Game Night Freak-outs

I've freaked out. I've seen other people freak out. It usually has nothing to do with the game. It's just people push each other's buttons. Playing a game isn't like being at a cocktail party, where if someone is annoying you, you can just walk away and go chat with someone else. You are stuck at the table with that person. People try to keep their cool, but eventually reach their limit and blow up. Typically the thing that puts them over the edge seems trivial, however it's not that one specific thing that they are upset about. It's the culmination of an hour or two (or sometimes a long history) of annoying behavior that sets them off.

Like I know a guy who always interrupts people when they are speaking. It's crazy making during a rules explanation, because the person who is explaining the rules can't get two sentences out without him asking a question about something that the rules explainer hasn't gotten to yet. So the rules explainer gets side tracked repeatedly, and the rules come out in a tumbled order that doesn't make much sense, and usually something gets forgotten.

Recently we were playing our second game of the evening with with this guy, which meant that we had already gone through the interrupted rules once with the first game. Then during the game he was interrupting conversation. Then we went through it with the rules for the second game. During this I was trying to stay cool. Reminding myself he was actually a really nice guy who I like, and to just be patient, but I was getting annoyed.

After the rules explainer was done, I was still confused, due to all the interruptions, and asked for a clarification on one of the rules. The guy interrupts my question before I even get it out to say the rule is perfectly clear and we should just play. I ask that we look up and read what is actually there, but he interrupts me again and gives me a rule as he remembered it, and insists that we just play. But since he hadn't allowed me to speak a full sentence either time I tried to ask my question, neither he nor anyone at the table even knew exactly what I was asking, and his answers hadn't addressed my actual issue. So at that point I was totally steamed, because I had sat through 300 of his questions, and he wouldn't even let me finish speaking one full sentence to fully articulate exactly what my question was. Plus, I probably wouldn't even have needed to ask the question in the first place if he hadn't interrupted the rules explanation 20 times. When he cut me off on the 3rd attempt, I think I told him to shut the fuck up (or something like that, I don't really remember but it was something that upset everyone) and walked out.

So everyone who was there or who heard about it (gossip is rampant in our game group) thinks I blew up over a disagreement over the interpretation of a game rule, when all I wanted was for someone to pass me the rule book so that I could read the paragraph for myself. My vindication is that now there is a common consensus in the gaming community that the paragraph I wanted to read was poorly written and ambiguous, and there has since been an FAQ on it. However, that doesn't change the fact that I'm still considered by some to be that crazy bitch who yelled at the nice guy and then stormed out.