I get incredibly worked up playing vs other players

Is this just me?

I tend to avoid PVP games or game modes. This is because I get really worked up. My heart beats really fast and my pits get sweaty. If I'm gaming shirtless I can feel the sweat drip down my sides. Afterwards it always takes me a while to come down, because it's like I've just fought for my life (fight/flight response?)

And it's not due to poor skills (with PVP I'm average to decent I think) and I'm not a sore loser, I don't fly into rage mode and throw the controller into the wall or anything. It's because I take it Very. Personally.

That guy killed my character because he hates me.
They're going after my guy because they know they're better than me.
They know I'm weak and don't know how to defend myself.

I realize this is showing my insecurities; and I can easily just not play these games. I don't do these game modes often but it has happened, eg. new content comes out and I give it a try. Or in this one game, PVP experience was necessary to unlock certain skills: so in the PVP area I crouched and slowly moved across the entire map in stealth because I didn't want to deal with opposing players.

But I'm posting more because I'm wondering.. why do I react this way? Countless gamers do PVP and not all of them can be getting worked up the way I do. Does this happen to others here?

I avoid competitive games at all costs. I get really angry when playing them and incredibly frustrated. That's why I stick with single player, co-op, or just casual competitive games like SCP:SL

Most of the games I play are single player but I do enjoy multiplayer (depending on the game) when it works. My internet connection is not always the greatest and I tend to get frustrated with lag, not the players.

I stay away from competitive games because they tend to have very toxic communities these days. I have ADD so I tend to zone out during games; so something like League of Legends would not be for me.

I don't like most competitive games. Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled is gorgeous, I love the style of it, but the way you have to play to beat other people isn't remotely fun to me. I finally gave up getting the extra characters because I got tired of playing online with others which is the only way to earn the in-game currency quickly.

The only time I enjoyed competitive gaming was back in the early days of Halo 3 and Halo Reach. Those games were more simple and enjoyable.

When I was younger I did but there were less pvp games around then, I used to headbutt my Nintendo gameboy regularly, I don't play much pvp now but I got quite good at the games I stuck at, but you have to learn to embrace death as you get older can't fight the reaper forever : /

When I was younger I would only play multiplayer games with people irl in arcades or on console in the same room if I was visiting their house or they were round mine and that didn't bother me. Loose definition of pvp though really. When I used to go on holiday I'd play arcade games because most of the places we stayed had those. Sometimes I'd play with people I was hanging out with but sometimes some random kid would come over and press the 2player button while I was playing 1 player which isn't cool really because it would take one of your credits. Particularly annoying though if I was playing something like puzzle bobble where I wasn't interested in 2 player. Many games are better with multiplayer but that one isn't. I'd mostly compete with this one boy I hung out with indirectly on the score board lol. Was pretty fun. Also played Tekken a bunch and racing games.

It's been a long time since I've done pvp in a game online, but it didn't use to bother me in mmos. I don't like socialising in games these days though so avoid people when they initiate conversation often.

I can't play games with other people at all. I wish I could, but my anxiety is just too bad. I kind of hate that everything is multiplayer now. Pretty much killed my interest in games.

i tend to use competitive games for communication mostly. i talk more on teamchat than i ever talk in real life/work.

for me its easier to talk there over the mic because i dont know these people at all. so i can pretend i am positive all the time.

i play overwatch mostly. (quickplay) many people there ask me if i am always so positive because i come across as positive on the mic apparently. i am the kind of guy who never gets angry because i know that its only a game. i am always positive and try to convince others to talk more on teamchat. i make a lot of bad jokes until the people start to talk

i dont play ranked because people are toxic there because they all care about their rank and i am not really good at the game. i am average at best.

but quickplay is good for people who hate competitive i think because people are not so toxic there because there is no rank to lose. its all more casual there. i played rounds where our team talked about their hobbies and favorite movies on voice teamchat and still we beat the enemy team

i can only recommend overwatch quickplay for people who hate pvp games because of their toxicity.


@Mister Fahrenheit :

if you ask if others have these feelings. yes. many people have them. in overwatch ranked it is called "ranked fear/anxiety" or "competitive fear/anxiety". even good players stop playing ranked sometimes because they have a fear of losing the rank they are in so they just stop playing.

there are people who are gm and next season they fall to lower ranks. i know many people like that. so they just stop playing because they dont want to fall in rank.

that is the reason why i only play quickplay and not ranked. because i know i would have this fear too. but this fear doesnt exist in quickplay at all because there are no ranks there

Don't they make single player games anymore?

^Control, RE2, and Sekiro are three of the best games this year.

I couldnt get into outer worlds, but people love it. outer wilds..star wars..DMC 5 is another one i dont like but others love it. Hellblade 2 will be great. Ori..rdr2..last of us 2 and cyberpunk will be goty contenders next year. GRIS was beautiful

I'd put luigi's mansion in that space, personally. death stranding (havent played it and i get the baggage with it). god of war, spiderman...there's a lot of good stuff imo.

