A short time ago I had the good fortune to find myself in the EA offices in Centrepoint, Leicester Sq. I add that this was out of office hours and a social trip rather than a business one, and pretty much the only thing I did there was play a bit of Fifa 09 (a game which I’m at least vaguely competent), and Street Fighter, a game that I am deeply, deeply horrible at.

I can just about cope with beat ‘em ups that reward the heavy duty button-masher, such as being Eddie Gordo in Tekken 2, but anything that requires having a genuine knack for the game leaves my pixelatted self laying in a pool of blood with the words ‘flawless victory’ serenading my opponent far more often than I’d like.

That digression aside on this day I came up against a very competent Street Fighter player, who roundly whipped my sorry ass on several occasions. Obviously I am not the yardstick by which I measured his competence, but he was beating everyone else as well.

Two things occurred to me at one point, as his Zangief clamped my Ryu’s head between his meaty thighs and prepared to drill his head through the floor, and they were;

1) If Zangief were a real person he’d be exceedingly popular in certain dominance related sexual communities,

And

2) That I was clearly a glutton for punishment.

Because in my heart of hearts I knew that my chances of victory were so small as to be virtually non-existent, but I still kept on coming back.

Obviously a large portion of that is simply gamers addiction, that yearning and aching to hold onto a control pad and be the main character in something other than my own sad little life. Yet perhaps there’s more, perhaps a part of it is about voluntarily being on the receiving end of one of life’s little lessons, and building character by learning how to lose.

Learning how to lose is a vital skill that you have to develop, as a gamer or in life in general, or you risk becoming an entirely obnoxious human being.

This is something that the advent of online gaming has brought more and more to the forefront of late, because we’ve surely all come across examples of horrible behaviour on X-box live and the like, where bouts of profanity and childishness are common. This has actually been one of my steeper learning curves in the cyber realm, understanding exactly how bad some people take defeat.

My suggestion to all of you out there who think you might stray towards the line of being a bad loser, is that you find someone who is way better than you at a game, and get kicked around for a few hours. Trust me it’ll do you good on a spiritual level, and maybe, just maybe, make you a slightly better person.