Though it was not a term I had heard until much later in my life, once “rage quit” entered my vocabulary, it felt like it had always belonged there.  It encapsulated a feeling I had experienced many times before in a nice, concise, two-word phrase.

Even if you don’t know the term, which is unlikely if you’re a gamer of any type, you have undoubtedly experienced it before.

In my mind, the rage quit breaks down into three distinct types…

The Cheating Bastard/Lousy Game Rage Quit: The most classic of the rage quits, the CB/LG comes from that slow, steady build-up of realizing that either by design or by bad design, a game is keeping you from victory in some way or another.  Clipping errors, impossible-to-hit bosses, or general cases of the AI deciding its going to cheat: all of these things may end, at one time or another, with a controller thrown through a wall or a keyboard being smashed in half.  One-hit kills on your main character in Persona after you’ve been leveling up for an hour with no save? The CB/LG stems from the utter frustration of knowing that it’s not your fault that things are going so wrong, and a sense of helplessness in the face of gaming injustice.

The Self-Inflicted Rage Quit: The most humbling of the rage quits, the Self-Inflicted Rage Quit comes from the opposite end of the spectrum of the CB/LG: you are losing at the game, and you know its completely your fault.  Maybe you keep missing the same jump over and over again, no matter how well you think you’ve timed it.  Maybe you forget that a particular zombie is going to leap through a particular window no matter how many times you replay the sequence.  Maybe, like me, you continue to dodge left in Punch Out Wii when you know damn well you need to dodge right, even to the point that you yell out “RIGHT!” to yourself and still somehow end up going left.  Shame… utter shame…

The Muliplayer Rage Quit: Perhaps the most insidious of the rage quits, and one that has become unfortunately more common with the growth of online gaming, the MP rage quit comes about when a player feels that they are losing so badly that they would rather just not even play.  Perhaps you are the opponent, so greatly dominating someone that they abandon the server rather than have to deal with you anymore.  Sometimes this can be quite satisfying, but sometimes it can be downright infuriating (quitting before a match is over to save your precious “rank” makes you a coward and an awful gamer).  On the flip side, sometimes you are the one being absolutely dominated, and you find you just aren’t having any fun.  It’s ok to tuck your tail between your legs and run, just don’t be the douchebag trying to protect your score or points or whatever I just mentioned above.  There are also those who set out to make others rage quit not through superior play, but simply by being as annoying as possible and trying to make everyone else’s online experience miserable.  Sadly, I don’t think these types of people are going anywhere anytime soon, so your best bet is to not even give them time to enrage you, but to simply move elsewhere at the first signs of such idiocy.

While these are the main three categories as I see them, there are no doubt countless subtle variations across the spectrum of gaming.  We’ve all felt the rage build at one time or another, and how we finally deal with it says a lot about who we are as a gamer.

So tell me your stories of rage quitting, be it one that was inflicted upon you or one you inflicted on others.  Did you handle it with quiet grace and dignity, or is there a hole in your wall with a special story behind it?