With so many games putting us on the edge of our seats, it is no wonder that so many people quit when they lose, but who is it helping?

Maybe it is just me and my infallible sense of duty, or maybe I just hate quitting, but leaving a game halfway through is just never an option for me. Even when all hope is lost, I’ll try to battle it out to the bloody end, and take down as many of my adversaries as possible. Like a Captain manning his ship until its latest and darkest seconds, I will never give up. This is not always the case for my team mates though, and often this noble and awe-inspiring fight that I give falls on blind eyes and yellow bellies. Being the last person on your team can be both daunting and exhilarating, but is definitely always annoying.

Nobody likes to lose. It’s not very fun, but even though we have all been in losing fights, is quitting ever really worth it? I don’t mean to sound so high and mighty (up on this very tall horse, there is a wonderful view of all the rage quitters and their tails between their legs) but it is my opinion that if you don’t try, then you won’t ever succeed. When that success is to be shared with your often anonymous team mates, you owe it not only to yourself, but to the people relying on you to at least try.

Competitive team games are a massive part of the video game market, and as gaming expands, more and more people are joining in on the fun. Sometimes however, that fun is more stressful than enjoyable, and when you know that your prospects are looking low it is understandable that people feel the pressure and want to leave as soon as possible. However, this causes more problems than it does alleviate them. Many games will punish those who quit games early, and while this does seem to penalise those of us with a shoddy connection to the internet, it is a certain way of enticing players to continue their streak of deaths.

Games without a deterrent to those who wish to leave early often suffer the pain of the rage quit. Take the newly popular and ever so frustrating Nosgoth as an example. Nosgoth is still under development, and though its player base is surely growing, many find it all too much when an enemy team of vampires (or even worse, humans on rare occasions) have been beating you down into the blood-infused muddy puddle that is defeat. With games like this, where team work is everything, it literally disables any chance of a win. With no punishment for those who like to slip out before the grand finale, it is often no skin off the backs of those who would rather leave than suffer another crushing defeat.

FIFA is another game (though I haven’t played personally) that I often hear people complaining of rage quitters in. When a match is one on one, and you are winning, there is nothing more annoying than being a few seconds from victory, only for the match to end due to forfeit. Granted, I do not know if these issues have been fixed in the latest iteration of everyone’s favourite ball kicking sim, but the point still stands, even if that point happens to be a few years old by this time.

“So why not quit these matches yourself?” I hear many of you cry. Well the answer is simple. I don’t like to waste my time. Even a defeat is worth something more than null. With so many people worrying about their kill/death ratio these days, it is often like people are playing games to make their numbers better and higher rather than to get enjoyment. The same can be said of many other games. You play to improve a number, and if anything threatens that number, then you might as well give up and let Satan eat your soul, after all, we are all damned once our K/D drops below 1.0. The way I look at loss is that I more than likely learnt something from it. It is said by many that you learn from your mistakes. It’s a hard thing to sit there and take a loss on the chin, but another saying is that suffering builds character, so if both those sayings are actually true, then losing all the time will make you a far better person…. Like a Saiyan.

To be clear, I am not condemning those of you who have to leave for whatever reason may pull you from your game. But those who dislike being on the losing side are only ever going to continue to be on that side unless they learn to stand up and fight back. Maybe this sounds arrogant to some of you, and I want you to know that I am often on the losing side in fights, which is why rage quitters can irk me to the point that I feel the need to vent about them in an article. Luckily I can also say that I am often on the other side, forcing many to leave due to the immense power of my gaming prowess (or at least the collective power of me and my team mates). Essentially what I am saying is, you win some, you lose some, but at the end of the day a loss is only a loss if you let it defeat you. If you can take away something from a loss, then is it not really a gain?