Nerd Rage: On Sportsmanship
Whatever you’re doing, it’s not the last time
I did a piece on nerd rage a while back, which can be found here. If you absolutely don’t have five more minutes, a) I’m sad for you and hope you can find a way to declutter five minutes’ worth of time off your calendar, and b) I will TL;DR it for you here anyway. Nerd rage is the overwhelming fury you can find yourself feeling when the people who create a thing you love have “ruined it!” with whatever new thing they have added to its canon. Nerd rage is always real burning hate, and it is always about something that, viewed objectively, has very little actual value. It’s self-indulgent and petty, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Realizing those things is the first step to letting it go and being a happier person all the way around.
In conversation recently, I was talking to some longtime gamers (I count myself one), and I realized that nerd rage manifests among gamers (and really anyone who participates in a competitive activity) in a unique way: poor sportsmanship. I want to explore that a little bit here, and see if some fundamental truths can be found that can help us all avoid being a jerk to everybody we game/play/compete with. This is something we have all been guilty of, and some of us may still be guilty of. It’s worth examining the roots of poor sportsmanship, so we can then figure out how to avoid it. To do that, we must begin with two symptomatic behaviors: petty cheating and sore losing.
No I Didn’t! Yes You Did!
Several years ago, I found myself at a family event playing one of those time-killing card games with two of my great-nephews. You know this game: it involves an old deck of face cards that get kept in a drawer for when company comes over, and the kids love teaching guests how to play. The name doesn’t matter, because these types of games are all pretty much the same. Family games with regular face-card decks all follow the same theme: you get dealt some cards, and then take turns drawing new ones and discarding existing ones until you can complete some kind of sequence (a set, a run, or whatever).
In this case, the cards were face down and needed to be turned up and put in an order. And I watched as one great-nephew peeked out of turn, easing a card’s corner up ahead of time so he knew what it was and could therefore “guess” correctly that it needed to be replaced with his next draw. Peeking at face-down cards is one of the classic little kid cheating behaviors. I let it go. I was playing with little kids. This wasn’t the World Series of Poker or anything. It was just fun, and we were killing time waiting for dinner.
But then the second great-nephew did it, and the first caught him doing it, and the finger pointing and yelling began. You peeked at that card! No I didn’t, I was just getting my cards straight! You’re cheating! Nuh-uh! Admit it! Shut up!
“Okay,” I interjected at last, “you’ve both done it now, so you’re even. No more peeking. Let’s get on with the game.”
I’m the game-playing cool great-uncle with the dissident political opinions and the closet full of guns, who gives boys pocketknives for birthdays, so I was not argued with. They both grudgingly let it go and we finished the game. Why do I share this? Because it holds an important juxtaposition. We both caught someone cheating, but I let it go while they did not. Why? Because I have learned an important lesson that is still gelling for them. I’ll explain that lesson in a minute.
Sore Losing
You might be able to credibly claim that you never cheated while playing a game, but I will bet a dollar you have overreacted to losing. You’ve been there. We’ve all been there.
The platonic ideal here is the table-flipping tantrum, or the storm-out-of-the-room outburst. But that’s rare. Much more common is the eye-rolling deep sighs and flopping back in the chair when turns don’t go your way, accompanied by the loud proclamation that you never win and the game hates you and you hate it back and it’s just impossible and stupid.
I have this other nephew who has started transitioning to the grown-up table (you know how this is), which means he is starting to play bigger, more complex games with bigger, more complex rules and action to track. His parents love big honkin’ boardgames, and he had been chomping at the bit for a chance to play big honkin’ boardgames with the adults, and he ended up next to me for this particular big honkin’ boardgame.
Central to the action of this game is a card mechanic called drafting. Everybody gets dealt a dozen cards, each person chooses one from their hand and then passes the whole hand to the left (the game this time was Seven Wonders. IYKYK). This repeats until everyone has selected 12 cards. If you have collected certain sets or combinations, you get extra points. It’s normal in draft action to start with an idea of the kinds of cards you want to collect, but you’re very likely to end up with some that you don’t really want or need simply because they get passed to you at the end of the round.
But every single pass became a huge dramatic moment. My nephew had an idea of what he was wanting to collect, and he didn’t get passed very many of that kind of card. He started getting frustrated and loud about it. Eye rolling and chair flopping and rhetorical fist-shaking at the game ensued.
This kind of behavior is entirely self-defeating, as we shall see.
It’s NOT Just a Game
It needs to be recognized that “it’s just a game” is the counterclaim most often deployed to challenge both cheating and sore losing. Why would you act like that? There’s no good reason for you to have gotten so weird about this. It’s just a game, after all. It doesn’t mean anything.
However, the game does mean something. Effort got expended to learn to play, and time got spent committing to play. The game now occupies a tiny piece of all the players’ memories, and tiny is not nothing. The play of the game is now part of the players’ lives.
Dismissing that spent time and effort as “just a game” misses the nature of nerd rage: even though it is brought on by something of no objective value, it’s real for the person experiencing it. Trying to defuse nerd gaming rage by saying “it’s just a game” is a mistake because for the rager it’s not just a game. It is now a “ruined” game. This ruination is a critical detail, and ultimately is the place to find the solution to the larger phenomenon.
Why would the game be ruined now? Why would you think that? Because deep down, you’re afraid you’ll never play again. You believe, perhaps unconsciously, that this particular playing of this particular game is the last time you will ever play, so going out on a loss would “ruin it.” That fear drives both petty cheating and sore losing. You think you can’t afford to lose, because you might never play again and then you’ll be a loser forever.
So you peek at your cards (or “drop” your dice, or stack your deck). You’re not doing it to bask in the glory of being a winner. You’re doing it so that random chance doesn’t make you a loser. Or you edge into a tantrum as you complain about how the game went bad for you, and how you would have won if only XYZ thing had happened. You’re not doing that because you didn’t win. You’re doing it to blame random chance so you’re not a loser.
Here, then, is the great lesson of this installment on Nerd Rage: learn to remember that the game you are playing is not the last game. It is true that “it’s just a game,” but it is more appropriate to say “it’s just one game.” You can play another round, or another game, sometimes immediately after losing a game. There will be another game night, and more opportunities to play.
More opportunities, that is, unless you don’t learn to work through your nerd rage. Because if you don’t, the fear driving that nerd rage becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Opportunities will start to dry up if the people you could be playing with start easing away from you because they know you’ll “lose it” over a disadvantageous set of card draws or die rolls. People will find other things to do rather than game with you if they come to believe you’ll consistently engage in silly cheating.
Don’t let nerd rage lead you this way. Remember that the game you are playing is not the last one you will ever play. It will occupy a speck of space in your broader gaming experience, and sometimes you’ll lose and other times you’ll win. Do not flip the table and rant, or you’ll find fewer and fewer tables open to you. And that would be a shame.