I’m not what you would call a sore loser. More accurately, I am a rabid loser. I don’t have a meager lactic acid situation going on; I have the sort of thing that gets your childhood pet put down.
More than half of the time, I am fine with losing a game. I’m simply not good at a lot of games, especially video games, and that’s something I’ve accepted about myself. Still, a large chunk of my losses dig at me and make me the kind of person you wouldn’t want to run into in Monopoly jail.
It’s the worst when I am learning a new game, like when my boyfriend first taught me backgammon and I chucked a stuffed animal at his head. While I’m less likely to slip into rabid-loserdom once I’ve licked the specific schematics of a game, it gets much worse when I don’t have “I don’t know what I am doing, dammit!” to fall back on.
My short temper is to blame, for the most part, but also the way my childhood experiences taught me to approach games.
First of all, when you’re a kid, adults don’t let you play anything fun. Yahtzee, Spin the Bottle, poker, you name it, and I was barred for being too little. I was precocious and wanted in on the fun, but no dice.
And then when I was old enough to be allowed, no one gave me a chance. My learning curve is steep at first. I ease into the game, then once I understand how it works, I get to real playing. There was this rush to indoctrinate me, abandoned once they got tired of shorty trying the big leagues.
A good example of this is Monopoly. After a couple games of being bored and “accidentally” skittering their houses off the board with my game piece, I shut the other players out of whole stretches on the board and took all of their money. And then I flipped the board and ran to my room when they called me out on my tyranny.
While I’ve been able to rally in most games and become a worthy opponent, I wasn’t as lucky in others.
Team-building in grade school Physical Education classes probably robbed me of the chance to go Olympic in volleyball. Who knows how to serve the first time they hold a volleyball? Not me. Fittingly, I was last to be picked and shoved to the back of the court, impeding my ability to improve and making me generally cranky for years.
When my siblings discovered Nintendo, I was again shut out once I demonstrated less-than-ideal skill sets on “Crash Bandicoot.” That ice level is a killer. Personally, I’m more for pastoral scenes with lots of boxes to throw my body at.
I never learned how to use a joystick or game controller well, and my career as a video gamer has been nearly exclusively as a watcher. I like video games, but they are more like interactive movies to me at this point.
Given this long-standing exclusion from whole arenas of game-playing, I assume now, even as an adult, that if I do not demonstrate considerable promise right off the bat when playing a new game, I won’t be allowed to play anymore. Ever.
And the anxiety associated with that carries itself into games I know and play well, like backgammon or badminton, ruining everybody’s fun. I’ve spent a lot of time being ashamed of my being a terrible loser, especially when I see someone else getting all sore over a game of checkers.
I’m assigning myself something of a New Year’s resolution as of today, midway through March. I am going to flex my losing muscles until they are much less sore post-play and stop worrying about being banned from a game — before people actually do ban me from playing because I am irrationally angry over scratching on the cue ball.
My fall-back plan is upping my average pitching speed at the expense of my friend’s heads. So… win-win?
Samantha Bares is a 20-year-old English junior from Erath, La.