essaygraveyard

[essaygraveyard]

What even is a name

I have, for several years now, been doing a bit where if someone gets my name wrong, I will just roll with it. To the extent that if someone asks to make sure they are getting my name wrong I won't even correct them then. As a bit it is at most mildly amusing, but fundamentally I do it because it doesn't cost me anything. I have found that I have almost no personal attachment to my name. I recognize it as a thing that is for and about me, but really I think of it as a thing for other people. So, if other people have a different name for me then it really doesn't affect me cause that name was always for them. That is until they need to talk to someone else about me which is where the funny part of the bit comes in.

What's funny is that this seems to extend to other thing in my life. Usernames being a big one because basically every time I join a new site I pick a new username. Several of those usernames have been based entirely on bits for or about my friends who were also on that site, but the more stable usernames that I've had have actually been pithy attempts to describe my personality at the time. Both of those come with the drawback that they age very quickly. It's a pattern that I've only recently picked up on and one that I think is a bit of an extension of my relationship to my own real name.

The one real exception I can think of is my character names in table top games. I find that I like my characters way more if I find the right name for them, something that both fits the characters vibe, the vibe of the game, and is easy enough to say and remember so other people at the table will pick up on it. I CARE about my characters names feeling right. I haven't finished internally breaking down why exactly that is. It could just be that it's the thing I call the character, so the name is for me in a way mine isn't. That might well be the case but I think some part of me wants it to be something more profound than that.

[essaygraveyard]

Am I Old???

2023 has certainly been a year. Honestly, it doesn't have much of a right to be causing the amount of introspection as it has been based on my own life and yet it's found a way. Granted some of that is from world events, it's hard not to have to take a look back on your actions, no matter how passive, when it has become undeniable that absolutely every system you participate in is endorsing genocide. Outside of that though I can't help but feel alienated from a lot of things that I used to help use to define my identity.

I didn't buy a single game on steam this year. The only console game I bought was Tears of the Kingdom which honestly, I don't know if that counts as its own game. I did go to see my fair share of movies this year, which is markedly up from the previous few years, but I didn't engage with them quite as in depth as I used to with other films. I started playing Runescape again, and that briefly sparked some retrospection before falling into something of an obligation. The main shift in my media diets where that I started watching One Piece and that I've been playing significantly more Ttrpgs. My writing for so long has been fueled by consumption for so long that now that my consumption has decreased so has my output. I'm at the end of the year now thinking that I should be playing new games and diving back into what drove me before, but I can't find the motivation organically.

Video games used to be exciting. In high school I latched on to the fact that they were an evolving medium, that every year there was some game that was pushing a limit in a way that felt new. The critical landscape that I found myself in after that reinforced a lot of my engagement with the newest output of a wide variety of developers. Indie games were constantly surprising, AAA games were consistently pushing the boundary. There was no shortage of topics to explore that made me feel like I was unwinding the possibilities that the medium presented. Even in more recent years when the formulas in both spaces started to feel more and more set there were still refinements to be made. The Last of Us Part 2 gave me months of work to process, Cyberpunk 2077 even more so. In between those I did start to feel a longing for another Night in the Woods or Kentucky Route Zero. The indie games I did play hit me with a hollowness that felt like I was missing something. I probably was.

Last year I renegotiated my relationship with a lot of older games that I came to realize my opinions were never really my own. I finally admitted to myself that I had never actually enjoyed a number of critically beloved games, and in following realized there were a number of games I had sworn off despite enjoying immensely. Skyrim was the main player that helped me articulate that. At the time I felt like I could move into 2023 confident that I was going to be more honest with myself about my personal experience with the games that I consumed. Then I didn't play any fucking games.

What's odd is that I no longer feel like I'm missing out on anything. The only game this year that felt like it might be worth it is Baldur's Gate 3 and even that I'm in no rush to get around to. In any other year I would have picked up Starfield just to tear it to shreds, but that too came and went without a second thought. I don't even know any of the indie games that came out this year, and when that would have felt like a failing to me once I don't strongly feel any way about it now. It seems to me that in many ways video games have hit their limits. Like any other medium new great works can be created within them, and like any other medium there is now a strong capitalist contest resisting the more experimental tendencies of the people working on them. Before everything was new and interesting, now it takes work to sort it out. Perhaps then it's no wonder that this is the year I started playing Ttrpgs 3-4 times a week.

