Designing Around Rage - Extra Credits Gaming 

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I don’t “tilt” when I lose, I “tilt” when there is no progress, when I am sent to do the same thing I just did 5 times, when I get the “Our Princess is in another castle” message.

WHY IS EVERYONE SHARING THIS VIDEO WITH ME, I DONT HAVE A PROBLEM EVERYONE JUST USES CHEAP, BROKEN CHARACTERS

Another thing is that sometimes you learn later on in a game that you unknowingly made a poor decision that permanently affects you and cannot be undone without forfeiting all your progress and reverting to the time you made that decision. That's frustrating

I think this might miss an important point in how frustrating some loses feel, that comes in the form of fairness and agency. Sometimes you might feel like you have lost because of things out of your control, like match making, bad team mates or opponents way out of your league, or power inbalance in equipment or level. Maybe good opponents might act as a datapoint for the player, but lower level in a purely versus game, or unfair match making, don't really give the player much information on what they can do better. It feels like a destined loss and a waste of time and progress.

Time lost is a huge issue. Those long, epic battles can be delightful but losing right before victory can be crushing.

I gave Elden Ring over 20 hours of my life, but never came to enjoy it, and I feel like this video kind of touches on why. I love extremely difficult games that, upon losing, drop me right back into the action to try again, Meat Boy, Prinny Can I Really Be the Hero?, and on and on all do this very well. But the problem with Elden Ring was I kept having to redo long stretches of the same content to get back to where I died. I didn't just lose my souls, though that was a huge kick in the "nut fun" box too if I died before getting them back, but even if I got back to my souls, the tedium and stress of redoing the same long section over and over and over that I've already mastered just for another shot at the part I'm actually stuck at completely drained whatever fun the game could have had for me. I ultimately gave up when I finally completed a really difficult section and realized that I didn't feel good about finally winning, but just relieved I didn't have to redo the section leading up to it for the 20th time because I had stopped having any actual fun over an hour ago. I didn't give up because I got stuck, I wasn't stuck, I gave up because I realized I was playing to get through the parts which were no fun, rather then playing because getting better WAS fun.

Another important aspect of rage is managing your own expectation; if you go into it with the expectation that you’re going to do really well, that makes it very disheartening and frustrating when it doesn’t. I actually didn’t find Getting Over It very frustrating, not because I’m some sort of zen master (I get mad at games just like anyone else) but because I went into it with the expectation that I would be falling all the way down many times, which made it sting less

I suspect that the time cost of hitting a Game Over is one of the main reasons a lot of people don't like (or that they think they don't like) RPGs. Nothing like sinking 25 minutes into a boss battle in a Final Fantasy-like game only to get wiped when the boss is down to their last 5%. RPGs are trending in the right direction in this regard, but I still can't really blame people who say they don't like them because they're long and grindy for this reason.

The only times I tend to rage is when the game simply fails to properly communicate why something didn’t go as planned.

Ah, the joy of learning or rather, being told: Your reactions just aren't fast enough for my design-choices and you are thus not allowed to progress or the glorious design choice of your randomly assembled team being a bunch of clowns and thus we designers are allowed to waste your life-time.

The issue I personally find with losing is the time investment lost. If a game asks you to win 2 games a day, and you lose 5 games in a row that take twenty minutes each, it feels like a waste of your free time. Its why I had to quit Heroes of the Storm, because even though I liked the game, I found myself growing increasingly toxic whenever I got on a losing streak, especially if I felt my losses were my teammates fault

Time invested should NEVER result in time wasted. THATS the biggest rage inducer: In our effort, in a DIGITAL PLANE, our time spent grinding should gain a net-positive SOMEWHERE

Considering the main point of this hypothesis is that losing is a feedback point you guys kinda miss the other big thing designers needs to do. Give feedback on why you died. People often tilt because they feel like there's nothing they could have done differently. This is especially the case for games with high skill floors like strategy games where it can be difficult figuring out what needed to be done differently. Fighting games also have the same problem. If your fighting games inadequately teaches the mechanics to new players they will often feel like theyre just losing because the AI cheats or ones punch should have gone through so making sure to actually reinforce what mechanic is causing them to loose is important

This doesn't account for multiplayer games where you could do everything perfectly and still lose. Not only is it frustrating, but it is an incorrect data point. Also, this doesn't account for rewards locked behind winning. Thus it isn't only time you lose out or even money, but exclusive access to special things.

