What makes a game frustrating

Ever have anxiety while playing video games? I am one of those people. It can also be more than the failure to complete a game. Players can feel disappointed in letting their teammates down during multiplayer gameplay and feel lonely when playing solo. Gaming anxiety affects people everywhere and can show up as symptoms like headaches, palpitations, abdominal pain, and paresthesia—that pins-and-needles sensation—as well as feelings of hopelessness and low self-esteem, says Leela R.

Magavi , a psychiatrist and regional medical director of Community Psychiatry. So, what do you do? Give up on video games for good? What have you been up to this week? I've spent most of it staring at a near-vertical assortment of pipes and beams and wishing I was dead.

I've also been inventing guttural new expletives that threaten to bring Social Services to the door. God only knows what the neighbours have made of it. I have spent significantly more time failing at the game than making progress. And yet, this has been one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences I've had in the last five years.

For the purpose of this article it's really not important that I'm stuck in a game - we've all been there. What matters is that, following a six hour marathon trapped in the same desperate cycle of failure, I can only bring myself to turn the console off for five minutes before rebooting for just one more go. When I fall asleep, I do so with mental attempts to solve in-game problems playing out behind my closed eyes. So strongly has the Tetris-effect taken hold that after a prolonged session, I can no longer view a column of text without it rocking to and fro while my brain calculates the necessary movements to traverse it.

Clearly this calls for a moment of introspection. There are, after all, no shortage of games featuring revolutions in story-telling, impressive visuals and protracted narratives. There's also no time in which to play more than a small percentage of them. So what compels me to spend so much time in abject misery for what appears to be a deficit of pay-off?

The transformation of my gaming habits began with Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, back in It was ironic becauses since the days of bit hardware, I had happily believed that if I threw myself behind the juggernaut of hardware progression and queued up giddily on day one, gaming nirvana would be assured. RPG vistas would become ever grander, racing environments would get more and more realistic and total immersion would be achieved. But it was the side-project confined to the in-game arcade machine of a triple-A launch title that woke something within me which had lain dormant for 15 years.

The psychedelic wizardry owed a great deal to advances in hardware of course. But it was the increasingly complex simplicity of the game that reminded me why I started playing games in the first place - that flood of endorphins when you arrive in the zone and nothing else exists.

I've long since reached the point with Geometry Wars where I can break through the brick wall preventing me from progressing. It now takes me half an hour of queuing up to get the hit that slams home. But every day, without fail, I've got to have that fix, to experience that feeling of being switched on and alive while playing a game. It means the game is giving me a good challenge and not making it too obvious. Lots of frustration, though, just isn't fun.

So it's like salt, which is good to a point, not sugar, which is always better with more! Reactions: Brian Boru and Pifanjr. You must log in or register to reply here.

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