by Jenny-Lee
Article Discussion Forum

Last night I was in a bad mood. I was tired, frustrated and bored all rolled up into one tightly-wound and temporarily chemically imbalanced package (shh, that last part's a secret.) All in all, it was a bad idea for me to join a counterstrike server. I thought it was a great idea. I thought I would join, get some frags, relax a little and take out my frustrations on the game. I could not have been more wrong…

I might not have gotten so annoyed, initially, if I had been able to survive longer than ten seconds of actual fighting in the first three rounds. I think by the fourth had I acquired one frag… and died immediately thereafter. I got another frag in the fifth round and perished ten seconds after that. That was all within the first five minutes of play. For the rest of the 25 minute-long match, I was struggling to stay alive and keep from taking everything personally. All in all, I finished the match having fragged 4 other players, and having been fragged 19 times. I was not impressed with my performance, to say the least; in fact, the whole experience did absolutely nothing to improve my frustration or my poor mood and only alleviated my boredom because I was occupying my mind with something.

After spending a bit of time trying to come down from the elevated frustration I was feeling (I was hovering somewhere between seething anger and frustrated tears), I decided that this was definitely not the ideal mood for me to be in while playing a first person shooter. Then I started wondering what impact my frame of mind had on the games I played and how different games could affect my mood.

The first game I looked at, naturally, was the first person shooter (FPS.) Playing CounterStrike when annoyed, for me anyway, is a bad idea. It probably works as a great stress-reliever for some people, but I am apparently not one of them. To me, a first person shooting game is great when I'm relaxed and bored but horrible when I'm frustrated or stressed. FPS games get my adrenaline rushing, and when I'm already tense, it gets too easy to push myself over the edge and into that headspace where I take the game far too seriously and get upset over it. So I can't play an FPS when I'm stressed, and that's the end of that.

I really wanted to figure out what games would be better for me when stressed, so I played as many as I could. Next was a Role Playing Game (RPG.) I figured that it had been a while since I last played Drakan, so I tossed in the disc and started at my last save point. Drakan involves a whole lot of sneaking around and trying to avoid things, and the ambience of the game is pretty effective at creating that sort of tense feeling… which didn't lower my stress levels at all. I played for a little while, and while I didn't get the same intense reaction that the FPS had provided me, it was definitely not a stress reliever - it just made my shoulders tense up even more. I was starting to think that maybe I was due for a massage, but my personal masseur (a.k.a. my boyfriend Jay) was busy playing CounterStrike, and I didn't feel like bugging him until he was done.

With an exaggerated sigh (for attention, you know), I got up from my computer and switched on the T.V. Britney Spears was on two of the six stations I get with my rabbit ears; two stations had programming in a language I don't understand and the others were too fuzzy to watch. I switched off the T.V. and went back to my computer, more stressed than before… Britney has that effect on me.

Once more comfortably installed at my desk, my cat Sera cuddling in my lap, I glanced around for something else to play that might help me wind down. I found Companions of Xanth (circa 1996) and was tempted to install that, but decided against the effort that installation would require. Besides, I had finished it back in 1997 (I never throw anything out). My stressed, frustrated self was becoming more stressed and frustrated as boredom set its teeth in.

I considered a strategy game, but when I thought more about it, I decided that I wouldn't like losing to a computer any more than I liked losing to other people online when in this particular frame of mind. Then I realized the problem… I was playing games that I couldn't really win. I had to play games I knew I was good at, or at least had a chance of getting somewhere with. "Mind games," I suddenly thought (and not the real-life-soap-operatic romance type where you're wondering if you should play coy or not…). I could play something that is entirely mentally stimulating - puzzles or cards or something, then I wouldn't be getting frustrated over my lack of co-ordination and my inability to think quickly enough. I would have time to figure things out.

This seemed to work far better than any of the other games I had tried up to this point. In fact, I seemed to even be relaxing a touch, until I started losing - consistently. I was quite sure that the computer was getting better at the game just to bug me, so I started yelling at it. Jay looked over at me like I was losing it. Maybe I was. I quit the card game I was playing and turned to my game of last resort, the final distraction that which will always and ever be my sanity saver…. Minesweeper.

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