i stopped playing ranked games and it took me a while to figure out why.
there was no dramatic quitting moment, no rage-uninstall. just a slow drift where i kept choosing to do other things, and one day i realised i hadn’t queued up in weeks. but the interesting part wasn’t that i stopped. it was why it had stopped feeling good, and what that says about how motivation changes as you get older.
winning that feels like relief
what i eventually noticed about ranked is that the best outcome was never joy. it was relief.
a win didn’t feel like “yes, i did something great.” it felt like “thank god i didn’t lose.” and a loss wasn’t neutral. it was a slide into tilt, especially in team games where your fate is half in someone else’s hands. so the emotional arithmetic worked out to this: best case, you feel the absence of a bad thing. worst case, you feel a bad thing. there’s no real upside in the structure, only the avoidance of downside.
once you see it that way it’s kind of bleak. you’re grinding for relief. you push the rank up, someone pushes it back down, and the ladder doesn’t care that you were ever on it. it’s Sisyphus with a leaderboard. the boulder rolls back down and the boulder has never once thought about you.
compare that to sending a boulder problem at the gym, an actual boulder, the climbing kind. best case is genuine elation. worst case is “i’ll get it next session.” the entire emotional range sits above zero. that asymmetry, once you feel it, is hard to unfeel.
zero sum and positive sum
the framework underneath this is older than gaming. a zero sum game is one where my gain requires your loss. the pie is fixed and we’re fighting over slices. a positive sum game is one where value gets created rather than redistributed. everyone at the bouldering gym can get stronger at the same time. nobody’s send costs you anything.
the subtlety i missed for a long time is that ranked is two games stacked on top of each other. there’s the skill you build, which is positive sum, your aim sharpens, your game sense improves, and that’s real and it’s yours. and there’s the rank, which is pure zero sum, for your number to go up someone else’s has to come down. early on the two move together, so the whole thing feels like growth, the rank is just reading out the skill. but skill plateaus long before ambition does, and once it does the rank is all that’s left to chase. that’s the moment it stops feeling like building something and starts feeling like defending a number. i think that’s when it soured for me. i just didn’t have the words for it yet.
this is also why it isn’t as simple as “games bad.” osu! is a game and it’s about as positive sum as they come, because what you’re up against is the beatmap and past-you, not a bracket of strangers. it’s the structure that matters, not the medium. the wall doesn’t care, the barbell doesn’t care, the beatmap doesn’t care. they sit there as honest measures of what you can currently do, with no one on the other side of the table losing when you win.
but the part i keep coming back to, more than the econ-textbook distinction: positive sum progress decays on your own terms. zero sum progress gets taken from you.
it isn’t that what you build is permanent, exactly. detrain for a month and you’ll feel it, the v5 that was easy gets scary again. but it fades slowly, on a schedule you control, and it comes back faster than it left, because the hands remember. a rank doesn’t work like that. you can drop two hundred elo in a bad week you didn’t ask for, half of it on teammates you’ll never meet again. one of those you let lapse. the other gets done to you.
that’s the real difference. in ranked you identify with a number that fluctuates: i am diamond, i am plat. in climbing you identify with a capability that grows: i climbed a v5, i’m working v6. pin your identity to a fluctuating number and your sense of self fluctuates with it. pin it to what your body can do and you just become more. one is building a self. the other is defending a position.
the gamer’s natural endgame
i’ve started thinking of this as a natural progression for gamers, or at least the one i went through, if life were an rpg.
ranked is the tutorial zone. it’s where you learn that you like getting better at things, that competition is a real motivator, that there’s a dopamine in the climb. that’s genuinely useful, not a phase to be ashamed of. but it’s a starting area. at some point a lot of people age out of it and migrate, almost without noticing, to hobbies where the progress is cumulative and yours: lifting, climbing, an instrument, a craft. the boulder and the barbell are just the next zone. the rpg keeps going, the levelling just gets more real.
and i think the migration tracks something psychologists have talked about forever: the shift from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation. when you’re young your identity isn’t formed yet, so you need external scoreboards to tell you whether you’re any good. the rank is the answer to “am i capable.” it’s fast and clear and that’s why it’s so seductive early on. but as you accumulate a stable internal sense of who you are, you need the scoreboard less. the question quietly changes from am i better than these other people to am i becoming who i want to be. and positive sum hobbies answer that second question much better than any ranked ladder ever could.
your hobby choices, in other words, might be a leading indicator of where you are on that curve, not just a byproduct of it.
the social shape of it
the same logic reshapes who you’re around. when your worth is externally referenced, even your friends become measuring sticks, who’s higher rank, who carried who. the environment goes faintly adversarial even when everyone’s friendly, because the structure pits you against each other.
positive sum hobbies invert it. at the climbing gym someone else figuring out the beta doesn’t cost you anything, it helps you, their growth pulls you up instead of threatening you. the communities end up collaborative in a way ranked communities structurally can’t be, and you grow faster for being inside one.
no epiphany
i don’t miss ranked. i’m glad i’m out. the caveat is that maybe that’s just because i’ve changed into someone it no longer fits, not because there’s anything wrong with it in the abstract. i’m describing a shift in myself, not handing down a verdict.
when i see people still deep in the grind, i mostly don’t feel much. they rarely look happy to begin with. there’s a particular hollow-eyed quality to someone on a losing streak at 2am, chasing the win that’ll only ever feel like relief. but i don’t feel pity or superiority about it. i think the realisation just comes when it comes. it came for me gradually, no epiphany, and it’ll probably arrive for them the same way, on its own schedule.
the boulder rolls back down the hill in ranked because that’s the shape of the game. the climb resets every match. the difference with an actual boulder is that you’re not pushing a weight up a slope that resets. you’re becoming someone who can climb harder things. the self is the thing that changes, and the self doesn’t roll back down.
that’s the whole reason i drifted, i think. i just got tired of pushing a boulder that was never going to stay put, and found some that did ■