I’d argue that getting tilted in Mariokart is part of the appeal. Releasing your emotions, whether anger, sadness or happiness feels great afterwards. You shout, scream, curse but everybody is having fun.

This reminds me of why I quit the Eureka side quest in Final Fantasy 14 because that straight up punishes losing by making you lose experience and levels with grinding taking hours.

I think a lot can be gained by the game doing more to actually store and present loss as a data-point. That way the game primes the player's mindset in a way to deal with loss healthily. If the game just says "You FAILED!" and gives you no information on why, then it's setting you up to think of it in a toxic way.

If I'm having a crappy day and want to play to feel good, I'll set the game to easy mode and turn in to a Golden God for an hour or two.

The hardest loses are those we feel we had no control over, or that the player character did not respond properly to the inputs. (Looking at you Assassin’s Creed where the character jumps off a wall rather than climbing)

I agree that really the key is to not make losing annoying. I want the game to feel like it respects my time. If I lose I don't want to spend a bunch of time doing something I have no interest in. Far too many games are guilty of this. I LOVE hollow knight and one of my favorite parts of the game is the boss fights but man when you die in 30 seconds and it takes 5 minutes just to walk back to it? That's really annoying, annoying enough that I have just put off fighting certain bosses for weeks. Meat boy is a good example that handles death properly but I think FFXIV does a great job at that too (honestly a lot of MMOs are good at it) when you die in a raid you just start the raid over immediately. It's not uncommon for a team to die within a minute when first learning the fight, because you are supposed to die they make it less annoying. But in other areas of the game where you would only die because you really screwed up and should know better? Kind of a pain to die. It's the game's way of telling you what it is expecting from you.

I think another important thing to note is that the cost of losing isn't always time. I was playing Pyre one day, where the story progresses regardless of whether you've won or lost, and funnily enough, I found that such a mechanic made each match seem wayyyy more important. It wasn't just my time banking on it, it was also the happiness of each of the characters I'd grown to love. Made it hurt a lot more when I lost a liberation rite, right after the character I was trying to free had told me about how he needs to get back to help his family... Sorry Rukey.

When I hit that tilt stage, I often question if I'm having fun and want to continue. More often than not, I just give up on the game. This has taught me that there are a number of games with tags that I just avoid completely now because of past experiences.

James truly is one with the force 😂

This mindset applies to life itself. The journey (learning, overcoming obstacles) is always more important than the destination (winning/losing).

This idea of losing as a metric for the player made me realize that I tilt more when my strategy was almost good enough. When I see that something "should" have worked, but it doesn't, then I call the game "unfair", "broken" or 'bad".

I generally prefer games where losing isn’t a thing (either creative sandboxes or narrative-focused games), but when games *are* more challenging I appreciate when they give me an option to reduce the difficulty when I’m getting stuck. In Tunic, for instance, I got frustrated by the boss fights (I don’t really have the time to spend hours fighting the same opponent in the same room until I “git gud”), but the accessibility options were clearly presented and gave me an option to turn on invincibility for a while and get the fights over with so that I could get back to enjoying the world and it’s puzzles. In contrast, while I loved the atmosphere and story of Control, I nearly gave up several times when I’d been stuck in boss fights for hours with no real option to back out and try exploring somewhere else. There may have been some difficulty options I could use to ease my way through them, but I didn’t see them. When I did finally make it through them, the feeling wasn’t one of triumph but just tired relief, and they interrupted the flow and mood of the narrative. I know many people see combat and overcoming challenges as the main point of games, but there are many ways to enjoy games, and I appreciate when developers allow the option to experience their creations in different ways.

