I consider Dota 2 to be one of the greatest games of all time, and I stand by that despite not having played it in over six years. I’ve put almost 700 hours into it (which I know isn’t a lot for some, but it’s by far the game with the most hours I have on steam, the next highest is around 150). For those of you not in the know, it’s a 5v5 multiplayer game where you’re trying to work as a team to defeat your opponent. Just figuring out the game will probably take you 30+ hours (I hear they’ve made the onboarding easier now, but back in like 2014 or wherever I started playing it was still pretty tough). There were about a hundred separate characters who played differently and you had to have a basic understanding of all of them, technical skill, the ability to coordinate and plan a team, mindgames, all of the wonderful things of fighting games and social games and video games more broadly all packaged into a game that genuinely allowed you to express creativity and surprise people.
That said, I haven’t played it in six years. Partly because games can take up to an hour, so you really have to block out time for it. But mostly cause it’s a really toxic community. I found myself getting really bad bouts of intense anxiety after almost every game. The fact that I usually queued up for another game right after the bout of anxiety was over is a testament to how good the game was. The fact that I continued to play against bots well after I stopped playing, to feel the rhythms of play even if all the subtlety is lost, the fact that I regularly watched tournaments years after I stopped playing, it’s all a testament to the fact that I think it’s one of the greatest games ever made. Maybe if I had a regular team of people to play it with, I wouldn’t have quit. But as it stands, it’s a game that relies on people to be social, kind, forgiving and cooperative which is Hard. And given that it was actively detrimental to my health, I don’t regret leaving, despite how good it was.
This happened again right after I stopped with a card game called Duelyst. It was pretty good while it lasted, and as a 1v1 game there wasn’t any social anxiety to get me down. Unfortunately, that too eventually became toxic. Too much of my ego was tied up in being Good and so I started playing and getting stressed as I was playing. I had to drop that too when I was playing for hours and being miserable. Good game, I just couldn’t deal with that.
I eventually got it right with a game called Battlerite. It’s the game you get if you just focused on the technical skill aspect of Dota and stripped everything else away. A game with less sticking power in my brain, but one I really enjoyed. I think that was the game that I finally learned to let go with. The one where I learned to love losing because it was both an opportunity to learn and because I had a fun match. I still play a lot of multiplayer games to this day, and having to learn how to abandon toxic fan spaces and my own toxic habits took a while but I’m a lot happier for it. Battlerite was very much a part of that, but the mistakes I had made earlier were an important part in allowing for that growth to occur. Plus I think Dota 2 is one of the greatest games of all time and I don’t think that’s acknowledged enough in the general gaming sphere.
