Last week I expressed my concerns about having little to no emotional reactions to video games. And whilst that may be true for sadness, I certainly feel disgusting amounts of rage.
If you knew me in person, then you’d already know that I’m a very passionate person. Either about what I ate for breakfast or how adorable I found a cat-centered Vine the other day, I don’t half arse emotions. Look at my last Confession and my inability to cry or get deeply emotionally distraught by video games – I either whole ass or no ass my emotions. It’s even gotten me in situations where people who I consider my nearest friends have had to take me to one side and tell me I’m being ‘too intense and intimidating’ in particular conversations. Don’t worry, I took it as a compliment.
So what am I like when I go into FULL HULK MODE? Well, first of all, let’s just get us all on the same page before we break this down any further. Here’s a charming definition from Urban Dictionary on what it truly means to ‘rage quit’ on something :
RAGE QUITTING: A condition in which gamers, through steady provoking, simply cannot take being killed (cheaply or otherwise) anymore and leave an online game mid-match. Mostly occurs in multiplayer first person shooters.
Pathetic, isn’t it? But indeed, I can strongly identify with this animalistic and embarrassing way of conducting oneself within the medium of video games. I would however like to make one small change in definition to the above by stating that this intense feeling of frustration and anguish is not just reserved for the players of multiplayers such as Call of Duty, Counter Strike or Team Fortress. Oh no, I’ve felt this level of utter hatred across the entire board of video games, as your patience will soon find out. [Spoiler: Listicle Ahead.]
I can pretty much overreact to most things. I’ve been known in the past to scream, smash and single out inanimate objects to attack with unbridled anger and fury. But in my defense, how would you react to being relentlessly mocked by NPC’s and IRL people by having your ass absolutely handed to you inside a fictional realm designed to make you feel good? It’s awful and it’s shameful. And what’s worse is that this treatment of the player as cannon fodder can surface in multiple ways – spawn camping in Call of Duty, corrupt save files and hardware difficulties, inconsiderate boss battles that are inhumanly difficult, and so forth.
Apparently in an industry as consumed with entertainment value and audience satisfaction, what they love the most is toying with our emotions and taunting our inner cave-people to attack. And you know they do this on purpose by acknowledging cowardice and immature behaviour with painfully accurate achievements (see Team Fortress 2 and the ‘BarbeQueQ’ achievement – that’s cruelty), memes and the power to restrict pussies from getting their much desired XP/money/sense of achievement from their brief time inside the game world.
So this week I have decided to let you have a peak in through the window of my bedroom and witness the truly immature ways I have thrown a hissy fit over video games and thrown all my toys out of my large adult sized pram.
1)Call of Duty
I have mentioned this game a lot of far, but frankly whenever you think of rage quitting, this game is never far away. Now I was never particularly good at this game. And this could be the route of why I found it so evil. But nonetheless, I tried and I tried to play this game to get to the route of why everyone loved it so much. All it led me to do was hate little children and my inability to no-scope even more than I thought possible.
In the past, I’m known to have actually thrown things across my room, but I’m hoping that this act isn’t too ‘new’ you to all and that I’m not some kind of anger-controlled freak. Either by experiencing another player dropping out of your match and fucking it all up for you or by your own terrible abilities to play together as a team online, everyone has pretty much come across an act of rage quitting within Call of Duty. It’s almost integral to the fucking game in my eyes. That, plus unpleasant encounters with minors. Or Noobtubers.
2) Resident Evil 5
Fuck me I hate Wesker. I hated my entire time spent on that god forsaken boat. I hated every single bloody thing by the time I finished that game. I don’t even care that it took them 13 years to finally have a battle between Chris and Albert, that shit was ridiculously hard and frankly absurd.
You’re inside some dumb volcano shit shooting at a bloke whose arm resembles that creepy guy from Fresher’s Night that was a bit too handsy and all you want to do is go home and not look at another zombie. In this final part of the game, NPC’s, my controller and the environment all battled together to conquer my emotions and lead me into one of the more spectacular rage quits of my life.
Even after days of calm quitting, walkthrough scouring, YouTube tutorials and conversations with friends, I could not get my act straight. After eventually biting visible dents into my controller and screaming seven shades of shit at my wallpaper, I killed that bastard Wesker and called it quits on the entire franchise. It wronged me and I was done.
3) Left 4 Dead 2
As is the way with the Left 4 Dead franchise, the developers always had some mind blowing end-set piece to finish up each chapter of the game and make you work your little socks off to succeed. Well, no other scene in history tested me as much as the Dark Carnival Concert Finale. The premise is to attract a helicopter to your location by starting a Midnight Riders concert even though your previous ideology within the game is to remain as silent and hidden as possible. The level is batshit crazy and a hell of a lot of fun with 4 players. But when you’re on your own, operating lights, fireworks and the sound system to awaken the dead, it all gets a bit ballistic.
