this is also why I can’t do strategy games lol. every single time I make a choice I immediately regret it - whatever it was - and start thinking that the other choices would have been so much better and I just fucked myself completely by choosing the wrong thing. and the thing about strategy games is that those choices hang over you for the entire game, and you have to make a lot of them too

I think a part of it though is that in Runescape the relationship of my mining skill to my Clicking On Rocks ability is extremely straightforward and simple, and I like that I don’t need to optimize multiple variables in order to Click On Rocks. that’s very comfy to me

same with WoW’s professions: get better at professions to get better at professions. there aren’t separate “stitching accuracy”, “stitching speed”, “stitching strength” stats that I need to balance in order to do tailoring. I can just enjoy making clothes

I think the problem for me might be related to the Paradox of Choice: if I have to make a bunch of small optimization decisions before I can Click On Rocks, my Clicking On Rocks efficiency will always be a source of anxiety and dissatisfaction to me. whereas if my choices are Click On Rocks or Click On Something Else then I can enjoy both of those tasks more fully

I also think that a big factor is that in Runescape it’s impossible for me to make a choice that locks me out of another choice. for example I can’t choose to spec into defense in a way that locks me out of speccing into strength or attack. everything is always available to me, so the choice becomes which thing I want to focus on first. and it’s hard to get anxious about that

but in more traditional RPGs the choices feel permanent and dangerous - like I’m supposed to understand a lot of implicit information in order to make the “right” decision and the fact that I don’t means that I’ll regret my choice for the rest of the game. I’ll always be asking myself “would this be easier of I had put those points into strength instead of defense? should I have given myself that passive so that I could have done this more quickly?”

I fucking love games that have the bare minimum of story in order to tell you who you are and what you’re doing

but then the world is so vibey that you want to read more anyway, and it turns out there’s a bunch of optional lore that you can read to learn about anything you want

Mass Effect’s codex system is my absolute favorite example of this because the lore is unlocked as soon as you start wondering about a topic, and you can access it any time in the pause menu with no bullshit

for some reason I hate RPG elements when they’re framed as attacking an enemy but I love them when they’re framed as Clicking On Rocks

like why the fuck do I love Runescape but not Pokémon? they’re effectively the same thing: do a braindead simple task an unreasonable number of times in order to unlock a slight variation on that task that you have to do even more times

what’s weird too is that WoW’s combat-oriented progression systems frustrate me. but the crafting progression systems? fucking love them

maybe part of it is I just like being able to make my own gear and see the aesthetic change of wearing different gear that looks cooler and better

I think that the internet’s fixation on only the “best” players is creating an extremely skewed perspective of what it means to play a video game at all, which is creating a lot of cultural problems in the video game world (like many games - especially MMOs and PvP games - no longer being designed to facilitate certain types of ludic play because there’s no longer a cultural understanding that ludic play exists or that it’s valid). but that’s a whole other post that I might make at some point

I think there’s a certain type of autistic person that hears “get the fastest time you can” or “try your best” and understands that to mean “overclock your brain as far as it will go for this task. put in the literal maximum amount of effort you possibly can, no matter the cost”

I’m that type of autistic person lol. so for anyone else confused by this, what “try your best” actually means is “put a reasonable amount of effort into doing this task. treat it as a serious task that needs deliberate effort to complete”

so yeah I’m currently trying to re-understand speedrunning from the perspective that it can actually be kinda relaxed and not an exhaustingly frantic task that has to go “as fast as possible”

for a long time I thought speedrunning meant “go as fast as you can” and to me that means exhausting myself rushing, which is not sustainable and not fun

but now I understand that it probably means “play the game so frequently that going fast is almost automatic”. it’s not that in their head they’re frantic for the entire run - instead it’s more like the “slow is smooth. smooth is fast” philosophy:

they started at the fastest pace that they could complete all of the required tasks with no mistakes. (this was probably pretty slow at first) then they practiced at that pace until they were able to go faster while still making no mistakes. and then they got faster and faster

so it’s not exhausting and hectic for them - it’s a practiced skill that feels natural

and to be honest, I wonder if the whole concept of speedrunning came from autistic people replaying their favorite game over and over. starting at a normal pace and getting faster over time until they started wondering “how much faster can I go?” because trying to be faster added a new layer of fun to a game they already loved

starting to think that I should stop posting eight million polls per day. sorry everyone

(I do want to continue the build-a-partner thing eventually though. I feel like I probably just asked y’all too many questions back-to-back with no real reward yet. so instead I’ll probably pick the traits that I want to write about (from the tie-breaker poll) and try to paint a good, evocative picture of them. and if folks are interested then I can do the lewd questions that I was saving for dessert, because I would love write erotic/kinky things about that character)

hi fedi i have a request for a friend who doesn’t use fedi

do yall know any artists that are good at drawing robots/dolls and do commissions? any suggestions are good, so if this is you or someone you know or whatever, feel free to promote!

• carrie

congratulations to Boba Fett - the galaxy’s first visor drone to come out as nega-trans