Precisely the point is that "losing" in itself isn't tilting. But when you fail constantly at the same task and you don't "see" the improvement it gets frustrating. This is specially so in singleplayer games, when you feel like you've hit your limit and can't get any better mechanically. You might say the solution there is to look for alternative ways to confront the obstacle, but if the game is all about letting you experience a fantasy of your choosing (like in RPGs choosing a "build" for your MC), it feels really bad feeling forced to abandon said fantasy just to be able to progress. Like the game's saying "if you're not doing things like *I* want, you better have the skills to back you up". Another source of tilting and frustration comes from actually outside forces that you cannot control. In multiplayer games, that could be your teammates, when you feel like you've done your best but they dragged you down and you can't really "learn" anything from that experience... even if you actually can, it's just too hard to see beyond what _others_ could learn instead. Another force could be your internet connection or your computer hardware making things harder than they should, and developers have nothing to do in that but the player still gets frustrated, because "there's nothing they could do, nothing they could learn", the only solution is to somehow have more money to buy better gear and not everybody can do that. What I'm trying to say here is that the video pointed out some factors and raised some arguments that are actually helpful, but player context is usually much more complex than just the game design, so stopping people from tilting is never an easy "just take this advice and never tilt again" kind of thing. It has to do a lot with player mentality and frustration tolerance, some people tilt a little and give up for a while before challenging the obstacle again; while others keep going until they reach their limit and stop trying forever. Game designers shouldn't strive to make their players feel bad just for the sake of tilting, but you cannot reasonably expect to make a perfect experience for everyone. In fact, tilting in and of itself doesn't need to be a _bad_ thing, since some people use that feeling as fuel, to try and get better so they can stop feeling like that, or to take the chance to relax and stop playing games before it becomes an addiction. Don't try to *stop* the tilt; rather, try to _control_ it and redirect it. Like for example, after getting frustrated for losing 400 times to Malenia, switch to a game like Doom and vent out your rage on those poor demons. Or change into sporty clothes and work out a sweat or two. Maybe even do some chores like cleaning the room or washing the dishes; discharge the pent up frustration erasing the dirt from existence. So long as you don't hurt yourself, others or your environment and keep it all in a safe environment like a game world, anything goes.

This is why I love Rimworld. It has a diffeculty that says "Loosing is fun". And boy.. it is indeed fun. Nothing more grandeur then seeing your 5 man town get ripped to shreds by a visious horde of murder rabits.

I thought tilt was what happen when someone bumped my pinball machine wrong.

Having the game over theme be a bop helps too.

I remember a RU-vid video by Shofu, a Pokemon youtuber, who was absolutely delighted to get slammed dunk beaten in Pokken Tournament. He had won almost all of his beginning matches when the game came and felt like there was little depth. But this player who beat him showed him there was still a lot more to explore when it came to tactics, combos and strategy. Sometimes losing is the best part.

I was recently playing battle tech and even though I feel bad about my most recent loss I think it is a good example of good loss design. 1. Pilots of your mechs can get injured or die, but you always have a chance to eject if things get bad and even a kill can result instead in injury. So at the end of my mission of my four pilots 1 retreated, 1 ejected, 1 was injured, and one died even though the injured and dead pilot were taken out of the fight in similar ways. 2. You don't loose your mechs unless you turn that setting on manually and even then only if it was totally destroyed. Your pilot can die and the mech lives to fight again. 3. Every mission has a primary and secondary objective to complete and success only requires focusing on the primary, but even if you retreat after completing part of the primary objective you still get some compensation. The game even has the tip on the loading screen that sometimes the best thing to do is retreat. So even though I lost a pilot and 2 mechs that will impact the rest of the campaign I can come back later and hire a new pilot, buy/scavenge a new mech and continue enjoying the game. And next time I will have better luck and play better. I and my surviving pilots gained experience from the loss after all.

There was a time where I did actually start to be “tilted” when I was doing a mission where if you get spotted you are screwed and I spent 3 days on that and when I did finish it by using the distraction mechanics that I barely used made it easy to bring enemies to other areas and take them down with no witnesses. Honestly had fun learning how to stealth it.

A few years back I adopted this mind set playing league of legends. Not only did I find that I was having fun again - but also that I was rapidly getting better at the game. Unfortunately I also learned that such a mind set has an upper limit for how much it can sustain a positive experience. A low probability run of games decided by other peoples internet connections set me back about a week of progress and prompted a reaction that led to me not playing it since.

This is a great way at reframing failure in real life as well, as feedback to change your approach rather than punishment.

"Losing" in modern games is put in place to give the players a "challenge" to overcome, and in some cases to inflate a games length when cutscenes and long animations can't be used anymore. And then we have camera controls and how they are playing for the other team, constantly shifting so that your character has a great view of their feet, or sky, or in any direction other then that of the enemy that is smacking you.

It's funny, because I don't tilt in the normal way most people do. I don't get angry, I just get frustrated. And it's never because I make a mistake or because someone is playing something overpowered or most of the reasons people tilt for, but because of a compounding set of mistakes that eventually make it so I no longer have agency in the game.