I do worry about how much more financially viable MP games are compared to SP games. People dont want to pay full price for a SP game like they will for MP ones

i dont think that its the price. its the content you get. for instance...the typically singleplayer game i play for 30 hours maximum. 80 hours if its a rpg.

i bought quake champions and overwatch. on qc i have 250 hours of playtime. i payed 30 euro. on overwatch i have like 600 hours of playtime, i payed like 20 euro.

thats a huge difference in what you get for the money. in overwatch and qc you still get new maps, heros and other content for free even after you bought the game like 2 years ago.

in singleplayer games you need to buy dlcs because there will be one or two updates after you bought the game but after that you have to pay for a dlc.

so you get way more out of a multiplayer game for way less money.

i have so many fullprice singleplayer games on steam i bought for like 60 euro and played them for 10 hours maximum. if you think about it, thats not really worth it. its insane.

I get that rationale 100%. That's what I mean by more financially viable because the number of hours you put in a game is such a huge factor

But for me, I value quality over quantity. A great 12-20 hour experience is more than worth the money. Even 10 hours the ratio isn't that insane to me. 6 bucks an hour for a memorable experience? That's not unfair

At the same time, I do have a high threshold of what I think will be a great experience. I loved control and I didn't buy it at full price and told my brother not to pay more than 40 for it. So I do contradict myself. I just really really like SP games, and they're getting more and more expensive to make, so I worry about that in the future, but luckily it still seems to be going strong

yeah, if you think about it movies are way more expensive than singleplayer games.

i get your point and i still will buy singpleplayer games (after they dropped the price, i will not buy at release) but for me, i have a problem with quality over quantity.

because i have plenty of quality time with multiplayer. i am old, 37 years old i played since the nes and master system times.
i have seen most of the singleplayer games out there.

so for me, i miss quality in modern singleplayer games. if you think about it, most singleplayer games have a story for children. they are kinda juvenile.

so for me...there are not many singleplayer games out there who have a story which is worth experiencing it as an adult. obduction and myst from cyan are good games in my opinion storywise. also i like the thalos principle and the game where you solved riddles on a space station. i forgot the name, it kinda was like portal2 on a space station.

i have stopped playing jrpgs because they all have the same "i save the world with my girlfriend" plot. i play more crpgs now because their story is better. i am talking about things like disco elysium, not oblivion or skyrim

i dont know if you get what i mean but many singpleplayer games today are kinda juvenile which makes them less quality for me. content not really worth consuming.

because multiplayer games have a story too and if you dont like it, you can just play the game for what it is with other people. you dont have to care about the story at all.

so in my opinion modern mp games are more quality than most singleplayer experiences. i dont want to play the 500th game where i play a clown who escapes from the evil wizard. that is the thing i mean.

Depends what the litmus test is on a game being mature or juvenile. I dont feel the ones I listed are juvenile. The last of us's first 10-20 minutes are heart wrenching. Spiderman I'll give you..but its fricken spiderman. hellblade tackles some mature stuff.

I dont really play jrpg's but those did look as you described

an aspect for me, too, is that the story isn't actually number 1 for me. I would play a game with fun mechanics with a not great story, but I probably wouldnt play a game with a good story and bad mechanics. It's kind of just a "time in my life" situation where I would rather finish a game and play another one instead of an endless multiplayer game. I did play the crap out of overwatch though. But i felt so empty after a battlefield game for example because of the endlessness. Titanfall 2 was the same

Agreed, there is a ton of interesting looking online stuff that I just wish had an offline mode with bots or something.

can you give me an example?

there are enough offline games out there today. and if you talk about multiplayer shooters...some of them have botmodes. you just have to create a custom game and add bots to it. works in overwatch and in quake champions and in every other shooter i know.

but i dont really get why somebody would want to play online shooters with bots. i tried it but it gets boring super fast. its the fact that the teammembers and the enemy team is human that keeps these kind of games fun. i would rather dont play at all before i would play against bots.

Sea Of Thieves in particular, I love the atmosphere of that game and having a nice time sailing around but I cannot stand dealing with other players sometimes.

but wouldnt it get superboring without humans?

as far as i know, sot does not have missions like a offline game. you cant really play a storymode etc. so i guess it would get boring pretty fast.

Well, online shooters aren't designed to be played solo, so ofc they're going to be boring. The other players are the content; take the other players away, and you just have a shell. I can't blame game companies for concentrating on multiplayer because that's where the money is, and it's a lot easier to let the players create the content for you, but it makes most of the big contemporary games inaccessible to a player like me.

I've been playing video games on and off since I was a kid, but I never got to be very good at them because I don't have very good coordination or reflexes. Playing against other players is just a repetition of what happened to me when my parents forced me to play team sports when I was a kid: I was always the worst player on the team, the other kids hated it when I got put on the field, and it was nothing but one serving of humiliation after another. I have no wish to reexperience that in online multiplayer.

The point of video games is to have fun, not experience humiliation and abuse. The fact that your opponents are other humans may be what makes a game fun and challenging for you, but it just turns the game into an anxiety-inducing exercise in self-punishment for me. The fact that I am bad at video games does not mean that I don't enjoy playing them. I enjoy exploring the environments, solving puzzles, etc. In a single-player game, it doesn't matter how long it takes me to figure out how to achieve an objective, because there's no one there waiting impatiently for me to figure it out.

There's a touch of irony in the fact that games are now made primarily for the more outgoing and extroverted gamers. I've gone back to reading books and watching movies because they're more accessible.