Since moving back to Charlottesville, I have gotten back into board games. I’m probably playing more board games these days than I ever have in my life. I now own over 200 games (or over 2,500 depending on how you define “game” and “own”). I play games two to four nights a week, mostly at a board game night at a local game store that I helped revive. I’m also on my computer a lot, programming and analyzing and reading and so on. You can play board games online these days, including at a place called Board Game Arena (BGA). Sounds like a perfect place for me, right? Except for the crippling anxiety.
I would go on the BGA site and go to the page to play Settlers of Catan. This is a game I have been playing literally for decades. I have won sizeable tournaments in this game. I am in the credits for some versions of this game. And it’s not a terribly difficult game to play. Yet when I would go to the Settlers page on BGA, I would be too afraid to click the play button.
This totally confused me. I enjoy playing Settlers of Catan in reality. I enjoy doing all sorts of things online. Why is it that when you put the two together, I become too afraid to click a link on a webpage?
So I decided to make a project out of this. The plan was to force myself to play a game on Board Game Arena every night that I wasn’t going to board game night somewhere else. The hope was that this would get me used to playing games online, and get over the anxiety I was feeling. Either that or I would die of anxiety and it would no longer be an issue.
The first night I tried to join games of Carcassonne and Cosmoctopus, two other games I enjoy and am confident in playing. Try as I might, I could not bring myself to join a real time game. However, there is an alternative called turn-based games. In these games you make maybe a few moves a day, maybe just one move a day. I was able to join a turn-based game of Cosmoctopus. I sort of felt defeated, but it was a start. I was seriously depressed for the rest of the evening, and couldn’t get back to sleep after my usual three in the morning piss.
While poking around that first night, I found that you can play Can’t Stop on BGA. This was not a game I’m as confident with as the others I have mentioned, but it is very quick and very random. It is the essence of a light game. The next night I was on BGA, I played three real time games of Can’t Stop. I even won them all. And I started another turn based Cosmoctopus game. Everything seemed fine.
I started working from Can’t Stop up to more complicated games. Sometimes I would sweat or have anxiety. I started to understand that some of it was about the fear of being rude. This came to a head in a game of Sea Salt & Paper where the game froze up and I was out of time for making my move. Eventually another player said to refresh the page and that worked, but I felt really bad about going over time.
I had other games that I felt bad about just because they were bad games. I had a four player game of Settlers where two people dropped out during the game. The other player and I finished the game, but it was a very unsatisfactory result. Other games I did really well in, and I felt really good about.
But the anxiety was still there. And it often came up as I was about to win. It felt like winning was rude somehow. I thought it might be an adrenaline rush, but I think I was getting that from some of the games I was feeling good about, and it wasn’t the same.
I eventually realized that there were two main forms of anxiety at play. One was the fear of being rude. I have gotten better with the interface and learned how to say things in the chat, which has helped a lot there. The other I think is fear of failure. This is something I have recognized before in other contexts. While success was ignored by my parents growing up, failure was punished. And I am far from athletic. What respect I get from peers, I get because of my smarts. I am afraid to lose that respect by failing at “smart” tasks. These two sources of anxiety are related, as being rude is a failure of socialization. Apart from those two sources, there is some other anxiety that I don’t really understand yet.
However, understanding where most of the anxiety is coming from and getting used to playing on Board Game Arena has gotten rid of a lot of the anxiety. I am now able to play and enjoy games on the site on a regular basis.