I feel that some of this may just be neuro-chemical in nature: Rejection dysphoria is a very real thing and is much more prevalent in those with ADHD. And I kind of assume that those with ADHD are pretty represented among the more hardcore gamers.

So many physical manifestations of the save icon in this episode. So intense.

I'm used to losing. Am a loser. Games used to celebrate us losing with fucking fan fare. The loss jingles, the "Game Over" screens with the detailed art, and forcing you to wait some time before the controller is responsive again so you can hit start or X or w/e and try again. There's two ways of measuring whether losing is worth your time. If the game lets you get back into the action fairly quickly, like in Hotline Miami, or it's "You Died" and all you have to do is hit X and have a small wait time before round 244, then it's encouraging you to keep going. If it sets you back 30 minutes or you reload a save and all your items are still used and your equipment damage or some other time waster, you've now entered "fucking around territory". One wants me to keep playing so I win, the other fucks around with my free time. Option one gets quick save and quick load keybound to left click and right click, the other gets tossed into the bin. Also, is completely the reason why I stopped playing anything that requires teammates and the like to win. I don't feel like wasting time in a game that a teammate throws because they're in a bad mood and it fucks over 4 other people. If my success is dependent on someone else knowing what they're doing and executing it competently, it's going into the bin.

You guys improved your thumbnails!I like the new look.

One of the events I did within a Pokemon community of mine, I make up a mono-specie team and challenge people to fight me. I designed the event to actually make no one care about winning or losing. On my side, I just want to gather win rate statistics, so that my team has 25% win rate or 75% win rate, I still have a lot of fun seeing how well my ideas actually work out. For the challengers, since I made the prize to be a raffle for everyone that participated win or lose, so no one holds back with the fear that they might not be able to beat me. And thanks to that, people have really loved the events.

This makes a good point. I don’t play games simply to win. I play games for the story, gameplay, characters and other stuff. Winning’s just the icing on the cake.

Yes! This is really important for all games. As a player who make gimmick decks in YGO and played Evil route in Undertale, I can feel the tilting feeling, but in the end I got better at it and I finally won without losing too much progress

The part of trying new loadouts and strategies is something I've come to be accustomed to playing War Thunder for over 8 years now, as in this unique case, real-world stratagems can easily translate into the various vehicles of the game, such as taking on the techniques of ace pilots and war-games and taking into account the general strengths of weaknesses of not only your own vehicle, but all your opponents. Sure, WT isn't super perfect for physics (and whatever else the tilted amongst the players can say in rebuttal, I've been there), but regardless if it's DCS, Ace Combat or even Project: Wingman, it's a satisfying moment no matter what combat flying game you are playing when you master Air Combat Maneuvers, the quirks of your particular aircraft of choice and can think three or four steps ahead of that enemy pilot and what their plane is capable to engage in a dogfight and take them down.

The reason why so many people, myself included, have a rule not to "tilt queue" (ready up for a game while tilted) is simple and biological. Anger causes the brain to enter a state of arousal. Not like that! But also, not entirely unlike that, either. Memers of the world rejoice, for post nut clarity is real, and it happens for a reason. While the arousal is different it does cause similar effects. A state of arousal causes higher reasoning to become significantly impaired. After leaving a state of arousal you do think more clearly. That does lead us back into the perils of tilt queuing. When you're angry you're not thinking clearly. You're not processing things as quickly or having the same level of reasoning or the same breadth of strategy as usual. This will usually lead to you performing worse and getting angrier over time, further impairing your ability to play as well. Just set the controller down and watch some RU-vid videos or Netflix. It'll be okay, you just gotta get yourself out of that angry funk.

That let me solo her reference made me obscenely happy.

If only it were this simple. Tilt for some is much more than a mindset change. I'm well aware of what causes my tilting but it's basically unavoidable in a number of games for me unless I completely stop caring about the game itself (which then loses a lot of the enjoyment for me) or just never play them (which is quite a few games). The specifics are interesting, however. For me, I get tilted much more often in non-consentual PvP scenarios. I'll get tilted more in something like Elite: Dangerous pirate taking some cargo versus dying a lot in a Battlefield match. I'll also get tilted more if I'm being juggled in a brawler versus still losing but not without me putting up a fight. I think it stems from a feeling that the other people don't respect me as a person and are willing to remove my agency and cause me to feel helpless for their own enjoyment, which I very much take personally. Another path comes from making dumb mistakes in the presence of other people that triggers a strong SHAME response that can cause tilt. I'd like to think I'm not alone in this. I'd love to have a way to mitigate this that didn't feel like I was letting the bullies win (like perma-quitting the games that can trigger tilt, or just taking it with a smile, metaphorically). Unfortunately knowing the cause is only half the battle, and I can't seem to win this war.

