Anyone who's ever thrown a controller, shouted at a screen, or rage-quit at 2 a.m. understands one inarguable fact: some video games are designed to make you extremely mad. Unforgiving physics, unhelpful teammates, mechanics designed to drive you to your emotional limits, rage-inducing games have their own special place in gaming culture. They frustrate us, humble us, and, some way, somehow, keep us coming back for more. Let's talk about the most infamous, infuriating titles, and the psychology behind why they're so good at boiling our blood.
Why Games Make Us Angry
The rage we feel while gaming is not random. It has roots in how our brain processes emotions. When we feel fear, frustration, anger, the amygdala is activated in an attempt to process that emotion. But fMRI scans show that when we begin a game while already emotional, the amygdala shuts down. Instead of helping us to process the emotion, it gets suppressed.
That’s good… until it isn’t.
A suppressed amygdala can’t effectively communicate with the hippocampus, the brain’s learning center. Mistakes are not transformed into lessons. Errors are repeated, improvement is elusive, and we hit emotional walls. Frustrations mount until the suppressed anger releases itself in some form of controller-throwing, teammate-baiting, or unprompted strings of profanity hurled at the innocent pixels before us.
The Most Infuriating Game
Rage games would be incomplete without a discussion of Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy. This game has, perhaps, become the modern pinnacle of the rage game. A poorly contrived indie darling, the game’s premise involves a man trapped inside a large metal cauldron. The player’s only task in this game is to climb a mountain constructed of all sorts of objects by flailing a sledgehammer. A lack of checkpoints, rubber banding, or any other mechanisms of “rage protection” further compounds the difficulty. Getting Over It could make other difficult games feel like easy games by comparison. If the player misses a swing or if the swing is off by an angle, they will fall… all the way back to the bottom of the mountain sometimes. The game doesn’t let the player succeed, that is, unless they somehow find it within themselves to persevere.
To drive this point home, Getting Over It features a commentary track by Bennett Foddy. Foddy speaks at length about various video games, art in general, philosophy, and, of course, the player’s suffering. Although the game enjoys infuriating the player, its quite a testament to play with it while retaining your cool.
The Bottom Line
Despite all of the anger that they incite, rage-inducing games are compelling. They push us to the limits of our sanity and patience, make us face our darkest, most frustrating selves, and turn mastering that frustration into a win condition. So whether you're defying physics in Getting Over It, yelling at teammates in League, or just staring down the barrel of your brain's negative reactions to stress, it's clear that rage games aren't going anywhere. In fact, rage gaming may be the purest distillation of the gaming experience: equal parts suffering and success.
