The Joy of Losing - Learning to Have Fun Playing Games - Extra Credits

I struggle with self esteem and ego, I play call of duty often, every day, I’ve been playing it since I was like 3 (not well but that’s as far back as I can remember playing) and it’s been a huge part of my life, running into a player that is leagues better than me it’s demolishing to my self esteem

But this video gave me a ton of insight on this issue, so deeply deeply thank you

I lost at irl chess and 8 ball pool and I didn’t take the handshake proposal of the adversaries in neither the occasions because I found it disrespectful. All I wanted was an instant rematch that I did not recieve due to my attitude. All I could do to improve was to start practicing pool and studying chess games and eventually I did win and got rematches and finally became a winner in my friends group, but then nobody wanted to play against me because I made fun of them after every win of mine. Eventually I ended up playing chess and 8 ball pool on my phone and keep a loosing streak there. And the worst part is that I still cannot shake hands with the adversary. All I do is applaud myself for being a skilled player in my group, although I have nobody to play with.

I keep losing, in chess, gta, brawlhalla (its like super smash bros), for honor, pretty much any online game. Im getting tired of it and i loose like 10 times then win just barely once, ive tried tutorials and trips and tricks videos but nothing helps. Im tired of it

Severely outdated. The gaming community went from casual on the console scene to pure competitiveness with controller users All around. The only casual scene now is purely on PC. COD ruined the console scene with 2019 COD and mentioned SBMM.

Make the switch to PC and you'll agree that console players deserve this horrible shift in the community. There's not one game that does SBMM well because all devs decide to make the Elo pool extremely wide so there are newcomers and pros with the average Bob struggling all because he got the noob teammates and the pro enemies.

When you drop a complete rank in rocket league in one sitting, losing 10 games in a row and TM + opponents trash talking.. it’s hard to lose

its worse when you've been playing for years and just cant seem to improve at all

Not true lol

What a waste of time this video has been

So many games have many facets to them. They should reward doing those things well, not just win/loss and K/D/A.

games like fallout were fun today is all about ability and reflexes ...and ENDLESS HOURS of playing.. FUN MEANT you lose a lot and you laugh about it, you dont spend an eternity trying to enter a building (like batman arkham knight) if you quit playing in some decade you lost the train, and its really different. games like mutant ninja turtles were fun as hell or syndicate, or x com, or street fighter alpha or mortal kombat 2 or mario world or sega gemas 16 bit. i mean there are games like subnautica thata re great or maybe god of war ? i didnt play it. but i dont know i dont like this modern games i like good story above all, and fun fun fun fun fun. they are not inmersive ...like monkey island or between good & evil (i dont remember the name but it was fun) ..but hey thats just my opinion. Even gta 3 the main story is like...nothing special, but stealing cars was fun and being able to move around, but when you are done doing all those things what then?? i guess i like the ilusion of realism and a living city, not actually having npc that have a life programed. aniway thats all...for today

I thought extra credit in the title meant you got extra credit when you won or something

michael jordan would disagree.

complete utter nonsense if im dedicating my time to a game i want to win and feel good if im not then all my time has been wasted

if it's a chess match... you just cannot!!

here is the secret. pick a character in smash bros. say you will allways win as that character, and as long as you win as that character you can lose as any other character
step 2
play mario, any time you die, joyfully say WAHOOO HOOO HOOOO and any time you get hit, say GREAT JOB!
playing as mario is more fun becuse mario is never a sore loser....

(except in the strikers games but they dont count)

Man, i unironically needed to hear this

Wtf is the point of playing a game if not to try to win? Be a lover. The end?

Thanks for this video. I just died in Minecraft, lost full diamond armor and tools and a bunch of extra diamonds.

the best video ive ever seen

But what if you never see yourself improving ? What if every time you play, no matter how much you try to improve you don't. What if every time you play feel's like a dice roll, that you don't feel in control of whether you do good or bad, that you just flipped a coin and you ether win or you lose.... just because.

Then the idea of playing to improve becomes the pain itself, it becomes the win. Sure it's not about wining anymore, it's about seeing incremental improvement's no matter how tiny, but if they can not be found, or if there is just no incremental improvement to be found then you are back at square one.

Do you just have to accept you are a loser at that point ? And try take soles in the fact your pain and misery is making someone else better ? You just move on to another game and are doomed to repeat the cycle as let's face fact's, not everyone will be a pro gamer, no matter how hard they try, because they didn't win the genetic lottery and have X amount of hand eye coordination, or Y reflexes, and while they can improve, they will never be as good as that gamer they maybe look up to.