Extra Credits: Makes video about preventing Tilt War Thunder: *”Ima have to stop you right there”*

Here's the thing: my reaction to dying over and over in Dark Souls is completely different to my reaction losing in League if Legends. It's all about PLAYER AGENCY. Once agency is removed from the player, losing becoming incredibly frustrating and tilt becomes real. If I die to the Silver Knight archers in Anor Londo, that death is on me and is 99% my fault. You could argue that encounter is poor design, but I still have agency within that encounter. If I have an afk/trolling/griefing teammate that not only wastes my time but also tries to punish me by forcing me to sit through a lost game... that is an issue of having little to no agency. The less agency you have over a loss, the more tilted you are.

are you telling me not to rage, me Me I NEVER RAGE , I ALWAYS HAVE FUN

So many people need to learn this lesson about life in general, not just games.

Idk about that. Sometimes there is no lesson to be learned. It's not all about self reflection and statistics. Sometimes you have to know when you're beat and you have to know when the best move is not to play.

"People don't play even online competitive games just to win." EXCUSE ME?! Team Fortress 2 is flooded with sniper bots that can insta-kill you from the other side of the map. In Overwatch, people make smurf accounts for the express purpose of playing against people who are far below them in skill level. All the while, Overwatch throws a skill rank number at you so you can precisely quantify how much each loss hurts you. Any wonder why people tilt?

I also think that when fighting a tough boss or battle and you lose a lot, that when you win it feels so much better than just winning the first time.

4:05 very good point and also a nice throwback to OW1 in the early days. I put a dent in my previous table cuz of that damn hook hahaha

Feedback is king, I just picked up Two Point Campus on GamePass, and the cartoony style lets you really see what's wrong without needing the overlays (though they are welcome). People walking like Zombies? Probably need more accessible dorms and a coffee shack. Piles of litter? Maybe put a bin in that area.

In my experience, tilting often comes from when there is a mismatch between what the player thinks is the win condition and/or how to achive it and what the win condition actually is. Because in such a case, the player will work towards something only to not see any progress for their effort and they don't know why. This can be either due to the player misunderstanding something, or the game not communicating it properly. Typically it's the former, but it's kind of the responsibility of the game to get the player on the right track by making misunderstandings easy to clear and unlikely to happen in the first place.

I love fighting games, and I can appreciate losing when it is a learning experience. But I tend to get frustrated when I may as well have put the controller down all match for all the feedback I got for my inputs. This tends to be a matter of the game not teaching or clarifying recovery options, leading to a situation where may as well just not get up.

NFT Ape Escape gave me psychic damage.

There is one game that has a tagline LOSING IS FUN. it featured on this channel a few times. DF! Best game ever. Taught me so much.

I don't really tilt much in games probably because I generally see losses as data points, but I can get weary of a game if I find myself unable to overcome any particular point of a game despite spending a significant amount of time on that one point. The last time this happened was getting stuck in the tutorial to Soma. I never figured out how to leave the tutorial, put down the game, and never looked at it again.

I for one don't enjoy games where I have to change my playstyle because designers want me to "experience differenent paths". I want to use and do what I like, what feels good to me. I hate beeing in an min max environment where group play only works when one has the fotm something.

Me: dies Game: "You Lose!" Also game: "Good luck spending 10 minutes just getting back to where the fight was! Oh, not to mention another 10 so you can farm a consumable that makes the boss fight easier that you lose all of every time you die!"

my true tilt has always being; losing beyond your control, take MTG arena for example make an strategy test that deck lose because you only draw 2 lands in 6 turns (unable you to even test that strategy) i learned nothing with that lost and that leave me with the feling that i only wasted my time because of RNG, that truly tilt me

In the Elden Ring trailers especially the live action ones, they say “May death never stop you”. That’s the whole point of “losing” in games. To learn from each death and rethink your strategy. Whether it’s beating Malenia, Blade of Miquella, or even a sub boss in a totally different game.

