I couldn't hack Marvel Rivals, but Marvel Snap taught me more about PvP etiquette in 6 months than any game has before it

Marvel Rivals players love to throw around every "insult" in the book. From the extremely creative "kys" to the hilariously juvenile "Strange is gay" (the latter tossed at a friend of mine after, as Dr Strange, he failed to immediately pull up a portal for a very insistent Jeff the Shark), I'm both amazed and enraged by things I've seen and heard people saying in live service video games.

Nobody likes it, but it's been a longtime pet hate of mine that actively puts me off even attempting most online PvP games. Even with voice comms turned off, text chat gives rise to more ways to bully your allies and enemies alike. It's not just shooter games, either. I used to play a lot of Dead by Daylight and quickly learned that certain player actions – crouch spamming, flashlight click spamming, overuse of emotes, and so on – can be construed as BMing (that's "bad manners"-ing, for the blissfully uninitiated). Once I picked that up, it suddenly made me fume. All of it is silly, and I know it's daft to let emotion get the better of me, but there's only so many times I can put up with griefers before I want to take a bath with my toaster.

Enter: Marvel Snap. As a fun and flashy mobile game, its approach to PvP etiquette is streamlined and simple. There's no text chat, no voice comms, and only a select handful of emotes at the ready, allowing me to lose myself in the tactical minutes-long matches without getting side-tracked by professional trolls. It's a near perfect approach to punishing BMers: simply don't grant people the opportunity in the first place.

Good show, old sport

"But Jasmine," I hear you cry, "dealing with BMing is a large part of PvP gaming!" So what? More importantly, who says everyone deserves to be insulted just for playing a video game?

If there's one thing Marvel Snap has taught me, it's that – gasp – it's possible to show your displeasure with a situation without being a total dick. Most of the time, I see this when players simply retreat from matches as soon as I block their grand strategy.

For example, last season was a popular one for destruction strategies, so I made sure to keep Armour in every one of my decks. I fully expect my opponent to retreat once I throw a shield around their Bucky or Wolverine cards on turn four, because that's just how the game works. They don't need to play me if they won't be able to play the way they want, and by ducking out early, they're saving their cubes and emotional wellbeing alike.

Another thing that used to really get my back up before I realized it's nothing personal is when my opponent snaps on round one (or as soon as we load in, if possible). At first, I saw early snapping as an ego thing. You're only meant to snap when you think you're going to win, so by abusing the bluff and intimidation factor so early on, I'd often snap back in annoyance.

But then I realized that not only is the whole point of Marvel Snap to win as many cubes per game as possible to climb the rankings at pace, but a lot of people (myself included) forget to snap at all. Early snapping isn't always an intimidation tactic to make you back down – it could even be a preemptive measure. You can always retreat later, anyway.

Of course, that's not to say there's no way to annoy people in Marvel Snap. Emote-spammers pop up every so often, which is how I learned a whole two weeks ago that it's even possible to emote in this game, and I can imagine some players flat out refuse to play against certain meta cards they deem overpowered.

But here's the thing: unlike in some other PvP games that penalize you for disconnecting without seeing the game through, the fact that Marvel Snap is built around knowing when to snap and when to retreat means that you can move on quietly if you're having a bad time. It doesn't punish you for it, it doesn't waste your time when you can already see defeat on the horizon; it uses our own psychology to help us feel and play our best, even when we're losing.

I know that it might not work as well for every live service game, but I'd still love to see more games taking greater strides to protect players from their own emotions sometimes. It's the thing that makes me say "ooh, smart play" when I get a -8 power Hobgoblin thrown my way last minute instead of getting mad about it. I've had opponents give me a thumbs-up emote when I use a "copy the last card played here four times" location to drop all the cards in their hand by four power apiece.

Marvel Snap makes me feel so smart sometimes, but even when I'm getting humbled, I can appreciate the unique strategy and take it with me when I next build a deck. It makes for the most civilized, healthy PvP encounters I've ever had, keeping emotions at an arm's length in the name of staying focused on the game itself. Surely that's the point of playing a game in the first place, and if I need to die on this hill marked "you don't need to be an ass to have a good time," you'd better fetch the coroner.

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