And playing for the gameplay is hard to do in the modern era we live in. Games themselves incentivise wining, with kill death ratio's, win loss rankings and so on, there is no reward for participation. And communities are just as bad, the "get good" or "skill issue" mentality of any competitive environment, where everything is someone trying to one up the next person in line because they received the same treatment and had to perpetuate the cycle.

I watch these video's and think to myself, that is all great but you are not telling me the how, you are not teaching me the steps to get there. You are saying, your goal shouldn't be X it should be Y. Ok but how do I get to Y, as getting to Y feel's just as hard as getting to X. sigh I hope this makes sense.

I have this idea that I don't mind, even enjoy losing IF and ONLY IF I am 100% sure that game was not rigged and I had fair chance of winning. It doesn't need to be BALANCED in the way that we play on same manufactured controllers, same characters. It has to show me that I could win this one if only I played better/knew something I didn't. This is mostly why I quitted multiplayer, team based games. While in Counter Strike, you can win if you are good, in games where statistics matter like League of Legends, if these statistics are against you, you will have hard time to win, if not it will be straight impossible. And you are supposed to lose at least 20-40% of games EVEN if you are REALLY good. I just didn't learn anything from losing against better players, I didn't enjoy it, it wasn't fair so I stopped having fun and left the game. I am having a blast in single player, immersive games and some multiplayers where you can win if you are good, even if team is bad (L4D 2, Killing Floor, CS)

Having fun is not the problem…it’s that you somehow you’re being coerced into joining the toxicity of a remark of someone in a game because they had a valid point but put it a bit too harsh no one says nothing about that because the matter at hand was someone else’s to begin with so you’re left in a spot where you have to agree or disagree no one will blame you if you disagree so long as you have a valid explanation but even then they’ll be too stubborn to realize because all they know is how they can put themselves in their own shoes or to those that they vouch for personally

I wish i could have the same mentality as everyone else. I feel like no matter the breaks, training, or otherwise fixes my mood when gaming. Im comstatly plateau'd and nothing i do makes my gameplay improve, so why even continue?

Good losers will say "It's Only A Game, Chill Out!!" When they are not afraid to fail!!
Sore Losers will say "It's Not Just A Game, I Play To Win!!" When they refuse to fail!!

Try fighting the same boss and die. Over, and over, and over, and over, till the attempt count gets in the hundreds or thousands.

Overwatch is just terrible solo I never use to care about losing but when my rank went so low I couldn’t join my friends and I could tell which games I was going to win or lose was crazy. It was always win lose lose lose win win lose lose lose win win overwatch has 100% made me more angry at games so I’ve just lost the mentality of improving all together

I still have the problem of letting myself get too angry over losing that I don’t even think of how to turn a match around, I always just go off blatantly blaming my teammates while they can’t hear me thinking they’re the problem when I could be using that time to stop being insane and just rewrite my strategy.

This sort of thinking doesn't work on most competitive games involving aim. 99.99% of the time when you die, there was ZERO way to prevent your death simply cuz they are better than u. No strategy can take down someone who is more skilled than you no matter what. And most of the time the only way to get better is to spend 3 hours a day in the training arena (which isnt fun btw) just to catch up to the players that have gotten naturally better without the use of the arena because they play the game so much

No f that losing isn't fun I have fun by winning

Winning is the only thing that is important. Thats the only thing you get rewarded for is winning. Nobody rewards you for being a loser. Id rather win all my games forever than have to lose 100x in order to "learn". Its not satisfying. Winning is satisfying. We dont praise football teams for losing 100yrs straight but "trying". We praise and reward winners. Being a winner is how you progress in life not by being a loser.

I understand your point, but the problem for me is the reward. In many games, you get massivly more reward for winning then losing, even when u have done everything right and you lost by 99 to 100. the other get heavly rewarded and you get nothing for your time end effort.

thats my Problem.

i dont mind losing, but want to be rewarded for doing something right, even when someone else is slightly better, because there will ever be some one how is slightly better then u and me.

Multiplayer isn’t fun to lose or getting KO’ed by one or two hits out of nowhere

I generally don’t mind losing, most times I just get over it and move on. But when I lose and someone feels the need to ether lecture me about how bad I am for bringing the team down with me. Or feel the need to rub in their success in a negative way. Then I start tilting.
Honestly I don’t know why these people feel the need to smear negativity all over every match they play. Yeah I had a bad game, so what it happens to the best of us. I’m not one of those who tries to fight it, I just get off the game after the round. But still it makes the whole losing experience so much more worse than it actually should be.

