Though the first class I ended up leveling in Final Fantasy XIV was arcanist, I never really ended up playing scholar that much, mostly focusing on summoner—the two jobs the class can specialize in—and consequently it wasn't until I started leveling as a conjurer/white mage that I ended up actually doing any sort of healing. It has been interesting so far, though rather easy still, as I haven't gotten overly far to be fair, but the curious thing has been that it has once again reminded me why I like healing, something I had curiously managed to forget. Well, not really forget, but I had been expecting that the slower pace of the game—or more specifically, the longer global cooldown—would mean that healing would be less enjoyable to me, and as such I didn't really think I would enjoy it as much, yet to my surprise my experience so far has been almost the opposite: I think I enjoy it more than healing in World of Warcraft at the moment.

It's way too early to make any sort of final judgement on that front though, as the types of content I do in both of the games is so vastly different that the gameplay isn't really comparable at all.

Speaking of things that I rediscovered recently: tanking. Well, not really rediscovered, but I have been playing as a gunbreaker more recently, leveling through duties and tanking. It has actually been really fun again, especially since I tend to end up doing the same duty several times due to level restrictions, meaning I really get to learn and optimize my play therein, allowing me to actually start thinking about how I pull and where I use my cooldowns. What also really helps strangely is going back to the duty finder from doing trusts—trusts are basically duties (dungeons) that you do with NPCs, duty finder is finding random players to do it with—because even though the interactions are generally rather limited and I do tend to get unreasonably nervous about the prospect of having to interact with new people and afraid of being judged, I think those same fears play into it being that much more rewarding when things go in a reasonable way like they are wont to do. It is curious though, these fears seem much more prominent while playing a tank than a healer for me, probably because of the more visible role in having to lead the group—or perhaps because as a healer I haven't been queuing alone but with a friend, which probably also helps a lot.

A slight drawback of actually playing with other players is the availability of such, and the increased queue times in trying to find players to run with, which are actually while still not long per se surprisingly long as a tank, generally somewhere between 2-10 minutes. The variance is of course rather high, depending on many factors, but it is still rather interesting to see since I'm somewhat used to tanks being the most in-demand role. Healer queues on the other hand have been surprisingly fast, essentially instantly being put in a party, which is also something of a surprise to me. Perhaps the level range also plays a role, more of the playerbase being available.

At any rate, both of these factors have given me a rather great deal of renewed interest towards the game which I have been happy to see, since it is nice to have something to do once more that I enjoy.

Some while back I wrote about my struggles with motivation, and while I did end up trying the whole novel-writing thing, it unfortunately did not end up quite as hoped—well, "end" is perhaps premature, it is still something I have a desire to do yet have laid to the side for now. But my recent forays into more, shall we say, motivated gaming have caused me to consider once more what it is about that activity that captures me so and how it might best be translated to other parts of life. Now, the simple and somewhat obvious answer is "because it's fun" but there are other things that are fun that I still end up not doing or not doing as much as I'd like, so that isn't the whole truth of the matter.

Actually, thinking about it, the problem for me in a lot of cases feels like the age-old problem of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, but with a twist: I'm really bad at intrinsic motivation. There seem to be precious few things that I manage to do out of the enjoyment of doing itself, and must resort to some sort of external motivator to keep me going. As an example, my recent forays into crafting and gathering, even though I was finding a certain degree of enjoyment in the collecting of things, as soon as I had reached my goals there appeared this internal resistance of "why bother?" that made continuing for lesser rewards or merely for the simple fun of it very difficult, leaving me adrift without cause.

This is a strange situation to find oneself in, because I can feel the call to keep playing and doing things, yet at the same time there is this huge internal resistance to actually do anything. One of the things I have going on is to level up another job, and I have been doing that mainly through dungeons since that seems to be the sensible way to do so, yet it for some reason requires rather a lot of mental preparation and focus to click that button to queue up. One might think this has something to do with shyness and other people, yet I had the exact same resistance even when launching on a command mission—as in, doing dungeons with a group of NPCs—so that doesn't seem to be it.

What might hint at the root cause of this problem however, is what else I have been doing in recent days: programming. Now, that in and of itself isn't the cause of course, but what I notice is that when I am programming I feel bad for not gaming and when I am gaming I feel bad for not programming, meaning whatever I do I feel bad. Now the problem of not being able to do what I wanted to do before I found new programming projects to work on did exist, yet it was somewhat easier to motivate myself then because I didn't have anything else I could be doing, or the things I could be doing were small and discrete making it easier to get started by thinking "I'm not doing anything at the moment, so let me just get X out of the way".

Maybe in the end all of this has little to do with motivation and more with indecisiveness, but the end result seems the same: not being able to do the things I want to do.

Right, now I remember where I was going with that whole motivation thing and why I was so focused on gaming: challenges and obstacles, and how that ties to intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. I am noticing, while gaming and programming, that once I hit an obstacle or have to think too hard or the like, it gets very hard for me to keep pushing through with intrinsic motivation alone, yet if there is some extrinsic motivation also at play—e.g. more story for completing the dungeon or some other reward like glamour or the like—it is much easier to keep on track and push through. I am not quite sure what this indicates, since the common wisdom is that intrinsic motivation is stronger than extrinsic, but maybe it is a hint that I don't enjoy the things I do as much as I think? Yet that doesn't really feel true either, so mayhap there is some other explanation.

The first that comes to mind is poor self-esteem, as in I don't value myself enough to give sufficient credence to my own motivations and therefore rely on external motivators to keep me going, and deprived of those find myself lost. Perhaps that is also why I take so much comfort in the knowledge that death is an option, and if life gets too much I can simply not. At the same time, I have made the decision not to merely not because there are things I want to do and see and achieve, yet that was very much a conscious and not emotional decision and as such its power to work as a motivator requires a somewhat significant amount of mental energy. I think, however, that the insight gained in writing this might give me more tools to empower that decision.

