Lithier
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Lith's Diary - May
🕑 Added 2019-06-01 02:36:25 +0000 UTCDear Diary,
I think I've figured out why I like those little clicker games. Sure, it can be addictive to pull it up anytime you have a spare minute and upgrade all your stuff, and it's really easy for that to turn into two hours wasted screwing around with whatever silly "special event" they've got going or something, and I've gradually sunk into that trap, then pulled myself out, a few times. I try to treat them as a "now and then" kinda game, when I feel like I have the time to spare. It might feel... kinda satisfying to play them? But looking back, I put that firmly under the category of "not really having fun, and not really working." Like... after I'm done with a clicker game, I don't feel revitalized and ready to tackle some work like I do after a really satisfying game. So it's kinda like I've just... lost all that time?
So when I said I cut out a lot of that "dead time" last month, what I meant was (partly) that I finally put down the clicker game, haha. And I'm glad, cause it's really helped me with getting full use out of my time, whether that means being productive or getting myself in a good state to get more work done. But... I've finally realized that there was one reason I kinda liked having those kinds of games going, that it was actually beneficial to me.
I've always had a lot of trouble getting to sleep on my own. It's really easy for me to lie down and start... thinking about what I've done, and what I need to do, and it can gradually expand into this huge overarching series of worries and plans for my life... and then it either turns into pure philosophy, or thinking about some movie or game or something. The point is, my mind starts going, usually with worries about what I'm doing, and then it just spins out of control and keeps me up for hours. It's pretty miserable. Now, I've tried a lot of things to fight that. Maintain a good sleeping ritual to get my body thinking it's gonna sleep. Put on something boring to watch that'll distract me just enough I don't think too much. Clearing my mind, even like, meditating and stuff. I've had... mixed results with pretty much all of it.
But one thing that I've realized always worked pretty well was actually those stupid clicker games! I'd pull it up in bed, I'd spend ten or fifteen minutes getting everything all set up to run overnight for maximum profit or whatever, and I'd close it and feel... satisfied, like the future will take care of itself for a while. It's like... as soon as I lie down, I get this burst of anxiety that gets me wanting to sort out "what happens from here," but having something I can actually do without getting up and doing the chores I put off or whatever, something that lets me "fix" and "set up" things for the future... It really helped me get to sleep. It sounds really silly, and in a way it feels kinda dishonest to like... take this impulse my body is giving me to figure out my life and trick it with this game? It's true it's healthy to stop and take some time to figure out your life now and then, and we often end up not doing it nearly as much as we should. But... every night is just too much. And then it makes it harder for me to get things done in the morning...
It's a weird solution, and feels a little sketchy, but in the end, it's the best option I've found. The only problem is... once you're playing a clicker game, it's super tempting to just check it at any ol' time throughout the day. I guess the ideal would be to either get myself into the habit of only playing a clicker right at bed, or to like... find one that literally only lets you do stuff once a day or something. I dunno. I guess I'll have to look into it.
This occurred to me randomly as I was looking back at last month and thinking about this month. It's been... a weird time, and "a sense of anxiety and needing to figure out what you're doing on a larger scale" is kind of a key theme, really. ...Well, okay, that sounds worse than it is, probably.
Part of it is just... I've been having some family trouble that's been making things really hard for me. I don't really wanna talk about it, it's all just depressing and I want to try and just... get away from it, not let it spoil things too much for me. That's pretty much all I can do right now. But it does fit that theme.
And the other big match for that theme is actually the game I've been playing lately. I thiiiink I might have mentioned it before? I actually got to play it while it was still in development, and was... frustrated with it. It's called Graveyard Keeper. It's another one of those "boring games," a lot like Stardew Valley (which I also played for a while this month, come to think of it) or Satisfactory. It's actually very engaging to me as a resource management game, but it's still... very frustrating.
Basically, the big problem I noticed in early access was slightly better now, maybe partly cause I knew what I was doing this time, but it was still a really maddening part of the experience. On the face of it, the game is a very open-ended kinda "build up your farm/crafting area" game centered around running a graveyard and a church, which includes some weird, shady mechanics for making money and playing around with the occult. You can also mine, cut down trees, forge tools, cut up various types of lumber and boards, be a stonemason, build all the machines to make these things possible, repair/rebuild/clear out the wreckage and collapsed areas all around your base, run a farm, go fishing with a full minigame and equipment levels, go into a dungeon and fight monsters, cut up bodies to alter their properties, take the organs and dive into an entire section centered around alchemy, which also requires gathering flowers, mushrooms, and so on from the world, there's an involved mechanic for writing and for compiling your own books, you can brew alcohol, cook up meals, you need to engage with the semi-realistic economy of the nearby village to make money, and eventually you start raising zombies to organize your own small army of workers to automate the more basic processes. And that's just the base mechanics of the game, over which there's a series of interweaving quests for about a dozen different characters.
So... there's a lot to the game. It sounds amazing, right? Like, a huge, open playground of things to do, to the point you might not even know where to focus!
