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silveradept[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]
I asked someone else a question for their December Questions post and realized that it was a really good question to answer myself. So, here we go:
The Goat. Or, if your deck is an RWS-based one, The Devil. For some specific reasons, though, that aren't necessarily related to things that have happened where the card showed up in a reading.
One of the things that the Ex Who Is Not Named said regularly that was a guarantee of aggravating me was "you're only having fun when you win" when it came to playing games with others. That statement is not true. However, I do get frustrated playing games more easily than I probably should. Some of that, I think, is because I've spent a significant amount of my life putting time and effort into games, and I expect of myself the ability to play a game well, even if I don't end up winning. Where this often falls apart is in competitive games, because it's always possible that everyone around you is much better at the game than you are, and that then becomes a situation that's aggravating, because "I know how to play this game, but I'm clearly not in the same league as everyone else, so I'm not actually good at playing this game." And that's frustrating, and aggravating when games lock achievements behind multiplayer things that require a set number of wins or a streak of wins or otherwise force you to play with others to complete your achievement list. DO NOT DO THIS, even if you're really proud of how your competitive multiplayer turned out, because, surprise, some people don't want to play your game with others, and especially not against random people in the internet for Prime knows how long until they get lucky enough to achieve whatever is needed. Yes, I know some developers will say "gets good enough", but that attitude should be squashed immediately. More care should be taken in designing competitive and cooperative multiplayer modes so that people who are there to "git gud" can be kept in their own place with the people who are hypercompetitive like them, and the people who are there because they enjoy playing the game and might fancy a friendly something with other person can stay with their grouping, and the people who are only there for the achievements can select an option that says "I'm only here for the achievements" and get all of them, and the extent of a message from the developers on this subject is saying "We're really proud of how this mode turned out, so if you want to experience it, it'll be here, but here are the achievements that you're here for, so you don't have to subject yourself to something you don't want to do to collect a full set." Rating systems are an imperfect implementation of this idea, sure, but they can be manipulated so that someone who is skilled and just wants to troll others can drop themselves into a rank where they can ruin the gameplay experience of others perfectly well.
Unless your game is solely a competitive multiplayer game, then, carry on, but don't expect me to want to play your game at all.
Getting back toward the point, it's not winning that's the problem for me in games, it's that a lot of games don't play fair, and the way that they manipulate fairness is the difference between an enjoyable affair and a frustrating one. When The Ex Who Is Not Named was uttering such a statement, it was usually in relation to either playing the Mario Kart games or the Mario Party games. There's a difference between being hammered by a blue shell that someone threw at just the right time and losing, which is "dang," and doing the same thing that you've been doing every lap since the first, only this time, for whatever reason, instead of making the same turn, a button press doesn't register, or a character that's been very far behind suddenly gets faster and crashed into you. Either way, you go off into the rough, and everyone zips by on the last turn. That's not fair. Neither is it particularly fair when the computer-controlled drivers are specifically programmed to target human players first, even if the better action for the team or the standings is to target another computer player. In a Smash Brothers free-for-all between computer players and human players, where everyone is supposedly on equal footing and there are no teams, the CPU players will all attack the human players and avoid each other's attacks until all the humans are defeated, at which point they will go after each other. That's not fair at all, and it detracts from the experience. Same problem with human players. If they all decide to team up against someone with less skill and eliminate them, passing up opportunities for good attacks against each other to do so, that's not fair and it's frustrating. (Which makes me a "scrub", according to a manual on the Internet that takes the position of "if it's allowed in the game, you should use it to beat your opponent, sense of fair play or fun, or whether it's actually intended to be part of the game be damned." You know, "Fox Only, No Items, Final Destination.") So, sometimes I have to tell my brain to play a different, tangential game to the one that everyone else is playing. If I'm only going to get frustrated at getting regularly beat with my "best" character, then I change the game so that instead I'm trying to see how long I can last against good players using random selections. It nicely sidesteps the idea of "I'll never be good at this, because everyone else is so much better than me" and instead makes it into "You don't know what you're going to get, but are you good enough to make the best of it?" Which is a much easier question to answer and to feel like I'm playing well.
So, ultimately, I want my games to be the kind of thing where everyone plays at similar skill, one person isn't blessed with all of the luck such that even playing a good game makes it impossible to be competitive (which happened a lot with Mario Party. There were times where I'd end up down two or three stars before getting my first one, and that is really rather hard to catch up to when everybody is playing their best game), and the result ends up being pretty close and might have hinged on one move or not. It's never been "I'm only having fun when I'm winning," and I'm learning ways to be less vocally aggravated when I roll yet another 1 on a semi-critical phase of cooperative gaming (or the equivalent of suffering repeated bad breaks in a cooperative or competitive game) or when a game does what I tell it to, rather than what I want it to do, and that messes things up again.
