When the Love of the Game and Competing Wanes
A quick disclaimer before I start the piece, this will be my first longer form Medium piece so bear with me as I constantly try to figure out the tone of this (and others) and how much I should make it professional/personal/etc. So I’m welcome to any critiques and ideas! It took a bit longer to get this piece out since I spent a lot of time trying to figure all of this out but ultimately, to help stop taking forever: I still just want to write.
Gaming for some brings comfort in trying times, exciting moments to experience, and memorable stories for decades to come. For others, it provides a chance of triumph: competitive ladders for climbing, leaderboards to top, and the ability to feel like you have gained mastery of something you’ve practiced for so long. I’m someone who flows between a gradient for both of these feelings, but recently there’s been a part of me that felt something waning with these joys.
For my competitive side I’ve always tried my best to prove my worth in any game I play. While I haven’t won any big national tournaments, I have taken part in multiple local and online circuits and have found fair levels of success there. For competitive multiplayer games I’ve always aimed to reach the top of whatever leaderboard I play, and thanks to my competitive drive I usually do reach those top ranks and titles.
The game I’ve currently spent most of my days being competitive in is Legends of Runeterra. Riot’s collectible card game is in its 12th ranked season, and it will soon have its seventh seasonal tournament, all which features players that finished at the top 700 players of its ranked ladder and 324 players that qualified through a Last Chance Qualifier series of matches. As someone who has finished Masters (the highest rank within LoR) all eleven seasons and was able to qualify for each of these tournaments, there’s a lot of accolades to fall back on and show past achievements to others for personal bragging rights.
Yet there’s still so many more higher goals I’ve wanted to accomplish and have yet to attain.
Despite the effort put in, ultimately all of it is a hobby, but it’s a hobby I want to do my best in while having results I can enjoy to share and maybe softly gloat about. I enjoy playing these games, I love the endless chase of trying to improve, and I really really just want to win as much as I possibly can.
However these efforts can definitely link to burnout.
While I have put in a ton of work to qualify for each of LoR’s seasonal tournaments, I have yet to even reach the top 32 portion of any of these competitions (the closest I was able to get to was Top 64 with one more match win away).
Even if I can say: “Well qualifying for all of them is still something I can be proud of and shows my acumen to adapt and thrive in multiple metas” there still is a piece of me that feels lost when suffering defeat after consecutive defeat and gaining the sense like there’s nothing to show for it.
Taking a break is a healthy thing to do, and should never feel like an option that should never be used. However, it feels weird to take some time to recuperate when you’ve held a successful streak in the goals you’ve currently maintained for so long. This coupled with the fact that each time you aim for your aspirations you’re so close to a grand victory each time.
When Each Failure Keeps Breaking Your Back
While faltering on your own goals that you have set for yourself doesn’t have to be felt as a failure, especially when the aspirations are incredibly high, there still is a bit of a pain at coming up short of them each time. The “correct” way to assess competition is to never have victory as the end-all-be-all goal, but to always seek improvement and play your best all the time as an ultimate success.
Accepting loss is a part of competition, and while I’m never shy about looking at my defeats to better learn from them, a tolerance for how much losing will come on the path to progress needs to be built over time.
While I have yet to miss reaching the Master Rank of any season in LoR, eventually that day may come. Whether the reason is because I’m not fond of a particular meta happening, I gain more hectic commitments outside of the game, or any other unforeseeable cause; the time will still feel weird whenever it happens. The day may even be closer than I think as I still have yet to reach Master Rank this season (I was five wins from Diamond and a long while to go when I started writing this).
Whenever that monumental day comes, practicing more acceptance of loss will be important to embracing getting back up much more quickly.
The Source of Burnout and Recovering the Flame of Love from it
It sounds simple at first on how to recover from constantly feeling the need to remain competitive: just casually play the game (or something entirely different) for the comfort and exciting moments and take things slow. However when your inherent approach to any game is “learn and optimize as fast as possible” then it takes effort to detach from that too.
A major misconception that often occurs is that competitors don’t find all the joy in the game they play. On the contrary, it is incredibly difficult to find success in a game if you fail to love it.
When the world enters a state of pandemic (with no clear signs of a potential a hopeful resolution) it does remind you of the real priorities in life. It reminds you of a certain absurdity that you can do your best and try to do right by the world, yet the plague is still aiming to spread around.
While a disease that’s infecting a ton despite your input and safety precautions you’ve taken sounds daunting to deal with (almost to the point where it felt like most have already surrendered), there’s actually a better line to hope for. It’s alright to still do everything you can to fight back against the pandemic even if your effort can be for naught and still catch the disease.
The Covid pandemic and burnout are fairly close to one another, and awareness of both are vital to not needlessly suffer from either.
Recently I tried to focus less on the competitive side of games to hopefully tune into the more chill and casual side of it all. After enough fidgeting around with deciding where to begin, it made me realize that even the casual side of games in general also may have reached a point of burnout for me. The backlog of games to start trying to play grew, finishing the ones I already began felt like a chore for one reason or another.
If I didn’t have any big national titles competitively to show for myself, and I’m struggling at taking chill times slower, then I’m clearly doing something wrong to avoid burning out.
After finally realizing that maybe I’m potentially at ends with burnout (both competitive and casual gaming wise), I began to examine and ask myself what brought me to love competition and gaming in the first place?
Daigo Umehara, legendary and historic Street Fighter professional, wrote a book titled “The Will to Keep Winning” where he talks about motivation, and lessons he learned from his time competing. The title itself is compelling and really stuck with me, but one takeaway that was also noteworthy was his time spent learning and playing Mahjong. He initially talked about his initial struggles transposing his skills from gaming to Mahjong, but also how approval from his friend and overall desires added to his ambition and ideals to get better.
Sometimes our “desires to avoid failure” could impact our gameplay, and this also circles back to the overall process of how burnout could influence how we approach our hobbies and aspirations.
Everything Will be Okay, Eventually, Hopefully. If not: it’s Cool
I mentioned earlier in the piece that when I started writing I still had yet to hit Diamond in LoR, but I managed to hit Masters for the 12th time as of the time finally publishing (time will tell if I succeed in qualifying for the upcoming eight tournament since I barely lost the Last Chance Qualifier last Saturday but I can still secure a top 700 spot by February 4th).
While this could be taken as a lesson of “perseverance will prevail and hard work will be rewarded” there’s a more important underlying lesson. Even if I did fail to reach Masters in 15 days to retain the 100% appearance rate, it doesn’t erase all the past accomplishments I set up for myself.
The “break I took to help avoid burnout” and ignoring the “desire to avoid failure” helped play a part in re-achieving this successful streak.
Part of the reason why we try to set up bigger goals and resolutions for ourselves is because growth and larger success is the logical next step and reward to improvement. “If I ran a mile in nine minutes then I can clearly go for seven”, “If I reached Top 64 then I can clearly get Top 8”, etc.
Despite all this, these creeping expectations scaling upwards really harm one’s ability to take a breather and appreciate all that you’ve done for yourself to get here. Sometimes you have to accept that you could be doing your best in the moment, and hope your efforts will shine another way.
Maybe it’s a bit of forced optimism to find hope no matter the cost, but it’s more healthy than forced despair. Finding good in what you’ve done, despite any personal detractions you may muster, is a skill itself.
Just do your best, have fun, and it’s okay to lose.
