Gaming Annoyances 101: The Human Factor

I tend to look at video games as stress-busters, but there are certain factors that tend to annoy the crap out of you during your gaming sessions. These could be game-breaking bugs, frustrating levels, or just annoying humans encountered while playing multiplayer matches on a LAN or online.

Developers generally do releases patches that tend to fix bugs, and a quick glance at a walkthrough could help you through that annoying level, but sadly we don’t have any such patches for annoying players who can ruin a perfectly calm and serene experience for you. Let's take a look at some of them.

Ever played a game with a couple of people standing around you doing absolutely nothing but sharing their pearls of wisdom with you while you’re struggling to complete a level? Let me assure you, it isn’t pleasant; in fact it it’s the opposite of pleasant. Think I’m exaggerating? Well allow me to elaborate; I was playing Tomb Raider Anniversary at work a while back and I found myself getting stuck at this one particular puzzle.

Now it took me some time to understand what I had to accomplish but in the meantime nearly everyone sitting in my bay had gathered around my computer and starting pooling their thoughts in. At first I appreciated their concern but this “Go here, Do that, arrey dude, not here, go there. Dude, is that a lever, what’s behind that wall etc.” continued for the rest of my playing session and in the end I had to quit the game and restart it only after my fellow do-gooders disbanded.

You’re low on health; you’re taking cover for dear life, waiting for the enemy to put you out of your misery; you hear footsteps approaching as you tighten your grasp on the mouse hoping to go out in a blaze of glory and then BAM! you’re shot in the head – not by an enemy, but by your very own team mate... huzzah!

I can forgive this sort of team killing once in a while but there are numerous times when I was killed by some n00b just because I startled him and he didn’t know WTF was going on. Even in games like Counter Strike I can’t count the number of times I was flashed by a team mate because of which I ended up eating a bullet. Bottomline: if you don’t want to get frustrated make sure you’re playing on a server that’s full of vets who know exactly what they’re doing.