On Swords & Stubbornness

In video games, whenever I’m given the option of fighting with ranged or melee weapons, I go melee. Even in RPG and tactical combat settings, where the interface means my choice of weapon has little to no impact on the controls, I still skew strongly towards swords and knives over bows and guns, because some bizarre, lizardy part of my brain feels more vulnerable if my avatar isn’t armed for close combat. In games that let me control my character’s actions directly, my combat style is blunt and unsubtle: even if I don’t really have the stats for it, my default approach is to be a tank, running right into the thick of things and hitting stuff until it dies. Even back when I was a regular Halo player (multiplayer against friends, never campaign), the sword was always my weapon of choice, followed closely by the shotgun and plasma grenades: in an environment where guns were the default, I still gravitated towards close-range weapons, because they felt, inexplicably, both safer and more satisfying.

Inevitably in the kinds of games I play, there are particular enemies, bosses and training fields where you’re strongly encouraged to tailor your combat approach to deal with specific threats, or else suffer punitive damage. Rationally, I know this, and yet I hate doing it. It irks me to have to switch to ranged weapons because a particular creature is immune to ground attacks, or to switch in my mage as party leader because using anything other than fire magic against a certain boss will see me stalled midgame until I defeat them. Partly, this reluctance is due to stubbornness on my part – I’m an innately contrary person, and always have been – but mostly, I suspect, it’s because hacking my way through problems without having to overthink or plan my approach is something I find soothing about gameplay. In other contexts, I’m constantly having to try and adapt my metaphorical plan of attack to deal with obstacles and the actions of others, but in gamespace, I can simply repeatedly hit the thing and, even if there’s a more stat-appropriate way to minmax my way to victory, I’m still going to end up the Hero of Ferelden. I can be reckless in games, single-minded, and if that gets my avatar killed a few times, so what? They’ll always be resurrected.

But still, in games, there’s that moment where I enter a new area, or start a new fight, and realise that I’m overmatched. Maybe I haven’t levelled my party enough, or maybe it’s just that these new enemies require a specific approach, but either way, if I try to plough ahead in my usual fashion, I’m probably going to die a lot. Which leaves me with a choice: do I suffer a diminished enjoyment of gameplay by temporarily changing my tactics, or do I bash on, save repeatedly, and treat the whole thing as a training run?

Nine times out of ten, I’ll choose the latter approach. Ultimately, I’m gaming for pleasure, and that being so, I’d rather enjoy the challenge of a difficult level played on my terms than feel bored and disconnected by taking an approach which, while easier, doesn’t engage me.

Kind of like how I deal with writing.

I am, as mentioned, a stubborn, contrary person. Like many creative people, my inspiration is something of a Billygoat Gruff/Rum Tum Tugger: hypothetical projects always look more tempting than the ones to which I’ve committed myself, and no sooner have I started a thing than I want to start something else. It is, frankly, a fucking miracle that I ever finish anything at all. But I do it. I do it, because I approach my writing projects with the same blunt melee frenzy as I do my battles in Knights of the Old Republic: I run at them headlong, heedless of strength and context, until I either emerge victorious or die in the attempt. But in real life, resurrection is a trickier process than merely loading from the last save point. I have to stop and recuperate; I have to change my tactics, which means anything from giving myself a series of mental health days to forcibly setting aside the thing I most want to work on in favour of completing the one that’s due. But once I’m back to strength – even if I’m taking punitive damage; even if it means dying again more quickly than I might otherwise – inevitably, I do it all over again. Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s how I work, and I’ve made my peace with that.

If my life right now was a video game, I’d be stuck in a monster-infested plateaux with minimal save points, enemies requiring the use of ranged weapons, and an under-levelled party. I owe multiple Patreon TV Roulette reviews accrued from the past two months, along with a still-incomplete novella and edits on my manuscript, to say nothing of needing to work on the sequel. I’m midway through writing an Ambush Novel I desperately want to finish, and am stalled in my updating of multiple fanfics which, while created purely for my own pleasure, are nonetheless an important sanity-check. I have five or six books waiting to be read for review, something like forty books to preferentially read for pleasure, and so many blog posts to read in my capacity, along with Mark Oshiro, as editor of the Speculative Fiction anthology 2015 (which you should totally submit to here, btw!). I’ve just taken on an extra morning’s work at my dayjob, which brings me up to four days a week – two full days, one morning and one half-day – which means I now have no days at home without my toddler, as all his childcare time falls when I’m at work. I have visa crap to deal with, which is both expensive and stressful. I have Seasonal Affective Disorder to deal with, as I live in Scotland and the Months of Endless Dark are upon us. I have so much to do, and not enough time to do it in, and not enough strength to do it with.

And yet, I’ll get it done. I’ll push through, bashing and yelling and swinging my sword, because it’s what I do, and what I’ve always done. I might have to die a couple more times in the process – am currently resurrecting myself right now, as it happens – but damned if I’ll stop fighting.

Choose your weapons, world. I’ve chosen mine.

11/11/15 – ETA the following awesome graphic, which the excellent Samantha Swords made for me. Hail!