A lot of my friends and associates, like myself, enjoy reading, watching or experiencing media in which human beings are placed in mortal danger. We move humans from cover to cover while shooting at other living things. We watch as political scandals unfold. We read about intrepid people delving into the darkness beneath the earth.
It’s fun, diverting and sometimes thought-provoking, but when it happens in real life, it can be a very different story.
For example, a lot of the gamers on X-Box Live playing a first-person shooter love to go on and on about how badass they are. But how often do these kids move off of the couch and off to their local recruiter? Does the thought even occur to them that holding a real gun and shooting at real brown people might satisfy them in ways holding a controller and shooting at digitized brown people never really can? Hell, paintball battles are frantic enough, can these people even fathom how terrifying it would be to try and make their way across an open area covered by people with assault rifles?
The reason this is on my mind is because the miners in Chile are being rescued after two months. In fantasy RPGs, players are often underground or delving into haunted dark hallways for a very long time. Most players are either alone or in a small party. In the context of a game, this is no problem. But when you’re actually in the deep darkness by yourself for an extended period of time, bad things happen. Those guys in Chile were taken care of in many ways and kept each other sane as much as possible.
Anyway, this dichotomy between the settings and circumstances of a game setting and a real-life one isn’t all that odd. I’d much rather keep Commander Shepard behind cover while alien weaponry inexplicably bounces off metal crates instead of going to a foreign country myself with little more than a submachine gun and a prayer book. Escapism is a way to experience these situations ourselves from the safety of our couches. I think it’s important to remember, however, that there are those who do end up in these situations who do so without the benefit of save points, an omniscient support character or a controller to stand between them and the events taking place. And the moments when they overcome the obstacles set before them is an event much more worthy of celebration than any achievement we might unlock on our consoles or PCs.
Despite the fact that this is my day off, bugs continue to plague me. I’ve been squashing them left and right in the application I’m building at the dayjob, but now they’ve crept into other bits of my life.
Yesterday’s audio, for example, does not play correctly. With the source files up at the dayjob, my alternatives are re-record it here or wait until Monday to re-sample and re-upload the file. Neither of which I particularly like, but there it is.
I also finally finished a rather buggy game that’s been a long, long time in the playing. I’ll get a review put together for tomorrow.
I’ve been in therapy quite a bit in my adult life.
You’re shocked. I can tell.
One of the most effective pieces of advice I was given by a therapist involved dealing with the internal mechanisms of my brain. Specifically, the phenomenon she called “racing thoughts.” Basically, if a notion came into my head or something bugged me, the notion itself and my thoughts on that notion would begin chasing each other around with little restraint or regard for anything I wanted to accomplish. Something would shock me or blind-side me emotionally, and I’d be a useless weepy rag of a man for at least half a day. It was bad.
Getting a grip on this problem, and by extension myself, was a lot like herding cats. Rather mangy undomesticated ones that that. My inability to properly cope with or communicate important, life-impacting information and events has lead directly to some real disasters. I’ve messed up quite a few things in my life. Some bridges have been burned, never to be repaired. I like to believe in things like redemption, forgiveness and hope, but reality is a lot colder and more harsh than the heavenly kingdom in just about any walk of faith.
See? There it goes. My mind starts chasing its own tail in a spiral of, in this case, self-loathing and regret. Nip that in the bud, mind! I’ve done bad things in my life, sure. But they weren’t all bad. And I can learn from the bad things I’ve done in the past and do better in the future. Yes, I’ve lost friends. Yes, I’ve disappointed loved ones. Who the hell hasn’t? We live on. Pain heals, chicks dig scars.
The Only Real Writer’s Block
Going back to my rosy-eyed optimism, I’m fond of telling people that they are their own biggest obstacle. Yes, the deck might be stacked against you in a certain endeavor, be it because of the success of other people or your gender or your current finances or the fact you can’t get your hands on a trained orangutan. But more often than not, the little doubts and tiny bits of self-loathing we all struggle with are the pebbles in our shoes that keep us from taking another step forward.
It’s especially true for writers. You hum along, banging out words, sending queries, pitching articles and sharing your stories with other writers. Or long-suffering spouses. Or confused pets. Or anybody within earshot. Bottom line is, six days out of seven everything’s fine as far as writing is concerned.
Then comes the bad news. Another rejection for the “I’m doing something!” pile. A disappointingly inadequate paycheck, or word that payment isn’t coming at all for another month or three. A collections call. The sound of the repo man’s tow truck hitching up to your car. Your dog leaves you a ‘present’ in your shoes. The roaches carry off the good china you haven’t managed to wash yet. You get the idea.
Whatever it is, however it comes about, you just stop cold. You doubt your worth as an artist, a writer, a human being. A little voice in your head tells you this was a bad idea. You’ll never make is as big as the people out there who have one tenth of your talent but are twenty times as wealthy and popular. You messed up somewhere, and you’ll never recover. The little bastard in the back of your brain drops a tiny bit of red matter into your heart and wham, super-massive emotional black hole. Because that feeling? Sucks.
