So, I’m not a great sport, right? But I manage. I recognize that there are lots of my friends I’d never play video games with for a variety of reasons. e.g.:

• Just today, I was playing Dominions 6 with a group of people I didn’t ordinarily play video games with. Turns that took them 45 seconds take me 15 minutes, which means they spent 95% of their time waiting for me to complete moves. This dramatic difference in playstyles means we’re totally incompatible; even if we did set a turn timer, I’d still use up the whole time every turn so they’d just end up waiting for me a lot. The only way we could reconcile that difference would have been to play-by-post it, but they don’t like that for their own reasons.
• When I play Helldivers II, though, I treat it like a party game. I run around using dangerous high-team-kill weapons, doing silly stunts and taking loadouts with me. For some people, like my sister, this is the optimal way to play- we both end up laughing our asses off until it hurts. But for other people, uh… Well, some people take Helldivers II very seriously. This has led to capital-I Incidents.
• I had a strong aversion to Rainbow 6 Siege. I just don’t vibe with the very leader-gun monkey-executing-script dynamic. But I can totally see how that appeals to people! Some people (“point defenders”) just like the shoot-y part of the shooter game, and some people (“roamers”) like the strategy. A game like siege allows them to get along and play games together when we otherwise wouldn’t!
• Another friend really wants me to play Fortnite with her, which is a game I’m not interested in on the basis of the aesthetic alone (though fun fact, I did play Fortnite before it became a battle royale game). But that’s fine! I’m sure the game’s fun.

Anyway, point is, I still hang out with those people! I usually just chill in a Discord call or VRChat and it’s fine, because we all have other hobbies like reasonable adults.

Regardless, I recognize that playing with me can be a sort of distressing experience, and the consequences of that are something I’ve been grappling with a lot more recently. I find that people will do something they aren’t enjoying out of inertia, so the discontentedness builds up over time.

A good friend of mine pointed out that I have a tendency to “optimize the fun out of games”, which I think holds true in most circumstances; I take competitive video games and strategy games very seriously.

Back when I was hanging out in the Roguelikes Discord, we had a group of about ten people who would all join a voice chat together and watch one single person play Slay the Spire. We all played together by “consensus goes, tyrant tiebreaks”, and if there was no consensus, we could be stuck arguing over a single turn for an hour. I found that exhilarating, but I also recognize that for the vast majority of people, it’s boring (and not how people usually play Slay the Spire). I definitely picked up this trait from those folks.

(Funnily enough, that experience with Slay the Spire is also why I can’t get into Balatro super well. Balatro defies perfect optimization by its design. Slay the spire has low-variance randomness, and the random numbers are within the range of human perception. Balatro, on the other hand, is a game about miracles; every individual thing that can make a round or run is rare, and there’s a high volume and diversity, making planning too difficult for me.)