Angel Lavaire
New York City College of Technology, CUNY

Imagine a gray and bitter day, a day where you feel like you need to escape from a stormy experience at the job or you feel like you should take a break for at least a few hours from an exhausted overdose of assignment at school, for many people their treatment is their favorites hobbies and I include myself in that group, the medicine that makes me forget about my morning routine is video games. Video games have helped me as a therapy to combat my boring and daily morning life, for many people their ways of acting or being in this massive community has a huge variety since they can be used for mere peace or entertainment purposes. The so-called Esports in the world of video games is absolutely influential for many individuals because they encourage competitiveness, teamwork, and also personal greatness.

Knowing these factors, why are there people who still want to ruin people’s experiences? Because there is still that toxicity, those insults that the only thing they serve is to sink people, they hurt their desires, experiences but most importantly they become insecure and also closed to society, they ruin their future, their hobbies, their personality and this has been happening to everyone lately. Esports teams have insulted me for no reason at all, they attempted to humiliate my friends in something that should only be for fun, I remember once we had a tournament when my team began playing, we had around a week since that they of playing together, we had to play against an experienced team, a team that had been playing for 2 years, they were experienced and had that group synergy, they wanted to trample on us in the chat trying to humiliate us saying things like “hurry up, I have things to do” as if nothing, they don’t care about being toxic and jerks, many members of the team who were just starting out in the esports world felt like they were insufficient, frustrated, enraged and moderately sad despite not admitting it. It’s like having a dream: you want to be an artist, you study, you practice, and when you have the first opportunity to be able to show your art to the world they tell you that it stinks and nobody likes it.

-392 words