Worst I ever did was put a TV through a wall. The TV was fine, the wall, not so much.

Nah, in my 30 years of playing video games I can honestly say I've never thrown, punched, or destroyed anything. In fact, I've never harmed an inanimate object out of anger or frustration ever, and I've never understood what drives people to do it.

I feel like I'm missing out on some facet of the human condition.

You really are. Ragequit is one of the rawest and most passionate emotions known to man.

Sturm und Spiel, fackahs!

I've played video games since I was two and I've never done this.

I sometimes like to throw mini-tantrums when I'm programming and encounter, for example, "thingnotworking" error for no discernible reason multiple times. Sure its really undignified but I think it improves my overall efficiency by letting me blow off some steam and focus on the problem clearly once again.
I am logical enough however to limit my tantrums to cursing and thumping my bed*
*I'm already sitting in bed cus I'm working from home.

I can also jeer and deride the problem (and do a little victory dance) once I have solved it. :)

When I ragequit I burn my house down.

Logic is pretty ineffective once the bloodlust takes over. I don't know how much clinical research has been done into rage-quitting in particular (there's some mention of it in Col Grossman's books, IIRC) but I'm fairly certain it's an adrenaline thing. I work at a PTSD clinic, and in my experience the dynamic is actually fairly similar to that of a trauma-induced stress reaction (in fact, at least one friend of mine had severe combat reactions triggered by his son's Call of Duty games) For many people, a game like Street Fighter draws them in to the Fight or Flight response; you get edgy, competitive, and sometimes, especially when a lot is riding on a match, something's gotta explode.

I usually ragequit over relationships. When I broke up with my wife I left my wedding ring as a tip at the bar and walked out, and played pinball to calm me down. Something about getting more pissed off at gravity than the gravity of a situation always calms me down.

If you've seen that Red Fang video, that was my old Galaxy Pinball machine. Sometimes it's fun to destroy your stuff. Or have some rock band do it for you.

I don't think I've ragequit to the point of throwing anything in gaming, and I've been playing since the VIC-20 era. Toss the controller aside but that's onto the couch.

I did throw the occasional whiteboard eraser when it was 4:30 AM in the lab and the proof or code for the assignment just wasn't working, because unlike gaming, marks mattered in the grand scheme of grad school. Then again, I've been mostly noncompetitive in terms of gaming and prefer single player stuff. Started to play LoL with friends now, so I'll see how that changes things.

The only time I ever truly lost my shit was way back when most arcades (remember when arcades were a thing?) carried the Street Fighter tournament kiosks. Those things were awesome..it was basically 5-6 SF machines all hooked up and people could play large-scale tournaments where the winner of kiosk one would fight the winner of kiosk two and so on forming brackets until the best players for that session were 1 on 1 with each other.
With the right crowd (mostly my friends) they were a blast. Until you got the fucking 10 year olds who just spammed M. Bisons flying move over and over and over again and shit like that. That admittedly pissed me off in a really immature way.

Whether the thing you're raging over actually matters is just as irrelevant as logic. Again, it's an emotional response triggered by acute stress; the importance of grad school may indirectly contribute to rage-quiting by heightening your stress levels (just as the "importance" of tournament level play will heighten stress levels), but the chemical soup in your primal lizard brain is what ultimately dictates your response, not any sensible, rationally-defensible factor.

With relationships, I usually repress my emotions to such a severe degree that I start experiencing blackouts. I have never rage-quit over a girl, but it probably would have been better than the way I actually handled the situation in most given circumstances.

Never anything competitive, honestly, I used to play Tekken Tag in the arcades 10+ years back, and I had been beaten badly, and in some cases actually made people ragequit, but I always took my competitive defeats with some dignity.

The second a game is that upsetting that not winning makes you unhappy, it's time to stop.

I've never really "raged", and I've never thrown anything or gotten angry, however I have fucked up sufficiently to the point where I realized that I was being a complete idiot for getting that disappointed and decided it was time to stop playing that game.

