Out of Pod Experience

I consider myself NOT to have much of 'competitive nature'.

I mean since I was young, I didn't care so much about competition. I enjoyed sports like most other boys did growing up at my time, playing football, basketball, whatever team sports we could make up teams for. I even played for school teams and captained the team for a year, but I was never 'aggressive' about 'winning'. I was 'cheerful' and tried to get my team to cheer up and play more positively, etc, but I never got 'angry' at my team for losing or not performing well.

I don't know. It was 90s, and at some point it was actually even 'not cool' to be competitive and 'try hard' to win. Kids (including me) were into 'Grunge', listening to Kurt Cobain sing repeatedly about how he is a 'loser', with unwashed hair & shabby looks being the thing, and 'not caring' was the cool thing. If you took something so serious that you 'lost your cool', you were not cool.

There were other things I liked, like doodling silly things, reading (whatever, from comics to classic literature), making (sometimes horrible) music, etc. But in general, it was never about 'winning' or 'being top ranked' or whatever.

Even when it came to computer games, a lot of it had to do with 'messing about'. I was part of the 'FPS scene' from quite early on. Having grown up on Wolfenstein 3D and the original Doom, and getting on the modems to play the original Rainbow Six online matches (which, IIRC, came much earlier than Counter Strike).

But as I grew older, and came in contact with wider social circle, moved countries, generations on the Internet changed, etc, I found that many people took competition very seriously. Maybe my highschool/middleschool was 'too small' to ever actually seriously compete for trophies anyway so that's why no one really cared much, but some kids we did play against in tournaments and such were very competitive. They would shout and scream at their team mates to perform better, etc, and get very upset when they lost. Also on the online games, people took things very seriously. They cared about win ratio, their rank, stats, etc, as more and more of these things got recorded and became available for view in public domain.

I was a WOW player for long time (at least a few years), and even there some people were quite 'competitve'. They would whine endlessly when their 'team' didn't perform well on battleground matches, and later came Arenas, which obviously were geared towards competition.

Then I started to play EVE, and all other games and such kinda looked a bit 'silly' to me. I mean, why get so salty and cry so much in WOW when all you gotta do is respawn? lol?

EVE felt pretty sick & real. When you lost, you lost ISK, which meant time/effort. Especially when you are a noob starting out, the ISK/time lost for each pvp loss was pretty significant. Every noob mistake & even loss in PVE missions (which were bound to happen if you are a noob) felt very heavy. I still remember losing my first battlecruiser in lvl 3 mission in high sec, and it took me quite some time to go back to lvl 2 to scrap up the ISK to buy & fit a new BC ready to run lvl 3 again. While even back then there were many resources, but I was too much of a noob to make good use of them, at least in the early days. And of course, in the very early days of starting out EVE, there were inevitable pod losses as a noob, and it happened more than once that it equated to SP loss, because, well, I was too much of a noob to have my clone updated at all times heh.

So such things did make me a bit more serious/careful with doing stuff in EVE. Because 'losses had consequences that mattered'. But even this, after a few year of playing, faded away quite a bit. It was no big deal to lose a few ships, even moderately faction fit ships, when you had established operation that brought income to replace X amount of losses per month while still putting you in the 'profit zone' every month, with ISK pool building up slowly over time.

So I just kinda went back to my old 'non competitive' ways. If I went on a roam and didn't get much action, sometimes I'd just fly into obvious death traps, because I didn't want to log off without seeing something explode, even if it was my own ship.

People talk about market PVP and such, but even that didn't get me riled up much, what's the ISK loss anyway, as people say, it's just space pixels at the end of the day. If I can save 'time' to buy something locally I didn't care if the 'rip off' seller made profit off me. What's the big deal with buying a T2 module for 10m ISK locally, 10x price of the trade hub, if it saves me 20 jumps. I rather let some dude make easy 10m ISK off me than me having to fly across the galaxy to get something cheaper, in my limited game time in between work and RL stuff.

So this kinda continued - my KB for the month can be 'red' but who cares, as long as I had enough to fly what I want when I want. If I lost on some speculation, hopefully I analyse the situation better next time, etc, and congrats to the guys who made
ISK off me.
Then recently, I started playing Overwatch, for change of pace (see my forum sig heh). I absolutely love it and I think it's a great game.

But I also found that many people on OW are very toxic, even in quick plays.

I mean
a) you do not lose anything even when you die or lose
b) it's not even competitive play where your 'rating' will drop upon a loss or whatever
c) you gain XP anyway win or lose which will lead to getting a loot box,
d) again, there is absolutely no consequence for 'losing' a 'quick play' (competive play is a different matter so I will leave that out for now, because by definition, they are called 'competitive play' for reason)

Just endless whining and moaning on voice comms and on team chats, pointing fingers to blame a team mate (whom you may not ever play with again), and God, the forums, so much salt and whine....

It's about expectation of reward, frustration and aggression redirection.

People play to obtain a reward, but the reward doesn't comes. So the player feels frustrated and frustration is painful, so the primal brain reacts with outward aggression (inflict pain on the source of pain). Then targets either something inanimate or something animated which can't respond and redirects the aggression: I am hurt, so I take this hurt and drop it on you.

As I said it's a primal brain response, and thus it's full of problems when it drives our advanced brain.

So, in short, it's not just competition. It's stress management. The wiser thing to do if your brain behaves this way is to not play those games.

As for competition, well, you and your grunge buddies competed for "keep your cool". I bet you discussed who had "kept his cool" under a "loose your cool" situation. I bet some of you just dwelled into nihilism. I bet none of you ever approached stoicism (stoicism is not nihilism. Stoicism is the ability to maintain a moral code no matter what circunstances).

Human compete in many ways. It's our way to tell the universe "no, not me, let someone else die instead".

Obviously those players think that winning against kitchen sink teams is easier than against well trained teams. They're wrong, of course, because kitchen sink teams are easy to defeat because they play poorly, and thus your own kitchen sink team will also play poorly making it easier to defeat. My bet is that they tend to be inmature players who can't notice the incongruency of their line of thinking, they want their cake and eat it.

Also is true that young ones are more competitive, they just started their adulthood, need to prove themselves and haven't had time to develop a world vision.

And further, some mature people use games to be purposedly inmature...

Just to add, OW even offers 'custom game' mode, where you can define many of the match rules. Yet people rage heh

lol the link.... XD