I keep thinking video games with a win/loss condition are supposed to make some kind of statement for my emotional tolerance and self-esteem. I was a scrub as a child a long time ago and could not handle failure. The "problem" is that I've since lost interest in games that are possible to lose. Winning now feels exhausting instead of liberating, and losing is only worse, of course. But I can explain away such a feeling by saying that not everyone necessarily likes these kinds of games. You can't just say that if you play a game, end up not performing well, and switch interest to other things, that you necessarily have serious mental baggage that you're leaving unresolved. People are too complex to make such generalizations.

But just for me, if I'm egged into playing a competitive game by someone else because they insist, then that is exactly what it feels like. I believe the only reason I don't press myself to best this person one day is because I'm a bad sport, not because I don't want to focus on the game because I want to do other things. I tell myself that I like creating things instead, and some other part of me won't have it, in order to capitalize on the feeling. I don't want to push myself to do all this training because I can't tolerate sustained amounts of failure and it's a lot of time to spend.

So even though games are not a significant interest to me, I am haunted by the notion that maybe if adolescent me had more self esteem, then that would not be the case, and that I've made some kind of mistake along the way. That I am just coddling myself, choosing instead to watch livestream archives where the win or loss was prerecorded, or selecting hobbies that are as easy to join as saying you watched something on TV the other night. People seem to agree that not being able to tolerate failure is not a good thing in general. And it feels like my tenuous relationship with games is somehow turning into a metaphor for the rest of my life, how I couldn't push myself to do better in other fields because of the same resistance to "getting good" not at fighting game combos or K/D ratios, but job networking or relationship building or taking constructive criticism to heart. The mechanism of failing, taking the fall, and doing better is the same. I don't need to play games and lose to feel that, whether or not I choose to turn off the console and leave, I'm still just a scrub at life.

I don't see games as a "superior" hobby to watching TV just because these problems come to light in the face of playing them. But I can never shake the feeling that I would be looked down on for them, by someone on an anonymous forum I'm unable to stop thinking about, or worse, someone who is the harshest critic and is also not possible to avoid: me.