Which is a very long introduction to why I dislike The Goat, but all of that background is hopefully helpful when The Goat is usually someone being blamed for something they did or didn't do, or because of a bad break, that costs the team a win. And perhaps it's some of column A, being a "sensitive child" prone to emotional displays that might be better explained as RSD related to neuroatypicality, except for the part where whatever it is I've got, it doesn't fit what the examiner was looking for in a diagnosis of a known neuroatypicality, some of column B, children allowed to be cruel and harmful at other children with the tacit blessing of the adults around them, or at least in the lack of presence of the adults around them, pushing to the point where they could find a spot of wrongness or something that was beyond ability and then mocking me for it. Someone who I would be friends with over shared interest later suggested that I came across as a know-it-all, which might be entirely true, but if that was the case, it was far more likely to be related to column A, I don't actually know how to Normal Human among my peers, than it was about feeling like everything was beneath me and contemptible. Boring, perhaps, because I'd already grasped and done a lot of the things that others were learning for the first time, but being bored about a thing and wanting something more on my level and looking down upon someone because they're not as advanced as you are don't necessarily look different from the outside. Both of those things contribute, however, to a maladaptive coping method that I'm pretty sure I've talked about before: You can't be made fun of if you're never wrong. So long as you do everything perfectly and to spec, there's no possible space for someone else to find fault.
Unsurprisingly, once I got to university, things mellowed out a lot and I think I learned a little bit about humaning around other humans, because those humans were no longer interested in playing power games because they're all cooped up together for a significant amount of time. Work undid that feeling, a lot, because of the manager who didn't understand what was going on and attributed malice and rudeness to incompetence (although in that case, it was really, I'm doing this thing, that's apparently perceived as rude, to avoid doing the greater, ruder thing that I know is rude, even if it is unintentional. I really needed more information about neuroatypicality a lot earlier than I keep coming across it.) But, as you can see, when there's a card that's about failure and possibly that failure being your fault, I want to get very, very far away from that, because someone else finding fault with me is a bad thing and will provoke strong reactions that, if I am on top of my game, I will have away from the person doing it, but there's no worse self-critic than myself, such that even mild disapproval sometimes requires a reality check with someone else to make sure that I haven't completely exploded the thing and now they openly or secretly hate me for the thing that I did. Because there have been enough times in my work life and my growing-up phase where that is what happened, and I was either too oblivious to notice the early signs before they exploded or I made a baseline assumption that people who work together don't actively want to sabotage each other and will say something, directly or indirectly, if there's something bothering them. (I want to be worthy of people's trust for direct conversation, but there's also the part where I'll need to go and process afterward, which can appear as being sensitive and unable to take criticism.)
My brainweasels are not unique, but that they are mine, and here are many of them. If they resonate, I am sorry that you have had similar bad experiences in your life at the hands of people who should know better and did it anyway, as well as the people who don't know any better.
I asked someone else a question for their December Questions post and realized that it was a really good question to answer myself. So, here we go:
What Tarot Card do you have a hate-hate relationship with?
The Goat. Or, if your deck is an RWS-based one, The Devil. For some specific reasons, though, that aren't necessarily related to things that have happened where the card showed up in a reading.
One of the things that the Ex Who Is Not Named said regularly that was a guarantee of aggravating me was "you're only having fun when you win" when it came to playing games with others. That statement is not true. However, I do get frustrated playing games more easily than I probably should. Some of that, I think, is because I've spent a significant amount of my life putting time and effort into games, and I expect of myself the ability to play a game well, even if I don't end up winning. Where this often falls apart is in competitive games, because it's always possible that everyone around you is much better at the game than you are, and that then becomes a situation that's aggravating, because "I know how to play this game, but I'm clearly not in the same league as everyone else, so I'm not actually good at playing this game." And that's frustrating, and aggravating when games lock achievements behind multiplayer things that require a set number of wins or a streak of wins or otherwise force you to play with others to complete your achievement list. DO NOT DO THIS, even if you're really proud of how your competitive multiplayer turned out, because, surprise, some people don't want to play your game with others, and especially not against random people in the internet for Prime knows how long until they get lucky enough to achieve whatever is needed. Yes, I know some developers will say "gets good enough", but that attitude should be squashed immediately. More care should be taken in designing competitive and cooperative multiplayer modes so that people who are there to "git gud" can be kept in their own place with the people who are hypercompetitive like them, and the people who are there because they enjoy playing the game and might fancy a friendly something with other person can stay with their grouping, and the people who are only there for the achievements can select an option that says "I'm only here for the achievements" and get all of them, and the extent of a message from the developers on this subject is saying "We're really proud of how this mode turned out, so if you want to experience it, it'll be here, but here are the achievements that you're here for, so you don't have to subject yourself to something you don't want to do to collect a full set." Rating systems are an imperfect implementation of this idea, sure, but they can be manipulated so that someone who is skilled and just wants to troll others can drop themselves into a rank where they can ruin the gameplay experience of others perfectly well.
Unless your game is solely a competitive multiplayer game, then, carry on, but don't expect me to want to play your game at all.