Having played through the main story in Final Fantasy and consequently feeling a bit lost as what to do next since the story was the driving force keeping me engaged with the game, I decided to take a closer look at leveling the other jobs I was interested in and had already started on earlier, only to not really feel that feeling of purpose that kept me going. I still intend to level those jobs at some point, and have been doing so sporadically, but the thing that ended up really catching my focus in recent days was crafting and gathering, primarily because of some cosmetics I ended up wanting that were gated behind those activities.

I have to admit, despite having heard that the crafting and gathering in Final Fantasy XIV is supposed to be great, I was very skeptical since it isn't usually something that I find overly interesting in games; it has for the most part just felt like extra steps from having something simply be a drop from a mob or a quest reward, and despite having studied a bit of economics the market aspect of it hasn't really captured me either. Then again, I notice now, the problem might be that the implementations I had seen before were made either in a way that I find boring (i.e. Assassin's Creed) or simply poorly (i.e. World of Warcraft), where crafting is naught more than getting the ingredients and pressing a button.

Yet here, crafting and gathering both, are separate classes (or jobs, as the game tends to call classes), with a good 20+ skills. Sure, especially for gathering which I have done more of, there are a lot of skills that end up doing the same thing with different cost and efficacy, but it is still a degree of actual decision-making that I have yet to see from any such system before. In World of Warcraft, the biggest decision is simply where to gather, the rest is more or less running in a circle and hope something interesting happens to be on the way while dodging enemies and hoping not to get dismounted; in Final Fantasy, you have skills that point you to the nearest node and make you permanently stealthed to the local fauna meaning you can focus on the actual gathering of things instead of getting derailed by annoying things like combat with trivial mobs.

Sidenote: I'm one of those probably strange people that actually kind of enjoyed archeology in World of Warcraft—but I was also lucky enough never to be forced to do it to get any relevant power increases, due to not playing during a time when that was possible—with the only thing really annoying me about it was all of the trash mobs one tended to have to deal with while working on the digs. Sure, it was a lesser problem when one went back to do it in older content, but it was really annoying in current content.

The gathering itself is also a lot more engaging and involved, in that while the nodes are common what's on them might not be, and even if it is especially for the quests one tends to need to gather it in high quality meaning the different skills one has at one's disposal tend to come in very handy. Then come the decisions of when to use those skills, since while they do not have a cooldown you do have gathering points—mana, essentially—which regenerates somewhat slowly, so you can't just blast out all of the skills on every node, meaning you have to think how to achieve whatever goal you have in mind in the most efficient way possible. This then also extends to things like collectables, that have their own separate mini-game allowing you to try to make their collectability as high as possible, and while the primary skills there do not require any GP, boosting them does, and maximizing collectability without them is rather unlikely. Gear also helps all of this along, increasing chance for HQ items or GP or merely the chance to gather something in the first place, meaning there is some real actual depth to it all.

Now, I am still a very goal-oriented person and I don't think I would end up running around gathering things just for the fun of it, but I have to admit the time I have spent gathering has been going by surprisingly quickly and I find myself looking for reasons to keep going.

It really is a strange feeling, realizing that I didn't dislike some activity, but that I merely disliked it when it was implemented poorly and having only seen such implementations I couldn't really imagine what it would be like to do it when it was implemented well.

The past month or so has been very, well, not busy but self-indulgent, in that I have chosen to prioritize my time in Eorzea over other concerns, even personal goals such as keeping up with this blog. It has been equal parts freeing and exhausting; on one hand it has been lovely not to have to think too much about other concerns and properly engross myself in a story and another world so completely, on the other hand there is always a toll taken when not tending to one's obligations or goals: the feeling of failure.

Considering it has to a degree been a conscious choice for me to ignore those other concerns that feeling is somewhat dampened through me having chosen it, yet at the same time I can't help but look at the things I feel I should have done and feel dejected having not done them. What doesn't help it that I find it difficult to pinpoint to which degree it was a choice of mine, and to which degree it was my obsessiveness—not quite sure this is the right word, but I'll come to that—taking over.

You see, it is all fine and good to frame something as a choice, yet when the alternative seemed to be almost a paralyzing unwillingness to act due to a desire to do something else and the sadness resulting from not doing it, how much of a choice was really made? More importantly, what does this say of me and my mind that I have such a overriding need to fulfill my current want that I become all but incapable of taking care of other things? Is this all merely learned behavior from having the opportunity to indulge myself for so long, or is it a symptom of a low degree of mental energy available to override this more instinctual behavior in favor of more long-term thinking? Am I merely unlucky, and need a higher degree of mental energy in order to override these instincts?

Now there are things which I have managed to keep running during this time, with more or less difficulty, and as always keeping them running has been what has provided some measure of accomplishment and relief to the whole situation for me—even though in many cases the whole reason they have been kept running is external supervision or support in those endeavors which means a social cost to not doing them instead of merely a personal one—which makes it feel all the more strange that I should sabotage myself in such a manner.

Overall, it is a strange situation to be in, being aware of what is going wrong to a certain degree yet being unable to stop oneself, thus a feeling of having failed making it yet harder to stop oneself since what is the point, I've already failed? Doesn't help that staying focused and indulging in the obsession is what keeps such thoughts at bay, further reinforcing the desire to keep indulging.

A strange spiral to have been in, one into which I will doubtless fall again in due time, but for now I think I can see the end of this incarnation, and the opportunity to enjoy my adventures in another world in a more productive manner.

Still adventuring in Eorzea, not found the time to really sit down and write. I know, already happened last week without notice or mention, but I simply do not have the energy for it at this time.