One thing that I don’t think school P.E. lessons focused on enough was good sportsmanship. The people who were good at sports did well and enjoyed themselves; the people who were bad at sports (like me) got picked last for teams and put in places where they didn’t have to do much, like goalkeeping. (Which always seemed a bit weird to me, given that the goalkeeper is the last line of defense in a football match and consequently should probably be quite good at protecting the goal. I was not.)
The upshot of this unfortunate tendency was the reinforcement of these positions: the people who were good at sports continued to be good at sports and grew to expect everyone on their team to be on their level and would sometimes even become abusive towards those who they perceived to be not pulling their weight; the people who were bad at sports grew increasingly bitter and resentful of games that, while competitive, should be fun.
Bad sportsmanship hurts everyone. It means the good players don’t get to nurture up and coming talent, help people improve and introduce new players to the activity they love, making them more likely to be able to get a good game. And it means the less skilled players feel ostracised and like they will never have an opportunity to learn more about something they might actually be quite interested in.
It’s unfortunate that this happens in online games, too. I don’t play a lot of competitive multiplayer games, but I can comment on it a bit with regard to Blizzard’s new title Overwatch, whose ranked competitive mode launched late last night.
For the most part, the Overwatch community actually seems pretty good; the game is a team game with variable character skills and statistics, so everyone needs to cooperate to achieve a common goal. If you don’t, you lose; it’s pretty simple. Unfortunately, there are players out there who seem to believe that if they just make unhelpful comments and call the rest of their team “noobs” that they somehow have the moral high ground and are justified in complaining and whining.
The trouble, I think, is that this particular type of player doesn’t like to lose. It’s more than that, even: this particular type of player thinks that they have a right to win every game they play. Whether this is due to overconfidence in their own abilities, a misplaced sense of entitlement or having grown up in the obnoxious “everyone’s a winner!” culture of many educational establishments these days, I don’t know, but it’s not a helpful way to be.
A competitive, two-team game by its very nature has a winner and a loser. Every time. You cannot rely on always being the winner — more than anything, that would make the game itself pretty pointless if the outcome was already known before you started. And being on the losing side doesn’t make that game a bad experience, either; some of the most interesting, exciting Overwatch matches I’ve had to date have come when I’ve lost, but it’s been close. And in those matches where it wasn’t close, I can usually learn something from the experience. You take it on the chin, you try again, you get better — perhaps you even help out people you were playing with that you know could do something differently.
What you don’t do is rage and piss and moan at the rest of your team (or worse, just say “………”, which is pretty much the least helpful thing you can possibly say — literally saying nothing is more helpful than that) because that sure as hell isn’t going to make them want to play with you again.
And what you absolutely shouldn’t do is go off in a strop because you’re not absolutely dominating the other team, which is what happened to me in one game I played earlier today. Said player decided he had the “perfect” way to play and wanted everyone to fall into line with him, regardless of where his teammates skills’ and expertise lay. The match was pretty even — our opponents scored 2 points on offense, then we scored 2 points on offense, then our opponents scored another 1 point on their final round of offense, meaning we still had the potential to win, or at least draw and push the match into Sudden Death… and Salty McSaltyson decided that no, he wasn’t going to stand for having to actually put in some work to winning, he would, instead, leave the match altogether, leaving us down a team member and thereby at a significant disadvantage. Shortly afterwards, another player left in frustration, putting us two people down and therefore completely unable to be competitive at all. The rest of us, to our credit, carried on playing until the “you can leave without penalty when this timer expires” timer expired, but then it fell apart, leaving our team with a loss that could have been avoided. It was a shame, since it had been a great match up until then; our opponents were gracious and apologetic about it, so at least it wasn’t a completely negative experience, but still.
That one player being a twat spoiled the match for eleven other people. I doubt he even thought about that when he clicked “leave game” and accepted the penalty the game gives you for leaving Competitive games early — but it really did spoil the whole match which, like I say, could have gone either way in that last round.
Be a better sportsman. Accept that sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. And if you think you’re better than other people — you might well be! — how about actually offering them some advice and help to get better rather than just being a dickhead? Everyone benefits in the long term.