4 Slowly Occurring Annoyances Experienced By Gamers

[Ford 1st MRB]

Gaming is one of those pleasant, playful activities that can very easily turn murderous. We all have very vivid memories of playing NES games as children and being filled with an adult-like rage because we can’t seem to swim by that damn collection of purple electrified plankton in that stupid goddamn Ninja Turtles game.

Bad memories aside, It seems like only yesterday that the days of being a gamer meant you were a nerdy shut-in. Cut-to a decade or two later and being a gamer is as commonly accepted as being a fan of film or books. But, as with every medium of entertainment, there are those little annoyances that just dig away at you and make you feel like less of a human -- those tiny, mundane experiences that break us down psychologically and leave us wondering why the hell we even put up with this crap. And, for some reason, they always seem to take forever to happen.

Alas, we will continue to return to our consoles, our PCs, and our handhelds, even though these 4 experiences will always be there to torture us.

Hitting The Wall

You’re 5 hours in to a marathon session. Everything is going smoothly. You’re slicing away at the waves and waves off bad guys with ease. You’ve committed the button scheme to your muscle memory and, chosen level of difficulty aside, you’re breezing through the game with your sanity intact.

And then you do that one thing that you’ve done hundreds of times before – maybe you’re firing an arrow, or trying to jump on to a ledge – and you miss, or somehow mess it up. It’s cool.

Whatever. If there’s one thing your parents always taught you, it’s to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and try it again. So you do.

Fail.

You mumble, “Oh, c’mon.”

You try it again.

Fail.

You try it three more times, each attempt convincing you more and more that you must have some kind of problem with your motor functions. By the time you hit your 6th or 7th attempt, you’re on your feet giving the finger to an inanimate object (your TV) while calling its mother a whore.

This is when gamers hit the wall. It’s the moment that’s almost like being perfectly alright one second, and, in the blink of an eye, your spinal cord gets cracked and you’re reduced to nothing more than a drooling pile of uselessness.

Nothing you’ve learned in the hours lead up to hitting the wall will help you get over it. No tricks you’ve picked up and no matter how much luck is on your side will help you get out of this spontaneous rut of suck that you’re in.

Particularly stubborn gamers will attempt to muscle through the suck to pull off a miraculous victory in the end, but a lot of the time, it’s to no avail. You’re brain has shit itself and that shit is running down in to your fingers, causing you to forget how to perform even them most menial of gaming tasks.

The Slow Destruction

There you are, running through yet another in a long line of Call of Duty multiplayer matches. You’re firing and grenade lobbing and airstrike calling – everything is cool. Suddenly, an enemy combatant crosses your path. The poor loser doesn’t even know you’re behind him. This is almost too easy. You continue walking your path to give him a swift stab in the neck when…nothing. You clicked the right stick but nothing happened. If this were real life, it would be as if you ran up to a man’s back and just sat there staring at the hair follicles dance around as you breathed on his neck. In real life, you might get punched for that. In Call of Duty, you get shot pointblank with an assault rifle.

But you did everything correctly. You pushed a button that was supposed to do a thing and the thing went undone. This, friends, is merely a small taste of the eventual catastrophic failure of your controller. It always starts off small – a mis-thrown grenade, or off-timed gun fire – but it then snowballs in to either your character going in to grotesque epileptic murder fits, or your character looking like he received a sniper’s bullet in the brain that did not kill, only caused mild to supreme retardation.

The Slow Burn

So you’re playing a game. Like the two entries above, you’re hours in to your session, maybe even many hours that span a few days. You’re playing the game and you realize that the boss fight you just went through was a little weak. It was a bit of a chore, and the wonky control scheme didn’t help much. Regardless, you continue to play because the game is doing a decent job of keep your attention.

Then another hour passes by. You hit a plot point that makes you think this game was written in small, 10-minutes spurts by a guy that took a fistful of Vicodin and tried to get some work done before he took an 18 hour nap. Then, there’s the block-pushing puzzle with the one block off to the side, unseen by your eyes due to the shoddy camera that doesn’t allow you to move it, and looks like its being projected out of the head of a cycloptic war vet. Soon thereafter, it dawns on you: for the past 15 hours, you’ve been playing a shitty game and you didn’t even realize it.

The Wasted Life

Marathon sessions are kind of a badge of honor. The longer your facial hair is in relation to where it was when you started the session is a badge of honor. The number of times you thought you were going to piss your pants as you held off on going to the bathroom for just one more dungeon is a badge of honor. There’s a certain glory attached to not having moved for an absurdly long time, only moving your fingers to control onscreen action and to occasionally readjust your dick in to that position that makes you feel funny every time your controller rumbles.

Too bad there’s a giant downside: a sort of ebbing and flowing wave of depression that drifts over you after you started playing WoW when the sun was up, vaguely remember a brief period of darkness, and then shut the game down, only after your alarm clock rings and you have to be at work in an hour. After going so long without much movement, very little – if any – direct sun contact, and a diet of sodas and microwaveable burritos, you feel like you’ve just been caught with some weed and you parents didn’t punish you, they just looked you in the eye and told you how disappointed they were. Only, there are no parents involved, and the look comes from yourself after a trip to the bathroom mirror.

It’s that kind of self-loathing that’s funny to talk about, but fills your heart with the 1,000 pathetic frowns of a shitty clown after he gets kicked in the shin by a snot-nosed 5-year-old. You know what you did can’t possibly bode well for any aspect of your life; but you’ll be damned it you’re not going to come back home from work or school, log back on and do it all over again. '


Holy Taco article that made me laugh while reading.

[J. Clark]

i had a good laugh its funny because its true

[Dexter]

lol I must not game enough I don't think I've ever had any of those.

[Ritchey 1st MRB]

dear god i've had every one of those happen to me. Wowzer

[McKenzie 1st MRB]

I like my victory spike story over a game of Blitz 2001, I spiked my playstation controller off the ground and it turned itself into a frag grenade. Or when my buddy ripped my PS3 controller in half over a game of Modern Warfare.

[Ness]

That is great