This channel has taught me so much

This video answers a few of my questions about how to manage and grow (in terms of taking breaks by gaming) while dealing with severe anxiety that then gets generalized to gaming anxiety (I'm not an expert, but this is just a thing I presume lots of people experience?). My greatest anxiety in complex fps and shootemups in general is that if I lose once, that's *the* sign that I'm not good enough to make progress in the game so I'm bound to keep losing. Although this is not exactly what this EC vid is getting at, it looks like one positive output from the experience of losing is to look at what I did to get so far and learn what it is that killed me/made me fail the mission. I KNOW those are obvious but now I know that some game design can HELP me figure that out and strategize *even a little*, and I don't necessarily have to settle for non-violent games to enjoy brief escapes into puzzle amd strategy solving. I mean, take SUPERHOT. I think the game design was challenging and aesthetic and there are plenty of reasons to enjoy it, but it also allowed for a learning curve through the game mechanics; or my personal favorite Portal; and so-on-and-so-forth plus hundreds of games in multiple genres that do the same. So yeah, thanks Extra Credit for highlighting, among other things, how helpful games can be and the importance of game design!

Sorry, I stopped mid-vido to point out the obvious: Proximal development zone. Or whatever it's called in English. The sweet spot in learning where it's neither too hard nor too easy. The difference between learning multiplication when you don't even know what numbers are and learning multiplication inbetween two derivations. In singleplayer, that's fine. There are difficulty options, cheats if nothing else, or you reach that escort mission at the end of Psychonauts and remember you would rather do you taxes. But in multiplayer, the difficulty is set by other players. I've played exactly one game of Wesnoth and not only got crushed basically early game, but the other players complained that I was taking time trying to figure out what units even did. Tilting happens when you have positively no idea what the game / other players expect from you, and coding your own fast Fourier transform will feel both more meaningful and rewarding than slamming your head at a video game. And if I want a challenge I have that thing called life.

Older audience: remember the time games needed many floppy disks to install. Younger audience: why do the characters have the save icon in their hands?

If a lose state is intended to be feedback, its important that the player be able to understand why their solution didn't work. Telling someone "no that's not a good way to do this" doesn't help unless there's something indicating what a good way might look like. This is a big problem in fighting games, where you don't always know why you lost or what strategy would have fixed the problem. It's often unclear if you had a failure in execution or a failure in strategy -- did I drop my combo there because those moves just don't link the way I thought they do, or did I drop my combo because I misinput something or was a few frames late on the button press? When I was getting smoked in the corner, how could I have ever known when their pressure was unsafe and I could have hit a button to take back agency?

This explanation helps me understand why after 7 hours of trying to pass the same level in Celeste, I still enjoy playing it... Because each death only sets you back a little bit and you keep learning more about the game while you play :)

I have the most vivid memory of when I was young. I was playing pokemon heart gold on my DS. I had failed beating one of the elite 4 members like 8 times and by the 9th I snapped my ds in half.

thats why edibles are the best anti tilt thing i own

I also would like to see a focus on "tilting as a design tool" in games like Getting Over It. Or the exploration in souls games which for me is the best component of the games, but it does feel that some traps/ambushes are meant to crush you the first time and then have you progress again, changing your mindset and maybe forcing you to explore another way. Something similar happened on elden ring with the knight at the start or margitt, walls of difficulty that act as tutorial tools to tell you go and explore, get stronger and then come back. Or with Genichiro on Sekiro

This turned out to be on a completely different topic than I had assumed. I thought this video would be about the techniques designers use to make you spend more money on microtransactions by appealing to your anger. Pairing up paying and f2p players in certain games intentionally so that the whale gets to feel good, and the f2p might want to buy stuff to equalize the playing field, etc.

Plot twist: Unfortunately, Matt has misread in his enthusiasm and accidentally summoned Let Her Solo Me...

The most frustrating thing for me is that when I lose or die at a game makes me feel like the designer themselves are saying we don’t want you to play like that and punish you for thinking of such a great strategy that you try to come up with just to have it blow up in your face for example hearthstone you’ll have a much better time playing Hearthstone if you play the way the designers want you to anyone who hates morlock decks and try to build their own strategies should know how I feel I hate any type deck in any game but designers want you to pay them because they put so much time in them so they make them better than all the other decks wow thank you so much designers and this can actually be said about almost any game no matter what game you’re playing designers only have a few ways for you to play and if you don’t play it theyer way well get used to rage quitting and destroying your stuff and feeling like the entire world is against you with the little pressures time you have ever week

No Blizzard devs have seen this video yet. Can confirm.

