The Five Worst Habits For A Gamer

Some habits make life hard for yourself, while other habits make everyone around you miserable. This is a top five list of the worst habits that can either effect just the person with the habit, or everyone they encounter. If you exhibit a majority of items on this list, your gamer friends probably hate you, and you should probably hate yourself, too.

5. Picking your nose: Not every booger comes out with ease, making the time of completion quite unpredictable. Gamers will often have a window of opportunity of only a few seconds—nosepickers will attempt to use this time to work their nose magic, resulting in catastrophic controller or keyboard residue when they can’t get the job done in time. The only reason this isn’t higher on the list is because it will usually only affect the nosepicker, with the rare instances of touching a friend’s fingers without the friend realizing it, unless there is more there than just residue.

4. Shaking hands with anticipation and excitement: From all the people I’ve played video games with, I’ve only seen two people do this, but it was so detrimental to their game that I thought it should go on the list. Imagine sitting next to three other people, playing GoldenEye 007 on Nintendo 64, and every time one person is about to shoot a rocket at you or is sneaking up behind you with the golden gun, his hands start to shake uncontrollably. You always notice the shaking out of the corner of your eye, and it becomes a warning signal to turn around or find cover quickly, making it impossible for this poor guy to ever really use his positioning or weapon as an advantage. I always found some way to take advantage of his habit in every game we played.

3. Changing the channel or opening a web browser during only seconds of waiting: There have always been periods where the gamer must wait, especially in older games–for example, during a cinematic scene they’ve seen before but cannot skip. Personally, I got in the habit of just switching the channel on my television so I could watch something that entertained me for ten seconds instead of something I was sick of seeing. But more than half of the time, I would switch back too late, find myself dead, and end up having to restart from my last checkpoint—where I’d have to watch the same scene again, anyway. I don’t do the same thing with web browsers for online games, but I know some people who do, and I see the same thing happening to them.

2. Smoking: It drives me nuts when someone makes nine people wait during a ten-man raid so that they can go smoke. If I had a compulsion to stick my thumb up my ass because doing so would satisfy a craving and relax me at the same time, I would at least wait until after the raid to do it, or I would do it before so I wouldn’t make people wait while I took care of a habit that I never should have started in the first place. It’s even worse in person, playing Wii with three other friends, and one makes everyone wait so that they can go smoke. They come back smelling worse than if I really had stuck my thumb up my ass for fifteen minutes. Take care of it before or after, please.

1. Extreme Virtual Flirtation Syndrome (EVFS): This is by far the most annoying habit. If you don’t know what I’m talking about yet, then you must have been lucky enough to somehow avoid all of the people with EVFS in your MMOs, or you just haven’t been playing enough MMOs. I am going to speak to the male gamer population for just a second. I know those girls that flirt with everyone and meow on Vent are extremely annoying, but at least they are obvious. The guys who have EVFS are even worse, because they are more hidden and way creepier. A lot of your online buddies could have EVFS and you wouldn’t even know it unless you’ve encountered them while playing a female character that they didn’t know was you, or you knew a girl without EVFS who could tell you about her experiences of being stalked by them.

Now, to both the guys and the girls: so you can quickly identify these guys and rid your community of them, I will name some of the typical characteristics. They love to post their pictures in places relatively public and send them to girls they barely know, with or without a boyfriend (it doesn’t matter to them). These guys will always express confidence about their appearance even when they are hideous, and they will always have extremely weird comments about real life things that have nothing to do with what’s going on in the game, and it will usually be sexually related. If you just read a description of yourself, seek help.