sway and you can sometimes anticipate where their momentum will take them, but not always.  Hell, not often.  You can try your hardest to lure them, knock them, or even just lead them into the bonus chambers to score maximum points, but you can never reliably get them in there.  You can set a decoy right outside the entrance to the chamber or right next to the control rods, but there is no guarantee the particles are going to do anything other than sway around, dancing to and fro.  And so, you must dance.

And this is why you always think that next time you will do better.  It's like the Lotto.  But all the while it is mocking you with its sinister dance, it is also seducing you into playing it more and more.  I've rage quit this game so many times, my controllers won't speak to me any more, and yet still I play another game.  You can play for 15 minutes or 15 seconds, but every game is new and different and you have no idea how long you are going to last.

This is my personal best shattering score submission for the High Score Club.  Too bad another cat has already beaten it 6x over!

It's unique, infinitely challenging, loaded with unlimited replay value and eschews any set strategy in favor of madcap reflexes and instinct.  I cannot name too many other games that can make that claim and successfully back it up.  That is why I say Reactor is probably one of the greatest video games ever created.

Oddly enough we are played Reactor this week in the Atariage High Score Club.  You should drop by and play with us, is good fun!