Herding Cats While Herding Cats
Writers and artists aren’t the only folks who deal with this. Gamers also run afoul of doubt fairies. Get blasted by other players one time too many, fail in the boss fight time and again, mess up the timing necessary to get that elusive achievement after an afternoon of attempts, and the gamer rage takes hold. You fume. You cuss. You quit.
Now imagine that frustration duplicated at least a few times, in the personage of fellow gamers with whom you have direct contact, but it’s all directed at you. That’s what it means to form a guild, clan or similarly titled organization of gamers within a given game. You not only have to deal with your own anxiety and desire to get your goals across, but you also need to respond to the needs of other gamers. Some are easy to please, some are passive-aggressive in communicating what they want, some just don’t want to play by the rules and some think they’re entitled to special favors just because you’ve made the wise decision to include them in the club (which, by the way, they’re not).
Basically you’re putting yourself through the wringer not only of proving your own self-doubts wrong but weathering the slings and arrows of the outrageous expectations of others doing the same. Egos are projected. Friends become whiners. Any ideals you had get swept aside as people scramble for bits of recognition and validation. It feels like the original notion has been picked up and carried in a direction you don’t like. Red matter, center of heart, black hole, suck. The feeling that comes from herding the cats in ones’ head is aggravated by herding multiple additional cats.
So how do you wrangle these rampant felines?
Catnip for the Brain
The best advice I can give for situations like this is to keep things in perspective. As a writer, there’s nobody else in the world who can tell your story the way you want to tell it. Sure, concepts or themes or plot structures replicate themselves all the time, but the nuances, the fine details, the character ticks and turning points are all you. You’re the teller of that story, and if you don’t get out there and tell it it won’t be told.
As for gamers, games are supposed to be fun. A joy and a delight, a distraction and a touch of escape. We shouldn’t drag our personal problems into our entertainment to the degree that it stops being entertaining. That said, I’m as guilty as doing it as anybody, starting over and ragequitting with the best of them, taking a game too seriously. So I’ll be right there with you, struggling to remember that I’m in the game to have fun. The people that prevent me from having fun, that try to take that fun away to fulfill those false feelings of entitlement, are people I really shouldn’t associate with. Maybe they’ll get over it, giving the gamer form of a cat’s look of “I meant to do that.” And maybe they’ll wander off, hindquarters high in the air in that “I’m the most awesome and everybody else is an idiot” prance cats do so well.
It’s important to have goals, in just about everything you do. The somewhat tricky part is that not everything will have defined goals laid out for you. The deadlines of a dayjob, the billing dates of utilities, the expiration on a gallon of milk – these give us tangible goals. Other goals aren’t usually as well defined.
Take gaming, for example. People are under no obligation to reach a particular level in World of Warcraft, Mass Effect or EVE Online. In fact, EVE has no “end-game” content to speak of. There’s no sprawling story structure of quests and rewards – just you, your starting vessel and the vast emptiness of space. To keep things interesting you have to set goals for yourself – get this skill to a certain level, earn enough money for that class of ship, be good enough to be invited to the Awesome Express corporation.
Mass Effect, being a single-player experience, has the goals of the story missions, side quests and DLC, but beyond that you really don’t have any obligation to play it more than once. Yet I find myself contemplating doing just that. I’ve beaten both games on standard difficulty (as an Inflitrator) and Hardcore (as a Vanguard). But the Insanity difficulty taunts me. I also never hit the maximum level in the first game. So at some point, I’ll be revisiting it, and maybe I can put together a review of ME2’s DLC while I’m at it.
As for World of Warcraft, my main character’s plunging into the final end-game raid of the last expansion. I’m also getting him geared up for the arenas, which are pretty much the pinnacle of player-versus-player skill. Meanwhile, I have two other characters I’m working on, one for the purposes of change-of-pace gameplay (tanking as opposed to DPSing) and one for role-playing purposes. It’s difficult to portray a charismatic, powerful villain when you’re only half as powerful as everybody else in terms of level, after all.
Outside of my various electronic distractions, other goals approach as well. I’ve been doing podcasts for IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! for almost a year, and in a few months I’ll have been getting blog posts up for over 365 days. The editing process of Citizen in the Wilds proceeds, I’m trying to get a hold of Polymancer again and in a few weeks I’ll know the end result of my efforts to place in the Blizzard fiction contest. Once these goals are met, however, I know I can’t stop – new ones will have to be set, otherwise I’ll just be puttering around in games all day.
I mean, more than I usually do.
What sort of goals do you/have you set for yourself? How do you reward yourself when you reach them?
I quietly introduced this feature yesterday. In case you missed it, take a look to the right of my main content area, just below the grinning face in the Classholes advert.
This is an opportunity for you to participate in my weekly IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! feature without having to make a donation or call me out in a public podcast. Every week, after I do my thing, I’ll choose a few movies on my queue that seem interesting, bring back memories or look like they need a good paddling. Once the new poll is up, you can vote on which movie you’d like to see & hear me review.
I think this works better than my old, static list. I set the polls to expire so I’ll be prompted to keep new ones coming. More than that, though, folks who actually have an interest in seeing how this series is evolving and improving can become a part of that process. Or just push me towards reviewing more bad movies.
What do you guys think of the poll? Do you love it? Hate it? Want me to get different movies in there?
