Welcome to Bad Gamers Anonymous

Hi, everyone. My name is Charlie, and I’m bad at video games.

As you might imagine, this is a painful admission for someone whose job is writing about (and thus playing) video games.

As I get older, I can increasingly use my age as an excuse: I just don’t have the twitchy reaction time of the 17-year-olds online. But while that’s technically true, the real truth is much darker. I was never good at video games, not even as a twitchy 17-year-old.

I began to suspect I was a noob pretty early into my playing career. While my contemporaries were honing their early skills on the Super Nintendo, all I had was a desktop computer and a WWII flight simulation game. By the time my family caught up with the console craze, I was already behind. Thankfully, games were mostly single-player back then, but I still had to watch my friends breeze through sections of the Crash Bandicoot games that I struggled with. I still had to pretend that I was just screwing around and not really trying to win when I lost—again—in a round of split-screen Goldeneye 007.

Putting in time never seemed to help me that much. I played the original Modern Warfare online pretty constantly for well over a year, but I still struggled to bring my average KDR up to 1:1. These days, I play a lot of League of Legends, and I’ve spent plenty of time poring over learner resources so I could write posts like this and this. But my KDA is still usually negative. I get carried an awful lot more than I carry.

And unfortunately, there’s no 12 step program for bad gamers. The first step is acceptance, but beyond that the analogy falls apart. I’m pretty sure there’s no higher power that’s going to cure me of my noobitude and bless me with the godlike mechanics that I need to dominate my online competition.

Still, maybe for gamers like me, acceptance is enough. Yes, I’m bad at video games. Yes, I try hard to play well but still often fail. And—here’s the moment of clarity—yes, that’s OK. I will continue to play my best, and I’ll probably continue to lose. But I’ll be able to enjoy the process a little more once I let go of my delusions of grandeur: I am bad at video games. I love video games, but I am bad at them.

So to all of my fellow feeders out there, to all of my fellow trying-hard-but-still-failing failures: accept it! Admit it! Release yourself from the pressure of pretending you’re a more skilled player having an “off day” (or an off month or an off year). Let go of your embarrassment at being the only one of your friends who died 40 times during the Dark Souls II tutorial. Say it proudly with me:

I am bad at video games, and that’s OK.

Note: Although I am using it as a metaphor and a rhetorical device here for the purposes of making the article more interesting, I hope no one will think that I am making light of alcoholism or of Alcoholics Anonymous. Unlike being bad at video games, alcoholism is an actual disease that can have a terrible impact on the lives of those who suffer from it and their families. AA does good work helping many alcoholics stay sober, so I hope that this piece will be understood in the light which I intend it: poking fun at myself, not at alcoholics or AA.