I don't play a lot of FPS because to me it is just about shooting people in the face ... But I never felt thretened by them or the possibility of playing with a friend and wins more than I can.

In the past, almost every games were near impossible to finish. Contra, GI Joe, TMNT, Ninja Gaiden ... all of them either on the NES or SNES. It didn't matter that much, we cheated or tried to go a little further the next time we played.

Now it is all about Multiplayer games and it is sad because the single player part is easy but then you go on the MP and you get beat up easily because people with no life only play. And anyway ... FPS it is always the same thing, Death Match, Capture the flag, king of the hill, survive wave after wave of enemies and sometime Greed ( where you make some points every time you kill someone so you may worth more than someone else, then you have to score in the enemy base to get your point)

well ... so this is it, enjoy your game ... and to me it isn't a necessity to be good at it to enjoy a game. 

However you handled your social situation with those people is your own personal way of dealing with things for now, and only you can determine whether or not you'll need to remain avoidant or be more confrontative (but not too aggressive) in each situation. 

Anyway, what's important is that you're back to enjoying the games you play. 

Why play something you don't enjoy? That's not "play." A more appropriate word for that would be "work" or even better, "punishment," as you'd be punishing yourself a lot more than you'd be improving at it.

oh lord i'm getting this in BF3 (PC), i just started playing i haven't really played any "modernized" FPS or more supposedly realistic ones, never got into BF or CoD. if i didn't have my friend to coach me and play with me, i wouldn't have made it past the first 20 min! i even had some guy continually try to votekick me, though nobody else agreed, but after 2 rounds i'm actually getting better and am having fun! i ended up being 5th out of 22, on the losing team, but still, it was fun :) if i didn't have my friend with me, though, it just wouldn't be fun. people need to chill out and enjoy games more often!

Yeah, I'd say that's the case for a lot of multiplayer games. If you keep getting your ass kicked, it just starts to get annoying. Singleplayer games are the way to go, in my opinion.

I completely agree with your view that being good at the game does lead to further enjoyment of it. Having just blown  my entire Sunday finally getting round to completing Gears of War 3's 50 waves of horde, i sat down with a few avid gamer friends of mine to play only to discover since i'd put the game down not soon after release and never returned to it I was many levels of in game progression and skill in comparison to my team mates. For which of course as is gaming law i was mocked for. 

However this wasn't the only down side as my fellow team mates were far more experienced at the game, they knew where the enemies would spawn the best tactics for taking down the larger foes for bigger scores and such and i continually found myself at the bottom of the leader board and i can only put this down to the fact that i'd spent what time i have available for gaming experiencing other more single player focused games such as the Witcher 2 currently playing,  i'd missed out on the time Gears 3 had spent in the gaming social light during which my gaming fellows had sunk the time needed to get the most out of Gears.

Now i know winning isn't anything but i would have liked to have climbed the leader board just once! but i'd fore fitted my right to do so my indulging in the social recluse side of gaming. 

A little off the subject, we recently started playing Resistance 3 and I am so disappointed they took out the cooperative multiplayer, that added so much extra playtime and I thought it was one of the greatest modes ever in a game from Resistance 2.  WHY INSOMNIAC WHY!?!?

True that, my friend comes in last place on every single match of Blops 2 after playing since it came out lol.  Hasn't even touched the single player campaign just a good way to escape the pressures of life and have a good time talking/trash talking with people.  Very entertaining matches we have lol.

There's a lot of room for enjoyment in games that you are completely awful at. You can be terrible at basketball and have a great time playing it.  But many people these days assume if they're not good at something, then they can't have fun doing it. 

In another sense, the better you become at a game (meaning your better in terms of what the game considers better: good kill to death ratio or something), usually correlates with how serious you play and how many hours of gameplay you've logged.  

I just played COD Blobs 2 the other day for the first time.  My friend plays that game everyday.  Yet, during split screen online multiplayer, I was the one laughing the whole time.  Maybe because I sucked and I thought that was funny, who knows why.  But one could say I was enjoying the experience more.

I think the difference doesnt rely that much on how good you are at the game, it  relies more on how's the game meant to be enjoyed.

Single player games usually have different factors that you may like, story, talking to characters, exploring, looting crafting items, combat etc.

If you're not good at one feature or you dont like it you can enjoy others, but in competitive multiplayer its all different.

It almost always relies on winning, not because winning is fun, but more because dying its boring and frustrating, what you win isnt a reward but actually is just keeping the fun going on, and what you loose isnt just a part of the game or an engagement, its the whole fun.

An exception may occur when you just mess around with friends not trying to win, a classic in Battlefield for example.