[essaygraveyard]

Well this didn't end up working out

After talking to a friend recently about how my writing projects have been going, I finally had the gall to come back and check my drafts on this account to find nearly a dozen half-finished essays sitting right next to the first post where I said that was what I was trying to avoid. Now the point of this blog is not to find a following, that's why nothing is getting tagged, but I do still feel the doom spiral set in when I go to long without contributing to a certain project. That pretty clearly shows that the format of my writing is not the problem and that consistently shifting the type of writing I'm doing is not going to lead me to a solution for my inability to form habits. While it is still true that different types of writing projects have bigger hurdles what I need to do now is find a way to move things forward on the things I've left half finished.

In the short term I'm going to try and clear out my drafts on here and get some of those things posted. Moving forward I think I'm going to try and force myself to post things in the same sitting I start writing them. Neither of those are a long-term solution but as it stands, I just need to feel like I'm making progress again. Perhaps follow-up posts are the way to go to expand my thoughts on something that I didn't get all the way there. I think I've been avoiding making multiple essays on the same topic because I see writing as a sort of external storage and organization method for my thoughts. As such when I write something that I know doesn't encompass all of my thoughts it feels like a failure to me. Once again it is perfectionism that seems to be getting in the way of progress. So here's to my second try at this, maybe I'll learn something this time.

[essaygraveyard]

Comparison without negativity.

One of the trickiest things about existing in the ttrpg space is the inexplicably hostile divide that exists between a large group of D&D players and a contingent of other players who seemingly define themselves by the fact that they play everything but D&D. The existence of this divide puts someone like me, who doesn't really have a problem with D&D but still prefers other games, in an odd position. See I want to be able to talk about other games, and the easiest point of comparison a lot of the time is D&D since it's the one you can kinda assume most people are familiar with. However, I have been struggling to compare games to D&D without sounding like I am being at least a little critical.

Let's use an example. Say I want to talk about games that use life-paths during character creation. I've been playing Star Trek Adventures and during character creation you follow your pc from their upbringing through the highlights of their career and as you do you tie ever single ability, interest, stat, and virtue to something in the characters past. The result is that characters come out much more developed by default than they do in other games. Thats not to say that the pcs in other games can't be developed, it's just to say that sometimes pc's in other games can feel like they just popped into existence in a way that they can't in ST:A. The point of comparison I would want to make here is to look at the abilities and skills in 5e D&D. So many abilities in 5e can feel like they just pop in out of nowhere, and just as often the proficiencies feel like they provide no insight into the characters themselves. This is a criticism of 5e, sure, and if I were to mention that criticism to people in the D&D community without first mentioning another game, I'm sure a lot of people would agree with me. However, bringing up a different game changes how people read that criticism. In this context it is now an insult being hurled from the outside despite the fact that I still play more 5e than any other game.

This makes a lot of conversations difficult to have. D&D has been walled off from other games with gatekeepers on both sides enforcing a conflict that as far as I can tell helps no one. Given I have little to no experience actually participating in online communities the ins and outs of this divide confuse and frighten me. A few months ago, I joined TikTok. a few weeks ago, I posted a handful of videos to test out the waters. Since then, I have been nearly paralyzed because every time I think of something that might be good to post I reconsider it for fear of stoking conflict that I'm not prepared for. This probably sounds like a really petty conflict for me to be tiptoeing around, and I admit it is, but nonetheless it has introduced yet another block for my ability to be creative.

What's unusual about this situation for me in particular is that I don't have conflicting feelings about it. My block comes entirely from how other people might take the things I say, not from what I am trying to say in the first place. In case it hasn't been obvious I think the entire dichotomy of this divide is stupid, that the people dismissing 5e are assholes and that the people refusing to even look at other games are largely being over defensive. I am also certain that this is a vocal minority that has just enough numbers to infect every comments section with their trademark cries of "just play pathfinder". Maybe I'm obsessing over nothing as I am wont to do, but I do want to be putting more positivity into the world and I'm still learning how to do that. In the process I'm just trying to be more mindful of the things I say in a public form.

[essaygraveyard]

The oddities of Old School RuneScape.

Recently (as in sometime since the time dilation got worse) a friend of mine bullied me back into playing RuneScape for the first time in a decade and some change. It was, at first, a fun little exercise in nostalgia and childhood wish fulfillment. I was unsurprised to find that I still remembered just about everything you could do in free to play given I had completed all of that content half a dozen times and when it came to the members content I was finally able to do all of the things that a young hatsforfish could only dream of doing. I never had a membership growing up, so to see the grass from the other side felt like striking off long forgotten bucket list items. What I didn't suspect when I submitted the request to recover my account was that I would stick around.