Getting back toward the point, it's not winning that's the problem for me in games, it's that a lot of games don't play fair, and the way that they manipulate fairness is the difference between an enjoyable affair and a frustrating one. When The Ex Who Is Not Named was uttering such a statement, it was usually in relation to either playing the Mario Kart games or the Mario Party games. There's a difference between being hammered by a blue shell that someone threw at just the right time and losing, which is "dang," and doing the same thing that you've been doing every lap since the first, only this time, for whatever reason, instead of making the same turn, a button press doesn't register, or a character that's been very far behind suddenly gets faster and crashed into you. Either way, you go off into the rough, and everyone zips by on the last turn. That's not fair. Neither is it particularly fair when the computer-controlled drivers are specifically programmed to target human players first, even if the better action for the team or the standings is to target another computer player. In a Smash Brothers free-for-all between computer players and human players, where everyone is supposedly on equal footing and there are no teams, the CPU players will all attack the human players and avoid each other's attacks until all the humans are defeated, at which point they will go after each other. That's not fair at all, and it detracts from the experience. Same problem with human players. If they all decide to team up against someone with less skill and eliminate them, passing up opportunities for good attacks against each other to do so, that's not fair and it's frustrating. (Which makes me a "scrub", according to a manual on the Internet that takes the position of "if it's allowed in the game, you should use it to beat your opponent, sense of fair play or fun, or whether it's actually intended to be part of the game be damned." You know, "Fox Only, No Items, Final Destination.") So, sometimes I have to tell my brain to play a different, tangential game to the one that everyone else is playing. If I'm only going to get frustrated at getting regularly beat with my "best" character, then I change the game so that instead I'm trying to see how long I can last against good players using random selections. It nicely sidesteps the idea of "I'll never be good at this, because everyone else is so much better than me" and instead makes it into "You don't know what you're going to get, but are you good enough to make the best of it?" Which is a much easier question to answer and to feel like I'm playing well.
So, ultimately, I want my games to be the kind of thing where everyone plays at similar skill, one person isn't blessed with all of the luck such that even playing a good game makes it impossible to be competitive (which happened a lot with Mario Party. There were times where I'd end up down two or three stars before getting my first one, and that is really rather hard to catch up to when everybody is playing their best game), and the result ends up being pretty close and might have hinged on one move or not. It's never been "I'm only having fun when I'm winning," and I'm learning ways to be less vocally aggravated when I roll yet another 1 on a semi-critical phase of cooperative gaming (or the equivalent of suffering repeated bad breaks in a cooperative or competitive game) or when a game does what I tell it to, rather than what I want it to do, and that messes things up again.
Which is a very long introduction to why I dislike The Goat, but all of that background is hopefully helpful when The Goat is usually someone being blamed for something they did or didn't do, or because of a bad break, that costs the team a win. And perhaps it's some of column A, being a "sensitive child" prone to emotional displays that might be better explained as RSD related to neuroatypicality, except for the part where whatever it is I've got, it doesn't fit what the examiner was looking for in a diagnosis of a known neuroatypicality, some of column B, children allowed to be cruel and harmful at other children with the tacit blessing of the adults around them, or at least in the lack of presence of the adults around them, pushing to the point where they could find a spot of wrongness or something that was beyond ability and then mocking me for it. Someone who I would be friends with over shared interest later suggested that I came across as a know-it-all, which might be entirely true, but if that was the case, it was far more likely to be related to column A, I don't actually know how to Normal Human among my peers, than it was about feeling like everything was beneath me and contemptible. Boring, perhaps, because I'd already grasped and done a lot of the things that others were learning for the first time, but being bored about a thing and wanting something more on my level and looking down upon someone because they're not as advanced as you are don't necessarily look different from the outside. Both of those things contribute, however, to a maladaptive coping method that I'm pretty sure I've talked about before: You can't be made fun of if you're never wrong. So long as you do everything perfectly and to spec, there's no possible space for someone else to find fault.
Unsurprisingly, once I got to university, things mellowed out a lot and I think I learned a little bit about humaning around other humans, because those humans were no longer interested in playing power games because they're all cooped up together for a significant amount of time. Work undid that feeling, a lot, because of the manager who didn't understand what was going on and attributed malice and rudeness to incompetence (although in that case, it was really, I'm doing this thing, that's apparently perceived as rude, to avoid doing the greater, ruder thing that I know is rude, even if it is unintentional. I really needed more information about neuroatypicality a lot earlier than I keep coming across it.) But, as you can see, when there's a card that's about failure and possibly that failure being your fault, I want to get very, very far away from that, because someone else finding fault with me is a bad thing and will provoke strong reactions that, if I am on top of my game, I will have away from the person doing it, but there's no worse self-critic than myself, such that even mild disapproval sometimes requires a reality check with someone else to make sure that I haven't completely exploded the thing and now they openly or secretly hate me for the thing that I did. Because there have been enough times in my work life and my growing-up phase where that is what happened, and I was either too oblivious to notice the early signs before they exploded or I made a baseline assumption that people who work together don't actively want to sabotage each other and will say something, directly or indirectly, if there's something bothering them. (I want to be worthy of people's trust for direct conversation, but there's also the part where I'll need to go and process afterward, which can appear as being sensitive and unable to take criticism.)
My brainweasels are not unique, but that they are mine, and here are many of them. If they resonate, I am sorry that you have had similar bad experiences in your life at the hands of people who should know better and did it anyway, as well as the people who don't know any better.