Dying isnt just another thing that happens in the game, its THE thing that literally makes it impossible for you to play on any level or form, even when it might be for a brief respawn time, and of course if you get mad or frustated that will be your number one enemy.

You dont need to take a whole year in my opinion, just stop playing for the day when you loose too much and thats it, the classic rage quit is actually the most logical and healthy choice, because it makes the game end, when you should end it, wich is when its not fun anymore.

Its not about your personality or who you are, its about the kind of game, in some kinds of games, because of their basic concept, fun=winning loosing=boredom/frustation.

This needs to be expanded on more. Only surface details are scratched here so we're at conflicting points because based on your comments you seem to believe this is a piece about getting better at games, but others (myself included) are seeing the signs of something else, namely social issues.  Your point of getting better at games by enjoying them needed far more focus. Instead half the piece is about people you didn't enjoy playing with. And it's easy as hell to ignore their game requests and just play on your own, so there either needs to be more of a focus on it to give us some backstory because as it stands it just seems like you handled your situation poorly.

Do you play Marvel vs Capcom 3? For me, I just go from one win to the next because I realized how fun winning can be. Next thing I know, a few hours pass and I don't remember who it was I fought other than a friend.

I absolutely couldn't agree more! I have a big problem with competitive games and don't even touch the multiplayer of most unless it has PvE co-op. Video games are my relaxation from the stress of daily life(work, school, etc.) so I don't need someone yelling at me for not playing the game how they want me to. Although my friend situation is the opposite of yours, as its nearly impossible to get them to play any game with me. It's like trying to schedule an appointment with a busy dentist, so I just kind of got over bugging them to play something co-op like Dark Souls or Borderlands. 

I usually play free-for-all when playing competitively, especially when I am new to the multi-player aspect of the game, or a bit rusty. I found that I can learn the game faster, and play better when I don't feel somebody in my team is judging my current skill. But I understand how you felt like having a target painted on you, and here is why: I was the least skillfull players out of all of my friends who played CS. At the time I was a console gamer who never had a computer or internet before, so I have to go to my friend's house whenever I am free, and a local multi-player session is being held. In nearly every match I am almost always the first one to go down, as a matter of fact I am so bad that even my friends would tell the others of my location. I hated CS very much until years later when I decided to pick it up again and re-learning how to play it properly on my own pace.

While this console gen has brought us a long way with online play, I think it created a lot of negatives that are detrimental to the gaming experience.  DLC, achievements, digital download and online profiles are double-edged swords - they may have had noble ambitions for us initially, but we quickly realized the downside to it all.

Now that they opened those floodgates, I'm afraid we might never be able to go back.  Now just about every game that comes out has DLC, achievements and some sort of online mode - regardless of whether they're any good or worthwhile.  And now it's more difficult to game on your own terms because the industry has made everything really social.

That said, I'm still enjoying gaming.  Maybe that's because my friend list is practically empty.  But when I did play Halo with other people, I was more often than not the person trying to look for others to play it with.  I usually had to settle for matchmaking.  Believe it or not, some of my best moments of XBL was playing Halo 3 ODST with a group of random people I added from the Internet.  Working with other dedicated players to accomplish something difficult is very rewarding, and most of these people were surprisingly nice.

Of course, I know all too well the downsides of online gaming.  But as long as there are games with great single-player modes and a long campaign or lots of replay value, gaming doesn't have to be so frustratingly social.

It's hard to really enjoy gaming when you have someone screaming at you for your mistakes.  I work best solo; I don't like coordinating with others.  I'm just not a multitasker, and I especially don't like it when a team "leader" starts yelling at me for something that I feel I had no control over.  This is why I stopped playing online, not because I was terrible at games, but that I just don't appreciate the discourtesy expressed towards me from other gamers for not being inherently adept at new games the moment I play them for the first time.  I like to be the only one to yell at me if I'm screwing up. :P

"The elephant in the room for me, before I got rid of my X Box 360 and converted to PS3 and PC gaming, was that I was always afraid I'd end up going up against my former best friend and/ or one of his cronies via XBL."

Is this something you talk at length about in other blogs, because with no information I just have to ask

1: Why didn't you remove them from your friends list
2: Why didn't you change your username/Appear offline
3: If you know his gamertag why stay in a game knowing that he is there in the very unlikely event you run into them

If you are saying that you canceled an account you paid for, sold a system which I would assume made you lose more money (not including any games you also sold), bought a new system just to avoid possibly running into one user out of all the people on Xbox Live, and that this not only effected your gaming life but your personal life (your writing projects) then that makes this article sound like there might be something wrong with you rather than you telling us how you learned from the experience by spending a lot of money to get away from what shouldn't even have been a problem.

Why dont u jus change ur user?