I just started playing League again and RU-vid recommended me this… oh the irony XD

This is why I personally after dying or failing a few times I turn off the game because then it isn't fun. I don't play difficult games for this reason either. I play to relax and have fun. Engage with a story or world. I'm not really bothered about being good at gaming. I just wanna have fun

This is why Elden Ring bosses also feel so bad in comparison to other souls game bosses. Their immense health pool, paired with their move sets that only infrequently let you safely get a hit in (especially if you use big weapons) mean that since even successful attempts on late game bosses can take up to 20 minutes (looking at you, Fire Giant) dying to them is disproportionately frustrating. Hopefully the DLC will have actual good bosses.

Loving the thumbnail change

One thing I'm missing in the video is tilting because of reliance on teammates in multiplayer games. You could be playing at your best yet but if you have 1-14 window lickers dragging you down, no way you'll have a good memory from the time spent.

I largely gave up on fighting games because it felt impossible to get better at them. What am I doing right, and what am I doing wrong? I have no idea; every opponent curb stomps me no matter what.

I don't tilt. I capsize and then I spin into a vortex that brings things down around me... While I generally find Extra Credits videos informative and helpful - I think I'm going to need something a lot stronger to beat my tilt. Thanks anyway.

We play to overcome other players. The closer the matchup the more exhilarating it is to crush your enemy.

Woah, it's been a while since Extra Credits has uploaded an Extra Credits video

Some veteran players do in fact beat down on new players all day, its called Smurfing.

here's my tilt moment from not too long ago: Shovel Knight, new game +, Tower of Fate: ascent boss rush no troupple potions (had to use them earlier in the level), and I didn't want to leave the level to get more, because I had grabbed the few music sheets I had forgotten the first time. Towards the end, I (usually a very quiet gamer) was shouting to the point where my throat hurt. Eventually gave up, tried again a couple days later, and got through it no prob (after getting the potions again). Just goes to show that sometimes, trying to brute force it... isn't good.

What if there is more than time that's at stake? And what if the loss is because of something beyond your control? Take a look at MOBAs. You get matched with 4 completely random people, and if those four you got matched with are idiots, YOU also get punished by having your rank reduced. How do you prevent tilting when you do your best but your completely random teammates drag you down, and you're getting punished for it?

As the Dwarf Fortress wiki elegantly puts it: "Losing is fun!"

While this is what I do, I eventually reach a time where I'm out of ideas and the skill doesn't seem to grow. (there is no difference in feedback in missing a roll by 0.5 seconds and by 0.1). So that is another thing that keeps me going: different levels of success and failure. I'm currently playing Spider-Man since its pc release and this game is littered with micro-wins and micro-failures. In this game in particular that is because there are multiple ways of disposing of bad guys (Web them stuck, throw them off buildings, beat them up), different ways to get them to a 'defeatable' state (mainly webbed up), and different types of micro-failures have different effects (grapple, stun grenade, critical hits). This game is not about winning, it's about looking good while doing so.

this all works in an environment where the random effect is reduced. In hearthstone you reach a point when you lose because of a draw or random results that are bad.

If games were just about "winning" then you'd boot up a game, get to the title screen then see a prompt that says "press A to win game". You press A and roll credits, good job you did it! Naw its more about the journey. And failing is part of any journey. I used to tilt pretty hard but as I've gotten older I take a more introspective approach and try to identify where I went wrong. Was it a bad judgment call? Was it a bad load out? A mechanic I wasn't aware of? Or maybe the other players just had your number and worked you, and nothing you can do but tip your hat because it was their stellar play that won it for them.

I never thought of it this way. I think a huge thing for a lot of people who get so frustrated so frequently is that they are pretty set on a particular style of playing. So getting better comes a lot more slowly.

I love Celeste, but I never raged as hard as in the final chapter in a part that had some pufflefish that you had to jump onto. Spent a week stuck in that part until I finally got past it, never felt so good. The last parkour didn't even made me mad, I was just sad it was almost over 😢

One of the things that makes losing in a game like Monster Hunter tolerable for me is that you still keep some of the rewards you earned before losing

I was kinda hoping for a Dwarf Fortress reference. It's been a long time.