Gamer Rage Is Real: Here’s What Drives Players Crazy

Maybe you’ve noticed this in other gamers, or even yourself: Video games don’t always make people calm. In fact, some games, and even particular game systems and franchises, are more likely than others to make people fly off the handle.

Time2play.com(Opens in a new window) surveyed 1,045 US gamers, at an average age of 28.6, who game a minimum of 4 hours per week (with the average at 14.9 hours). It found that the game franchise that angers them the most is Call of Duty (23.5%). But that’s only the start.

Breaking things down across gaming platforms (with numbers that don’t always add up to 100%, since serious gamers use multiple systems), it appears you don’t want to be around Xbox users who play every day—21.3% of them admit to daily (or more frequent) extreme bouts of anger.

The calm ones who rarely feel such indignation and attitude? Nintendo Switch users, at 42.1%. Still, 42.8% of them get mad once a week. No platform is perfectly chill.

The survey asked whether people had broken things while in a game rage, and almost one in five said yes. The object most broken is the controller or keyboard/mouse, of course, at a whopping 73.2%. Don’t stand near a wall if your local gamer is irate; the next most broken, even ahead of a TV/monitor (6.6%), is the household drywall at 15.8%. And 25.5% have lashed out at loved ones when in a rage, probably because someone told them to “calm down.” Because that always works.

What drives people to such destructive extremes? The top five maddening things are campers(Opens in a new window) (22%), griefers(Opens in a new window) (39.6%), game bugs (43.1%), cheaters (43.6), and the big one: repeatedly losing on the same story %^#$# level (60.7%).

Here’s the full infographic covering all the results.

One item it doesn’t show is that only 4.6% of all the respondents said they never experience extreme anger while gaming. Maybe we should be happy all these anger-management candidates are taking it out on the NPCs(Opens in a new window).

For the full report, visit time2play.com(Opens in a new window).