I once lost a very extensive inventory on a public server of minecraft via a stupid blunder, and I was in such shock and disbelief that it happened that I simply stopped playing.

You might as well have told me that somebody slashed the tires on my car for how shocked and dismayed I was. Yes, shameful display I know.

My ex once threw a wavebird at the floor in frustration at the stealth stage in Beyond Good and Evil. Those things don't break, they bounce. It popped up, hit two walls and the ceiling before coming to rest near the tv.

She was completely dumbstruck by what she had done. Rage is like that.

I once angrily chucked a PS2 at a wall, but that's because it was crapping out on me, not because of the game.

So I guess I'm on a higher moral standing than people who get angry at the game.

Only game I threw a controller over was Ninja Gaiden.

I did get a grown 30 something man to go into a screaming rage though. I was about 13 and Mortal Kombat 2 was at its height, where the machine would always be mobbed by people putting a quarter up for next match. I went up, picked Mileena, and spent the whole match tapping "forward" so I could immediately hit "low kick" and do the teleport jump kick every time he moved.

It was pretty great!

Why didn't he just block? Mileena's teleport kick is one of the most annoying moves in any game ever, but unless you're button mashing and sloppy, a player should be able to get free uppercuts off a kick-crazy Mileena.

Nominal was it that stupid windy stage in Ninja Gaiden 2? I hated that level soooooooo much. Luckily for everyone I was at my grandma's house and she rented us a Nintendo when we visited, and I couldn't feel right about justifying breaking anything because a stupid fucking eagle kept knocking me off a cliff over and over and over. If it had been my own house, let's just say half of the house would've been destroyed because of that goddamn fucking level.

Our anger is stirred either by those from whom we could not have received any injury at all, or by those from whom we might have received one. To the former class belong certain inanimate things, such as the manuscript which we often hurl from us because it is written in too small a script or tear up because it is full of mistakes, or the articles of clothing which we pull to pieces because we do not like them, But how foolish it is to get angry at these things which neither deserve our wrath nor feel it! ... In the end what can be madder than to accumulate spleen against men and then vent it upon things?

The original X-Wing had a some hellaciously difficult missions one of which caused me to put a fist through the wall.

I only seem to completely lose my shit when I'm arguing with crazy people on the Internet. One time I broke a (thankfully, cheap) keyboard after the conversation broke my (equally cheap) brain.

Yeah. I stopped playing this game, specifically, because it got too stressful at the tournament level. If you gain any sort of reputation you automatically have a target on your back and any loss is equal to about an hour of shit talk. Add to that the stream monsters and hundreds if not thousands of people watching (with many more ready to tear you down over any little thing)...and I don't care how strong willed you are, losing in that environment sucks harder than it should.

The guy throwing the stick is/was a very well known player in his region, so multiply that stress by whatever.

That isn't even counting tournament money loss and/or money match losses as well. People bet stupid amounts of cash on the outcomes of these games.

Plus, that's a shitty and frustrating way to lose in this game. He should have taken it, but his opponent had the clutch...it all adds up in the end.

I dunno, a close match like that usually leaves me pretty satisfied, whether I've won or lost. If I got beaten in a no-contest domination or FLAWLESS VICTORY I'd be a lot more upset. But I suppose that's one of many reasons I'll never go pro in my favorite hobby.

Unfortunately, good sportsmanship and the maturity that would leave one to respect an opponent that gave such a close match is rare in tournament level play.

To clarify: He didn't behave very maturely, but on the other hand, he probably knew how he'd be treated (LOL LOSER SO SALTY SCRUB etc etc etc), too, and reacted more strongly than he would've otherwise as a result of that stress.

I play this game and other fighters, but I do it online where there's no audience and my victorious opponents can mock me only through impotent little post-fight messages.

Fighting game fans deserve to be mocked at any level.

They're also allowed to vote.

They're apparently making some waves with their rap and hop music too, it really is pretty interesting.