"Pain will leave when it's done teaching you"
- Bruce Lee

I think that untitled tag game made losing fun as winning but winning is a bit higher than losing.

Edit: I think how they did that is the pure chaos of the game and (it's a roblox game and one of the good ones that.)

I only get upset if the winning team brags 😂😅

I don’t rage when I lose but I have found myself recently getting annoyed and it’s making me wanna just give up on certain games.

😎👍

What’s the point of playing games if you aren’t playing to win? If you’re losing, you will be the subject of trash talk and ridicule from your opponents and even your own team and friend group. Losing means you aren’t good, and you might win 1 in 10 games, but your record will only support how you are bad at the game and nobody will want to play with you. Someone on your team pulling you down is so infuriating. Getting crushed in an embarrassing manner over and over again just makes me angry and I don’t wanna play games anymore. Games aren’t fun unless the are games that you are immediately great at and getting high rankings in. Period. Look at some of the best and most famous marvel rival players. They are joking and having fun BECAUSE they are winning all the time. Fun = Winning

If you just put the game down after losing and losing, you’re a sore loser. And nobody will want to play with you.

An advice for me while playing War Thunder

I can't get better if my team is CONSTANTLY trash talking that I'm not American...

Games are designed in such ways to emit anger, frustration, jealousy, etc etc etc. People just would never acknowledge that. It was never about the game it was always about the intended outcome. This topic goes way over a lot of peoples heads.

this fixed my anger problems

The problem is losing back to back. Like you said, losing is a measurement of how to and how much you've improved. But when you have nothing but losses, doesn't that mean that you have not improved at all and wasted all that time?

Im so bad at the games i play i got someone banned for kill farming me, while i was actively playing, also i only play the games im relaly bad at because my friends play them

“Losing should be fun” is something only a loser would say.😤

Win or die.

This is why Fortnite is bad. Its a luck based game but You invest 12 minutes just to die from thing not really in your controle.

I agree that one shouldn't only have fun when they are winning. But that doesn't necessarily tell me exactly how to never get frustrated while losing ever again. Just telling me that I should enjoy the game regardless of winning or losing doesn't mean much or isn't going to change how I experience games. So my question now is how do I get to the point to where I can enjoy games while losing? Because I feel like the video did not answer this question.

I can still have fun while losing. When that happens its usually a close game or the players are at similar skill levels or I am able to play fairly decently regardless of winning or losing. The times that I do get frustrated is when no matter how well I play or what I do right I still get trampled by opponents that are way beyond my skill level to the point where I don't really get a chance to play I am just spending half the game waiting on death timers because as soon as I spawn I die immediately even while trying to play safe. Or maybe getting destroyed one game is not a big deal I try my best get trampled and try again the next game. But after getting destroyed ten games in a row. I start to lose it at some point. At some point it stops being fun and is more frustrating than anything. Experiencing these things once is not enough to be a problem, it's when you experience these things on a regular basis that it becomes a problem. The frustration builds over repeated exposure.

I started developing habits or strategies in response to some of the problems I listed above. I think learning to enjoy the game while losing would be better than what I am currently doing, but it's better than nothing.

In Rocket League I started playing 1v1 exclusively. When I get an opponent who is way beyond my skill level and is doing circles around me and I can't even touch the ball I just forfeit and move on next, not letting it get to me. The problem is over time I have gotten to the point where I will ff at the first sign that I might lose and just move on next.

In League of Legends I limit myself to no more than two games a day. If I win the first game then I am done and I get off. If I lose then I have one more chance to win and I quit after that regardless. I still go on 10+ losing streaks, it's just spread out across the entire week. Recently I've been trying to learn a new champion. I started out playing against the AI. Then moved into swift play. But I get destroyed every single game. The games I do win are games that I am carried in. I don't contribute much to any of these games. And I lose a lot of games partially because my lane loses so hard and the opposing lane just steam roles the entire game. Right now I am not having fun playing LoL. I have been losing for so long with this champ and my opponents don't get any easier, they destroy me with ease. I want to be able to learn to play different champs and not just play the same champion forever. But switching from my main to another that I have been trying to learn is painful. And the game does not seem to let up in that regard. I wish I could play different champs and have my opponents adjust to my skill rather then them always being at the height of me at my best with my best champion.

It's easy for even the best of us to get frustrated while losing games, but that doesn't mean we can't still have fun--in fact, arguably we play games TO enjoy ourselves!
What's a fun gaming experience you had recently, even if you lost or struggled for a while?