Hello, forum. Here be my debut on wrong planet, and hopefully my outreach here will bear some fruit of some sort. My reasons for coming are purely pragmatic, that is, I’ve a reason for coming here and a very specific reason at that, and I’m certain that it’s a reason shared by most everyone here on this forum; whether or not one considers it a problem is ultimately subjective.
I’ve had a rough weekend and all. I’m a junior in highschool and had looked forward to the previous weekend on account of two things. Foremost, I was happily anticipating what the weekend would signify: the end to an unrelenting and terribly crammed workload and schedule that I’ve had the displeasure of enduring over the past couple of weeks. As if some 5 consecutive tests in AP classes weren’t enough of a load on my platter, I’d to partake in the SAT test… (albeit, the glimmering silver lining in it all is that I performed satisfactorily on all of my tests, but I digress). Primarily, however, I’d been looking forward to mustering a group of five of my friends together to hold a session of the pathfinder role playing game. I’d been playing it by myself for the past couple of weeks as a more analytical and paperwork-based alternative to Dark Souls, and the mention that my friend would be willing to play excited me beyond belief.
When I wasn’t working academically last week, I was preparing for the upcoming session. I contacted other friends at my high school who I figured would be interested, asking folks what their preference in character would be and rolling character sheets for all of them. Looking in retrospect, I realize that I had the biggest say in what people would end up becoming, pitching ideas and reducing my players’ free will to a binary gate. Eventually, the day of the game came, and despite the fact that everybody couldn’t come (one player was sick, one player had a family emergency, one player simply couldn’t come) I was satisfied to be able to DM 3 people. I had a plotline laid out in my mind and was eager to enact it with the player characters that I designed. I presumed it to be inexperience at the time and simply unfamiliar with Role Playing Games at the time, but my character party had different things in mind. I couldn’t tell at least, because I was too busy hardlining the characters’ actions and having them act within the parameters that I established quite rigidly.
The Session went much shorter than expected; everybody had been burnt out after a bit of roleplaying and we didn’t even bother finishing our first combat. What should have been a 7 hour session turned out to be 2 and a half hours. Even a transition to the Settlers of Catan proved to be lackluster and boredom inducing. I wasn’t dissapointed when the early time to leave came, because I was honestly quite tired and drowsy by the end.
About 2 hours after the game, I shot my friend (hereby to be referred to as L) a text message in question of what went wrong and what could have gone better. L replied solely that my failure was in taking the game too seriously. I asked him why. He replied that I was stopping character decisions and eschewing the dice often when determining occurrences, and I realized that L was correct.
And it was at that moment that It dawned on me that, despite all the time spent in my youth going to social skills classes and years of middle school droned away in crippling loneliness because of aspergers, I had fundamentally learned nothing. I’m just as inflexible and have just as great a propensity to be flustered now as I had when I was 4 years old.
Of course I realize that statement remains mildly hyperbolic (I’m nowhere nearly as inept socially as I was when I was 4...I don’t treat reality like Pokemon XD for the gamecube). But I feel that it holds true. I had made an attempt this weekend to try to prove to myself that I wasn’t as distant and alien from everybody else as an aspie would be, and only proved the contrary further. I didn’t want to have people over so that I could enjoy their personalities and socialize with the person that I had invited over; I wanted them to merely be players in a grand play that I wanted done my way according to my standards and my expectations. Any deviation from the big idea was minimal in all the players, and my endgame was that the end of the game would ultimately be the same, the only permutations would be in the delivery. I might as well have been playing with machines; they didn’t matter because they really didn’t have any say. It wasn’t about their banter and jokes and enjoyment that they had from socializing and being together, it was about my enjoyment of putting characters that I ultimately designed against monsters so that they could increase in level and be even stronger ad infinitum.
It’s terrifying for me to realize that despite how far I’ve come as a human being that my modus operandi hasn’t changed in the slightest. I’m as inflexible about the things that I really, really want now as I was when I was a 2 year old. I want to think of myself as a normal person but I’m scared that what I saw yesterday was a figment of the person that I fundamentally am: I might want to trick myself into thinking that I care about other people, and that I can care for other people as much as joe schmo, but what yesterday suggested is that I have a heart of ice. People are irrelevant to me so long as I can use them to make me feel good. The only thing that keeps me from acting on that bit of sociopathy is a tepid spirit that finds itself too often afraid to object to the status quo (I get that bit from my mother. She’s Always Right), and an ingrained tendency towards kindness that acts because it was put in there. I feel like half of a human being. I can do everything as well as the next guy, but I don’t experience pathos on the level that he does. I don’t get upset because people mean something to me, or because they give me any degree of existential fulfilment; they sustain me aesthetically. I’d get mad as hell if my mother were to get rid of my xbox, sure, but would I honestly mourn as hard as my siblings when my mother died? Its scary to think about. I think I’m seriously going on a tangent at this point, and the quality of my prose is decreasing, but I’ll leave my introduction at that, forum.
Regards.
03 Oct 2016, 5:13 pm
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