It feels helpless. Another match of DotA 2 ends in a loss. When your teammate fed their lane and now you just can’t keep the enemy team down, there’s really nothing you can do. I have decided to start calling this phenomenon a salt mine. It’s a big hole you return to to fill yourself with saltiness and then haul yourself out when you become encumbered with it.
It feels helpless. I don’t know how anyone dates, especially now. In the past, maybe you would encounter someone at the café or an ice cream social or something. What do you do now? No one goes anywhere. And if they did, I wouldn’t know, because I certainly don’t. How are you supposed to meet cute if you can’t meet anyone? Surely the meet-cute cliché exists for a reason. It’s not a fairy tale invented to put teenagers to bed, right? This is why romantic comedies are evil. Maybe dating is over. It had a few good centuries, but maybe it was a fad, after dowries and before algorithmic marriage.
I used to play a lot of DotA and only got back into it recently. I solo queue. I keep playing DotA 2 because I’m depressed and I have no idea what to do with my free time. I don’t know where to go or who to talk to or what to do with myself. So I go nowhere and talk to no-one and throw myself into the salt mine. There are a few different kinds of saltiness. To me, the key form of saltiness is helplessness. Being salty usually comes from feeling like you can’t do anything to win. This is why in-game chat can be so fucking toxic. When you’re on a team with someone who you think is making you lose, you want to throw them off. But you can’t make them not suck. You can’t control them.
I have decided to start calling this phenomenon a salt mine. It’s a big hole you return to to fill yourself with saltiness and then haul yourself out when you become encumbered with it.
I open these fucking dating apps and I feel nothing but self-loathing. I would be lucky if it was just lust, but it never is. I know nothing will ever come of any of this. Hinge, Tinder, they’re all equally exasperating, just in slightly different ways. Even if I do match with someone, I cannot bring myself to say a damn thing to them most of the time. Me? Outgoing? Unthinkable. And when I force myself to, with all my might, I feel emptied out. Just like there’s a little part of me that’s deluded that it will go somewhere, there’s another part of me that does it knowing it won’t. For me, it’s glorified people-watching. I know I’ll never hear from these people. I’ve learned all you can do on these apps is look, admire, yearn, resent. These attractive people are selected to taunt us, the algorithm setting up hotties in the display window to fill me with the awful, awful recognition that you cannot love everyone, cannot be loved by everyone, cannot even meet everyone. Glancing encounters with people you’ll never see again.
When I use these dating apps, I find myself wanting to open up a video game where I can win. Goddammit, if I can’t win on the apps, maybe I can win mid lane. This is a cliché, but it’s true. Sometimes you open up a game because you want to feel like you have control. I’m deeply uncompetitive by nature; it makes me feel sick. I struggle to feel motivated to win. I only want to be good enough to have fun. I have nothing to strive for when I’m salty. I’m not chasing the W. The only reason to keep playing is to get to a point where I stop hating myself.
Surely always being on the losing team can’t be a coincidence. There has to be a reason that it’s always you. Just like how it can’t be a coincidence you, specifically, fail to find any semblance of connection on the barren wastes of Hinge. Does the matchmaking system hate you? Dare you find out your Elo rating? Sometimes your team sucks, but sometimes you suck. And that’s the worst of it. Because you have no one to blame but yourself. That’s how it is in a fighting game. But maybe even worse is when you are the dead weight around your team’s neck. The ball and chain dragging them down. Totally helpless, but totally in control. The center of the downward spiral.
You truly don’t know what you’re doing wrong sometimes. Almost no one messages first. They don’t tell you what the ratio of matches on your profile is, but honestly, you probably wouldn’t want to know. Is it low? Is it high? Does it matter if it always sucks? If you happen to match, sometimes people unmatch with you when you haven’t said a word, or when the conversation’s just started. How the hell are you supposed to interpret that?
But I also know what I’m doing wrong. I’m nervous about talking to new people and the romantic element only makes it worse. I’m so terrified of rejection. It took me three months to work up the courage to tell someone I liked her hair after seeing her intermittently. I didn’t get to tell her I liked her smile. But I had to say something, because I thought, “I’ll never see her again after this.” And so far I haven’t. I have no one to blame but myself.
It’s not that I don’t want to be good at competitive games. It’s that the humiliation of loss never fuels me to try harder. The rush of victory is dwarfed by the relief that I didn’t embarrass myself. It doesn’t help that losses in DotA are long and often agonizing. Unlike League of Legends, your team can’t surrender. The only way to end the game is for one of the teams to take the final objective. You come to these games because you’re desperate to feel in control, and you are rewarded with an arduous match with people you grow to hate. That’s why the saltiness can get so bad. You’re trapped with these people.
The only way to end the game is for one of the teams to take the final objective. You come to these games because you’re desperate to feel in control, and you are rewarded with an arduous match with people you grow to hate. That’s why the saltiness can get so bad. You’re trapped with these people.
I play the worst All Pick match of DotA 2 I think I’ve ever played. It was my fault. I chose a character that didn’t fit with the team composition at all and I didn’t (and still don’t) understand the etiquette around drafting them. Most of the game is spent with people angry at me for fucking it up. It forms a pit in my stomach. I try to make light of it, be friendly with them, but I can’t escape it. The match is long and tiresome. When it finally ends, one of my teammates harangues me for my poor choice. I feel terrible. I debate playing another game but I don’t. The disgust hovering over me from that game lingers for hours. I still feel a slight twinge of anxiety when I remember that match, but that’s nothing compared to the hot flush of self-hatred when I remember my romantic failures. It’s nauseating. Maybe playing another game would wash the taste out of my mouth. Maybe matching with another person would shake me out of this funk. But maybe I’d lose another game and feel even worse. Maybe I’d get rejected.
But the feeling fades. You return to it like a bullied dog. It’s futile, but you keep doing it. You have to keep playing. You have to go down into the salt mines. You have to keep swiping. You have to walk down the spiral. Because maybe that’s how you get out. That’s the paradox, the catch-22. The more salt you collect, the heavier you become. The only way out risks sinking deeper. The more helpless you feel, the more you feel like it’s your fault. Maybe if you win, you can finally walk away. If you lose, you play again. You don’t get to stop when you’re tired. You get to stop playing when you stop hating yourself.
I lose another game. Someone fed mid lane. I consider opening up a dating app.
I don’t.
Maybe later.
vehemently is a pseudonymous writer in the Pacific Northwest, writing on games, culture, and philosophy.
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