Billy's Thoughts

Competitive Games Are Fun

Posted on Oct 19, 2021 — 3 mins read

“This game is bullsh*t!”

Anyone who’s played video games competitively (League of Legends, Counter-Strike, Fortnite, Street Fighter, etc.) has yelled this into the void at least once. Maybe you were having an off game, maybe your teammates looked like they had no clue what they were doing, or maybe you got stomped by your opponent and you had no idea what you could’ve done differently to win.

Go through this experience enough times (and you will end up here, a lot, given enough time) and you start to question all the hours you’ve put in, grinding solo queue. You wonder what it’s all for, if it’s worth it, why you’re still playing this dumb game anyway… as you queue up for another match, solo.

“I’m going to quit this game,” you say the next day. But you don’t.

Why are competitive games like this? Why are we like this?

I like video games. They’re fun. It’s fun learning the game, it’s fun progressing and improving, and it’s fun testing myself. This is true of most games, whether they’re single-player, co-op, or competitive, but competitive games just have that extra something.

In non-competitive games, it’s you against the game (and arguably against yourself too). You learn the rules and mechanics, beat the boss, save the princess, etc. If you lose or if you die you can restart the level and try again. And when you beat the game, you’re done. (You only need to get so good.) Then it’s onto the next game.

(Not to say that these games aren’t intense or frustrating. Games like Dark Souls, or even Overcooked, often involve lots of swearing and desk-slamming.)

Now pit player versus player (“PVP”) and you’ve got the basis for a competitive game. Beating a single-player game is fun, sure, but very few activities can hold a candle to the heart-pounding, head-buzzing feeling of clutching out a 1-vs-3 in overtime to win your team the match in Valorant. Or red-shelling your friend in 1st place at the last second to snatch away the victory in Mario Kart. For a split second, winning feels like the most significant achievement of your life.

The game itself changes over time too. The fabric of the game can change: game devs can continue to add more ways to play (characters, maps, game modes) and tweak existing mechanics and rules. Which then impacts the metagame: how players play, how they think about the game, what strategies they use. And outside of developer updates, players themselves push the metagame forward by constantly testing out new strategies, tricks, and combos to give themselves an edge over everyone else.

Competitive games just have that extra something to them that I like. I guess if you give people (kids and adults) an easily-accessible way to opt in, fight each other, and win through their own skill, it’ll draw in a lot of folks.

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