The Anatomy of tilt and how to deal with it
What is tilt and how can we deal with it?
The word tilt is probably one of if not the most overused term within the League of Legends community. For example: in the instant a pro player plays worse than usual, the whole community is fast to blame it on the famous tilt. But what is tilt really? Being on tilt originally is a poker term and has a very particular meaning. A player on tilt is being emotional and over aggressive with his calls, leading him to take too many risks and therefore probably losing the game. I think we can all agree that by now we are using "tilt" in many more situations than this particular one, such as raging, suddenly playing bad mechanically or even being overly passive. The importance lies within the biological functions behind the different phenomena.
The origin of tilt
The origin of tilt and most other emotional reactions on losing a game stem from a part of your brain called Amygdala. The Amygdala, being the centre of emotions or reactions like fear, distress and shock, is in charge of protecting ourselves against threats from the outside world. When facing such, the Amygdala is able to react without permission of our own consciousness, the thinking brain. There are examples for this in our everyday life: Let’s say we walk over the street and suddenly we hear a loud squealing noise from a car stopping right next to us. In an instance we are being thrown into an Amygdala Hijack, the so called “Fight, Flight or Freeze” reaction. We either try to jump away, or we freeze on the spot, lacking a fast approach to the threat. The latter happens, when the Amygdala doesn’t know how to react to the threat, remember, it is not the thinking brain, it is not able to analyze the threat logically before reacting.
The Amygdala in video games
But the Amygdala also plays a huge part when playing videogames such as League of Legends! Let’s go back to the pro player, who makes a bad play. He might as well suffer from the same invisible feeling of threat that you feel yourself, when losing a solo queue game. This feeling of being threatened leads to the Amygdala being more active, always being ready to jump into the action when it seems to be needed. The problem here is that the Amygdala might be very effective when facing dangers, because its reaction time is vastly shorter than the one of our thinking brain, but it surely doesn’t know how to play League of Legends. This leads to the only possible answer the Amygdala has, when it doesn’t have an answer to a threat, it increases our stress level by releasing stress hormones like Cortisol and Adrenalin. While these hormones remain on a small amount this increases our reaction time, which improves our possibilities to react to the threat, this also works inside the game; it’s a good thing really. But when the dose increases it can lead us to disbelieve in our instincts, because they don’t seem to be working, and it also makes us feel really, really stressed. This has various effects on us.
One effect can be, that we start to rethink every decision we take and therefore reacting too slowly, which is one of the worst but most common emotional problems in professional sports and e-sports. But it can also lead to the famous tilt. We feel threatened to lose and try to compensate for the mistakes we already made. But the decisions we take stem from an intoxicated thought and neither from our trained instincts nor from our rational thinking and mostly lead to disaster. Remember the part about fighting, fleeing or freezing? We may as well fight the threat by raging. We might be looking to blame other people, because by finding the mistake in other players we are able to make ourselves belief that we are not the problem, that we are not bad at the game, which is what the invisible threat might just be about. This calming of ourselves decreases the stress but it makes us blind for our own mistakes and does also not really help our popularity; no one likes to be blamed.
What can you do?
To fight this problem there aren’t any magic tricks, sadly, this is not a just fantasy, this is real life, even inside the game. The most effective approach might just be to try finding a new way to feel about the game. An advice I often see given by diamond and master players is to play to improve, not to win. When playing to win you are going to feel threatened when losing, by not playing to win, but to get better, you are still trying your best but you are less vulnerable to the feeling of being threatened within a game. When your stress level is already high – when you are “on tilt” how most people would say – the really only good option is to take a break, drink water, breath some fresh air and relax. Some of the stress hormones take hours to disappear again, remember that. And if you realize that you are stressed within the game you might as well take short breaks. Stand on a safe spot, like your fountain or inhibitor tower – assuming the gates are not open yet – and relax for a few seconds, look outside the window, breath consciously or drink a bit of refreshing water.
Conclusion, be aware that "tilt" is our biological way of reacting to threats. By being aware of that you might be able to fight the feeling of being threatened and vastly improve your emotional stability and therefore your consistency inside the game. It’s really hard to change your view on the game, but have trust that it’s possible, really. I mean, if you don’t have any trust, why are you even here?
Are you into fantasy leagues? Then check out AlphaDraft and put together your allstar lineup!
