Rhetoric of a Rage Quit

Here is a scenario gamers are familiar with and experience with variable amounts of frequency: A player is playing a video game and he or she experiences a problem within that game that he or she is unable to overcome. The player continues working on the problem with constant unsuccessful results and he or she becomes increasingly angry with every failed attempt. The player eventually experiences a "rage quit" and expresses his or her rage through yelling or cursing at the game and quits playing the game. An extreme "rage quit" often results in broken equipment such as a controller.

For people who witness a gamer experience a "rage quit," the gamer's reaction and behavior resulting from a video game appears irrational or immature, which leads to them openly scolding the gamer and expressing their dissatisfaction by saying things like "It's only a game" or "Don't take it so seriously." However, before scolding and dismissing gamers for their "rage quits," we must make an effort to understand that scenario. If we understand the rhetoric behind a "rage quit," then we might understand why college students drop from writing courses and develop better strategies to prevent the phenomenon.

From an outside perspective, a "rage quit" looks like an irrational or immature response to failure, hence why people scold and dismiss such behavior as bad. However, something most people do not understand is what gamers are raging about in a "rage quit" and Richard Lanham is able to help us understand what is actually happening when we witness a "rage quit." Lanham asks us to think about primate behavior and imagine a primate failing a task. Naturally, the primate becomes upset and begins whooping and hollering, which we believe is because it failed a task. Lanham corrects us and claims the reason primates become upset is not because they fail at doing something, but rather, because they invested so much time and energy into it and then have nothing to show for it. The same reasoning is true with gamers and "rage quit." Gamers are not raging because they lost a match or "died" again. Gamers rage because they invested significant amounts of time into playing a game and they are left with nothing to show for it. No reward, no proof, nothing to symbolize their investment.

Maybe students who drop our writing courses are experiencing similar feelings of anger or distress because they interpret our feedback as negative and it outweighs the positive. Maybe students feel like they exhausted all of their available options and believe dropping is their only option left, like the gamer. OR maybe instructors like us are more like the people who scold and dismiss gamers and their "rage quitting" because we refuse to understand the behavior from their perspective. We may never be able to fully control "rage quitting" or dropping, but we can at least make a stronger effort to minimize them.