RuneScape has gone through a handful of iterations since it first went online in early 2001. The version I grew up playing was RuneScape 2; the version that the modern Old School RuneScape (from this point on OSRS) is based on and the version that was revived due to some of the player base's dissatisfaction with RuneScape 3 (R3). My original character, which I had made in my elementary school computer lab and whose name was a misspelling of the name I had at the time wished my parents gave me, remains trapped in R3 since it is technically the original game. OSRS is a ship of Theseus of the 2007 version of the game that got updated out of existence. It is not the original but is made of all the parts that the original slowly replaced. Or it was at the beginning, because the devs then continued to update the new old version of the game with new content and even new visuals. So OSRS now is more what we remember RuneScape 2 to be rather than what it actually was.

The updates aren't haphazard though. Almost every change or addition to the game is polled by the player base before release and needs to meet a stringent 70% approval rating to pass. What this effectively means is that the active community in the game decides what nostalgia means to them. This helps get around one of the problems that Dan Olson pointed out with regards to WOW in this video which is that the paratext of the game, the guides wikis and technical understanding of the games systems, has fundamentally shifted the way we play the game. Back in 2007 nobody knew what they were doing, they just did what felt right to them or what a friend of a friend had said was good. The idea of a "game tick" was not in peoples vocabularies and so the devs didn't have to design around people intricately manipulating and optimizing the game the way they can now. At the same time nobody has the same amount of time they did back then so the genuinely long grinds the game used to contain are even less appealing today.

So when I started playing OSRS I remembered back to Olson's original video on WOW classic and figured that the same was going to more or less be true for RuneScape as well. Logging in to my new character (whose name ended up being weirdly prescient) I figured I would exhaust my nostalgia fairly quickly and throw in the towel the same I have for any game without a proper ending. It was sometime during the quest Recipe for Disaster that the true form of OSRS started to appear to me and I started to notice the pattern.

See, I wanted to get my combat level up, so I looked for the best way to train combat and the internet almost universally said that slayer tasks were the way to go. I jump into some of the level appropriate tasks, looking up guides along the way and it mentions an item that would help called the Slayer Helm which is unlocked by earning points from doing tasks. Well, that's convenient since I'm already doing tasks but doing tasks my level meant points came in slower. If I did faster easier tasks, then and did the high-level ones on the count that gave a score multiplier then I would have the Slayer helm in no time. That being said killing all these low-level mobs quickly mean leaving a ton of bones on the floor and it's just such a shame for them to go to waste since prayer is such an expensive skill to train otherwise. Turns out that there is an item that automatically converts dropped bones into passive prayer xp and that would be incredible to have for this grind. It is, however, locked behind the Morytania achievement diary which has a ton of requirements but they're all things I was meaning to do anyhow. So, I head off the grind agility and right around the time I start thinking about unlocking Fossil Island so I could start doing birdhouse runs in between agility course laps the whole picture finally snaps into place. The natural game flow of OSRS is just simulating what it's like to live with inattentive ADHD.

Given that I have inattentive ADHD I figured that OSRS just allowed for more floating from thing to thing than most games do so I saw my real-life tendencies reflected in it more than most other games. That was until I found out that a ton of other people play the game this way. Now that could just mean that a lot of ADHD havers play the game, which wouldn't strike me as all that unusual but either way I wasn't out of place here. What was odd was that existing like this usually makes me absolutely miserable but for some reason doing those same patterns in RuneScape didn't frustrate me at all. In fact, this sort of tangential advancement has kept me focused on the game waaaaaaaay longer than I ever could have guessed. While I never did get my bone crusher, I did just get back around to finishing the quest that I had gotten distracted from in the first place. Intentional or otherwise, the design of the game is one of the first times it felt like the way my brain works might not always be a detriment to my goals. In spite of that I do not recommend getting started on the game unless you have a lot of free time and nothing better to spend it on.

[essaygraveyard]

In lieu of a solution to my ADHD

Hello Tumblr, or rather what I'm hoping will be the equivalent of a paper bag for me to scream into. See, this is the latest in a long line of attempts for me to find some format that allows me to externalize some portion of the thoughts in my head to hopefully make it a little less crowded in here. While I saw a brief period of success last year writing essays it turns out that 10,000 words per thought was too high a barrier for me to consistently clear. Subsequently there have attempts to find some middle ground between a novelette and a sticky note none of which have proven particularly fruitful. Perfectionism is the main obstacle I have run into, as longer projects can be edited near endlessly and shorter projects never feel as punchy as I want them to. My goal here is not to let things linger as drafts past their expiration date.

I also need to work on not being too caught up in the originality or profundity of my ideas, so my new goal is to write even if I don't have point that I'm trying to get to. I want to write things, hit post, and move on. I already have doubts about the viability of this exercise but I'm hoping that it might at the very least illuminate the next step for me. I don't intend to tag anything in hopes that it prevents people from seeing it. Which is to say if you are seeing it, I would appreciate it if you just moved along. I may be struggling but I'd like to see if I can figure this one out for myself.