It’s all fun and games until you’re into what feels like the 7th year of your life and the helicopter still hasn’t arrived. Your ammo is basically gone and you’ve just realised that perhaps welcoming death is the best for everyone. But then out the corner of your eye you spot that helicopter. It signals hopes, survival and freedom and damn you’re excited. But just when you think you’ve shot the last of your zombified carnival goers and you’re ready to jump aboard your one way ticket to safety, there’s a Charger. Oh and that’s a Tank. And oh why not introduce a couple of Jockey’s to the occasion. It’s sheer madness.
And it will either go one of two ways: You get absolutely butt fucked before you even make the helicopter, or you somehow manage to plant your buns in the escape craft and you have to go and rescue Rochelle’s useless ass because the pilot won’t leave without her. This also ends in your death though, as your selfless ass is left bleed down the bleachers as she now frolics off to safety.
That’s where I call it quits. No waiting for the credits and end stats. I’m gone. Console off and controller embedding into the gravel of the nearest fish tank. Done.
4) Dark/Demon Souls
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Don’t be fucking stupid. I just told you I got pissed off by some douche canoe in a volcano. I’m not trusting my flailing anger limbs enough to touch this game. The most likely outcome is that someone will actually die.
5) World of Warcraft
So the guild and I had planned for a few nights to take on an easy raid challenge to get some much needed achievements in the bank. We finally settled upon Icecrown Citadel for an easy raid as most of our new members had missed their chances previously to take down the Lich King. We did everything we needed to do before we reached the foot of the almighty King himself, and then the Raid Leader just paused. He procrastinated. He talked endlessly. He went to get food. Then other people got inspired and when to get food as well to ‘prepare themselves’. Then someone had to go because they had class in the morning. Then someone lost connection.
It was one giant fuck up into the next and I officially had it. After hours of waiting, I was done and I rage quit all the way from my desk to my pillow for a furious night’s sleep. The Lich remained King that night.
6) Heavy Rain
Now this one is only marginally pathetic. You know that bit right at the beginning? When you have to press down all the bumpers on your PS3 controller to make Norman go up that slippery hill? Yeah, I rage quit there.
Now obviously I came back a day later and never put the game down as it exists to this day as one of my favourite games of all time, but dammit that hill gave me so much grief and I was just having none of it. Nearly snapped the disc over how mindlessly infuriating that one was. I was the physical incarnate of anger that day.
7) Bioshock 1
Now this is a big Confession for me, and I don’t take it for granted very lightly. Until now I have reserved this secret rage quit for only my nearest and dearest. But it’s time I came to confess to you something: I never completed the first Bioshock game. Why I hear you cry? Well my overly inquisitive friend, because I could absolutely never manage to kill the very first Big Daddy you encounter. That’s it.
I was either low on health, low on ammo or just plain stupid enough to never fully understand how to kill the bastard and that is only ever as far as I got in the game. I rage quit an ENTIRE game based on the fact I could never kill a single enemy. I never advanced that scene and held it in such hate filled eyes that I didn’t even play Bioshock 2. And I only managed half of Infinite as well. Just awful Charleyy.
8) Papers, Please
This wasn’t the games fault at all. There was no difficulty curve to conquer or a particularly hard segment I could never pass. But embarrassingly, I just never understood how to play the shitting thing. I tried my damnedest to follow instructions and tutorials, but I never fully grasped what I had to do and look out for.
I would always fail, let the wrong people enter the town and generally just fucked up every experience I tried to initiate with the game. This then resulted in a massive waste of my time and money and not even a disc or controller for me to fight with at the end of the day. Disappointing, all round.
9) Unepic
Whoa, this game was incredible. I absolutely adore this game and would recommend to anyone on Earth within only 30 minutes of my own gameplay experience. So why did I rage quit it so bad? Well you see, I got lost. Like, diabolically lost. I literally could not find the next part of the game.
After genuinely trying to recover every single step and check every single level and platform in the game overall design, I deduced the game was bullshit and called it a day. Which upset me just about the most out of any other experience of rage quitting both before and after as I adored this game and I could not understand why it had betrayed me so badly. How dare it make me so vulnerable and weak.
And there we have it, just a brief snapshot into my life as a rage controlled idiot who should not be allowed to play with expensive toys. Do you have a particular rage story yourself or would you like to point out how pitiful I am? Then comment below or belittle me on Social Media. I welcome criticism surprisingly well.
Confessions of a Gamer Girl 
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