I love to win.

The smug sense of superiority I get when I overcome my opponents simply cannot be matched sometimes. It’s amusing to me to know that I have conquered friends, family, and strangers. It’s a license to brag. For a few shining moments, I am revered as something magical. Unstoppable. Truly the greatest.

That is, until the next round when a bullet sets up camp in my character’s head.

As the old adage goes, you can’t win them all. I used to believe that I was the exception. I was the kid who would flip the Monopoly board when I landed on my mom’s Boardwalk with a hotel on it. Get rid of that much of my money? No thank you. I’d rather just stop playing. I was fine with all the pieces scattered in the floor and on the table and the money fluttering away. As long as I didn’t have to pick it up, I was free to run crying to my room to pout. With each recurring incident, one of my parents or a member of my family would always look at me with disapproval and call me a sore loser.

“Sore loser,” I’d think. “Pshh. I’m a kid, I don’t even know what that means.” All that was clear to me was that when you win, you get everything. The approval, the euphoric feelings, and sometimes even prizes, especially at birthday parties. Long story short, I grew up one of the sorest losers to be found anywhere. No matter what game, console, board, PC, or even sport, all I wanted was to come out on top. And if I couldn’t? I’d just cheat my way there, because then I’d be a winner.

I never felt any remorse for being a spoiled brat, crying and pouting my way out of losses or demanding handicaps for my opponents until I began playing Mario Tennis for the Nintendo 64 with my dad. After numerous disputes with my parents over the years, I’ve come to find that gaming sessions with my father will usually mend any rift. My dad’s a big sports fan, but he is unable to play most. Sports games, to him, are a great way to experience them since he cannot. Of course, he annihilated me almost every match as Yoshi against my Daisy.

“YOU CHEATED!” I’d scream, and toss my N64 controller down in a fit of rage. This happened a lot. Mario Party became a solo affair. GoldenEye multiplayer wasn’t an option. All this time spent alone got me thinking.

Why was winning so important to me?

The short answer is that it really wasn’t. The more solitude I experienced, the more my mood began to deteriorate. I loved that time spent with my dad. One lucky day, he proposed we start up a match of Mario Tennis. Four games in, I had lost all but once. It didn’t matter, though. I had been having fun. I was enjoying the game, and that’s the point of gaming. To have fun. In fact, I wouldn’t even be here writing this if I didn’t enjoy gaming. However, though I have put beyond me the need to win everything I compete in, there are those who simply cannot stand to go 4 and 25 in Halo or suffer a loss in a Guitar Hero match.

As I have stated before, I love to experience any game that I possibly can. This leaves little time for competing in friendly online matches, unless I’m that frustrated with my current project that I just want to spend time online. I’m not into the MMORPGs because I want to finish as many games as I can. Simply put, I am not a competitive gamer at the moment. Actually, I’m going to pull a percentage out of the air here and wager that out of all the gamers who say they’re pro, maybe 30% actually are. With that said, it’s difficult to understand why winning must be the only perk that you get from gaming with others.

It’s one thing to enter matches with a group of trusted friends who don’t care about how well they do, but you can’t always rely on that. Sometimes you will either want to or have to play with strangers. Make some new friends, right? It’s just a bit hard to when half of your opponents on the losing side make lewd comments about you, your mother, your rank, and even your race, when they can’t even see you. The losing side reacts as if you ran over their dog. This isn’t just a scenario I face. Everyone has (or will have) experienced this in their online gaming career at some point. It’s as if nothing matters except for victory. The game can’t simply be fun. Flags have to be captured, foes must all be eliminated, and God forbid anyone die in the process. It’s as serious as a heart attack, and it’s often a life or death situation.

Not everyone has 70+ hours a week to spend memorizing maps, exploiting glitches, or upping their rank. What’s more, not everyone wants to. It obviously doesn’t make you less of a gamer, and it most certainly does not mean that you should be unwelcome because you might lose a match or two, or four, or twenty. It’s not wrong to strive for greatness, either, because with enough practice you could very well win the majority of the games you play. There is no guarantee, however, but more power to those who want to be the best at any given game. That’s their prerogative, and I respect that, especially the best of the best who really earned their stats.

I just want to play games. I just want to have fun. Real fun, the kind that comes from spending time with friends and meeting new people, not from telling everyone how much of a noob they are because they were virtually pumped full of lead for a good fifteen minutes. Being just that, a “noob”, is never anything to be ashamed of, if you really are a beginner and you aren’t just being insulted. It’s treated like such an enormous deal when someone is new to the game. Oh god, can’t have the noob on our team. Oh great, we’re going to lose now. Everyone was once new, but this wanting to win turns people into selfish braggarts who have no regard for others.

Let me put it this way: winning is NOT A BIG DEAL. Unless you’re getting paid to win, or your career is riding on it, there is no reason to become so hateful toward others who either did not further your cause or thwarted it. Sure you can strive to win, but don’t make it your m.o. Remember why you ever picked up a controller or a mouse in the first place.

Because I don’t want to be mixed up in your elitist nonsense. I don’t want to boost with you. I don’t want a modded controller, and I don’t want to hack like in the days of GunZ: The Duel. I want to play fair, and I want to play clean. I want to share my passion with you. I want to play and get a little better, because as we all should know by know it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.

How do you play your game?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 11:14 am and is filed under Video Games, Editorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.