Highs and Lows
By: Jason Wheeler
Tags: Gaming, Mental Health, Psychology, Suicide, Addiction

The shooting and murder-suicide this week in Jacksonville Florida of two eSports competitors by another gamer may sadly illustrate two more general phenomena. One concerns explanations and the other is about competition.

When people are killed or kill themselves we naturally want to know why. But sadly we rarely get a satisfactory explanation, for several reasons. One is because we often don’t have any access to the agent’s thoughts and feelings. Notes and manifestos may offer glimpses of insight but never a whole picture. The other, and perhaps more profound reason, is that even if we could in some impossible way have access to all of someone’s thoughts and feelings, the motivations that he or she might have had are likely to be so personal, idiosyncratic, and of the moment that they wouldn’t make complete sense to anyone else. Mental illness complicates things further and multiplies the idiosyncracy. People may wrack themselves trying to figure these things out, for some it may be their job to do so, but ultimately we may have to accept that no satisfactory explanation is going to be forthcoming, and that we are going to have to live with that painful enigma, something unknowable almost in principle.

Having worked with several people who have been committed gamers, and in some cases struggled with gaming addictions, some aspects of competition common to gaming came to mind in relation to this recent tragedy.

There are broadly speaking two ways to play games: one is playing against the computer, which generates competitors for the gamer; the other is using a computer as a means for human avatars to play against each other. These two forms are frequently called PVE (Player Versus (computer generated) Environment) and PVP (Player Versus Player) respectively. Humans are very sensitive and responsive to both the highs and lows of competition: people love to win and hate to lose. The higher the highs the more people will want to play, and possibly become addicted to playing. Less noticed on the other side of that are the lower lows that come from losing in highly competitive games. There are of course PVE games that generate highs of triumph and lows of defeat, but not as high or low as in PVP.

Generally the most popular games (take the cultural crossover phenomenon of Fortnite for example) and games played as eSports are PVP games where other human players are your competitors. So, games that people may be most drawn to play will also have the most intense rollercoaster effects on their emotions. Sometimes gamers refer to PVP games or communities as becoming “toxic,” which means more or less that people become very angry while playing (during the low lows of losing). Players might “flame” (get nasty) and “troll” (provoke and disrupt) one another after losing, or might “rage quit” a match when on the way to losing rather than seeing it through to its end. “Rage” is not an exaggeration here; this is really the intensity of anger provoked by such games.

Gamers in competitive PVP games are likely to become adrenalized while playing. This is evolution’s way of preparing us for fighting to the death. It may only be one’s avatar who is losing or dying, but it gets people’s hormones flowing all the same. It can be especially hard to manage one’s emotions in an adrenalized state. Further, gamers who become adrenalized and who tend to take losing personally - those who really hate to lose - may become primarily motivated in playing to “beat the guy who beat me,” essentially using revenge as a motivation.

The most successful gamers are good at not taking losses personally, and for good reasons. For instance, some team-based PVP games arrange matches randomly, so your enemy one match may be your ally the next. As in the rest of life, really losing means having no one to play with. Vengeance may or may not have been a part of the Jacksonville shooter’s unique, complex, and ultimately unknowable motivations, but it is clearly a losing strategy.