Well... I think the devs agreed about that, because they set it up to basically force you to play the game in a very specific way. That way being, that you have to play ALL of it. And they're not actually going to tell you what order you have to play it in. So... instead of an incredibly huge sandbox, it becomes more of a huge labyrinth of invisible walls. They hook you with things like "you can write your own sermons to be more effective!" and "you can sell the meat from the bodies for profit!" and then... you gradually find out that to sell the meat, you need a stamp, which you can only get either by already HAVING a ton of money, or by doing a bunch of construction, running some sidequests for one guy to enable you to do quests for another guy, then diving into a dungeon, clearing it floor by floor until you get the macguffin. THEN you can have the basic mechanism for earning any money at all. And if you want to just do the body chopping stuff without playing Hack n Slash, too bad.
And writing sermons! Oh boy. Turns out, to do that, you have two options. The first is to learn the secrets of making paper, then also learn how to make ink, and procure feathers for quills. You couldn't just... think of a new sermon or anything, in your head, you literally have to invent writing first. So to make paper, you need an advanced workdesk that requires fancy construction components you don't know how to make, which in turn require materials you don't have access to. So good luck with that! And for ink, you literally need alchemy. And to do alchemy, you need to learn how to blow glass to make complex beakers! The second option is to not be a dummy like me, and notice that there is one obscure guy off on the other side of the map, that is only available on a certain day of the week, that will sell you ink and paper. For more money than you have, because you can't sell meat yet. And you still need to build a fancy desk just for writing on.
Also, the quests. You know how sometimes an RPG will have one of those "funny" quest chains where you need A, so you go to a guy that asks for B to give you A, but to get B you need C, and so on to an absolutely hilarious, excruciating degree? This is that, except instead of a long, simple chain, it's a tangled mish-mash of everyone wanting things from other people, and all of them are only available one day a week, so you need to track all the things you need to unlock this technology you need to progress, by satisfying This Guy, by going to That Guy and That Lady and working their stuff out first, and you really hope that they only tell you to make something to bring back to them next week, and not that you need something from The Guy Over There.
So! I sound really mad at this game, and I've been really mad at this game. But I've also poured a ton of hours into it cause I really want to beat this insane tangle? So... I guess that in a way, you could say it was designed really well. I was very engaged, and every time I was finally "allowed" to do something I've been struggling to get done for hours, it was immensely satisfying... for three seconds, until I notice there's something else I have to do before I can do what I REALLY wanted to do. I guess that in the end, that's my big complaint with the game: where other games give you tons of gameplay, but let you kinda play whatever you want, but reward you for playing some of all of it... this game feels more defined by all the things it doesn't even allow you to do. Every game state is "I need this but I can't yet because of some arcane collection of restrictions." This game gives you the opposite of the freedom to play how you want.
At one point, I scraped together all my money and finally bought the "town pass" (because nobody can go to the actual Town without a pass, obviously) because everyone kept talking about it, the Bishop said I should go there soon, and I really wanted to find some new opportunities to make money at all. So I went to the path leading to the Town, gave the guard my pass, and he said okay, and let me through. And somehow, that felt too easy. He didn't also ask me to get on my knees first. I literally said to myself, "something is going to go horribly wrong and I'm not gonna make it to the town." And then my character was struck by lightning ten feet down the path and died. I looked it up, and apparently the Town isn't actually in the game, and is a "joke" by the developers.
So yeah. I've had a lot of emotions about the game. I think I'm finally nearing the end, because I've filled out most of the tech trees, and the resources that were just so incredibly, painfully slow to come even when I clearly needed tons of them are suddenly flowing like water. I'm still waiting to be hit by lightning again or something, but overall, it feels pretty good to finally do all this stuff they kept teasing about (besides the Town). I don't know how much of this was just... me playing it the "wrong way" or having the wrong attitude going in? And I did have a lot of fun with it, and I'm still not sure if that's despite or because I got so frustrated with it. Overall, I'd say I recommend it as something worth playing, but I wouldn't actively wish the experience on anyone in particular. That'd be kinda mean.
Anyway, yeah, that game fits pretty well to the theme "anxiety and uncertainty about what to do next." It's not so much that I've been feeling a lot of that personally this month, just that it's been like... around, a lot? And I'm ready to put it all behind me. I'm gonna have to look into a good clicker.
Shoot, I really went on about that game, didn't I? Maybe I was a little more mad at it than I thought... Sorry. How have you been doing? I hope you're not having any of that thematic anxiety/uncertainty. Or being taunted mercilessly by the things you do for fun. It's pretty important to manage your own mental health! Sometimes, it might seem like you "should" do something, or even that you want to do it, and that it shouldn't be a problem for you, but... sometimes it is. And it's important to be able to notice that, to understand when it's happening and why, and to manage the things making life harder for you. Your emotional state is also a... an important resource to manage, I guess you could say. You have to protect it! And find good ways to build it up. Don't let people steal it all away and pretend it's okay!
I guess... that's another thing we've helped each other with, right? I've tried to help making sure you feel good about yourself, and you've always done a lot to help me, even when all this craziness has me falling apart. It's nice to have someone you can count on to help you protect your... resources? Your self. Your... sense of self-worth, and happiness, and all those good things. I hope you know you can count on me. You've shown me I can count on you. Thank you, Diary. Thank you for all your help.
Stay safe out there!
-Lith
