I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be the sort of person who, in multiplayer video games, tends to be the one doing infrastracture projects. The best example of what I mean is back in my old days of playing Valheim with some of my friends. There was a lot of cooperative labor and effort put into what we were doing in that game because the very nature of the game demands it (or at least strongly encourages it), but we all had our own time to work on individual projects and it was very telling that all of mine were things like building new bases for us to share, creating pathways to ease travel to resource clusters, and setting up various mechanic-based game features (things like resource farms and safe places to go AFK (Away From Keyboard)). I’d make roads so that, when we were mining, it would be easy to move the cart back and forth with everything we’d gathered. I’d do research into how base raids would start and what prevents monsters from spawning so I could make what we wound up calling “AFK Island” so that the server’s owner could leave it running with his character in-game so the rest of us could play whenever we wanted to (and so we could go AFK without worrying about being swarmed by goblins or dragons or whatever the current threat was). I even set up monster farms with safe sprinting paths so that we could collect resources that were normally a pain to acquire without too much fuss or danger. I’d make minecart pathways and Nether roads in Minecraft. I’d maintain the group’s purse and resource allocation in multiplayer Stardew valley. And now, in Final Fantasy 14, I’m taking it upcon myself to craft a bunch of food we use for raiding.

A lot of multiplayer games rely on some give-and-take. Any of the even nominally cooperative ones require that you keep your fellow players in mind as you do things, even if what you do is try to prevent them from getting access to whatever it is you’re doing. I don’t think there’s really an inherent imbalance in these kind of things since, for example, the reason I made those roads in Valheim was so my friend could more easily bring the ore he spent an hour mining back to our base in order to make us the next tier of gear. The reason I made that farm was so that we both didn’t need to spend as much time farming wood to turn into coal. I benefited from the infrastructure I was producing as well. What I’m more interested in is what it says about me and my relationships to other people, my own labor, and labor-as-relaxation that I always wind up being drawn towards this stuff. Because I could just chalk this up to a focus on the collective rather than the individual or a preference for repetitive tasks that held my brain destress, but that wouldn’t be true, even if I went with a bit of both. Because while I DO believe in the important of everyone working toward the collective good and can really get into repetitive tasks in a way that most people I know cannot, I can’t entirely separate those things or my efforts from the lessons I was taught as a child–that my value lies in the effort I can put in on behalf of other people.

I worry a lot about that. It is very easy for me to work myself to exhaustion on behalf of other people since there is still a significant portion of my brain wired to see that as a desireable and mentally/emotionally rewarding thing to do. Which means I often have to fight my own instincts to prevent myself from getting suckered into toxic or abusive situations or relationships. So, when the things this part of my brain tells me are good overlap with what I believe to be a good thing to do, I have to carefully examine whether I’m justifying the kind of codependency I’ve spent so much time digging myself out of or if I’ve justifiably letting my in-grained mental reward system push me towards an unequivocally good thing. In most games where it is easier to draw the line between my labors and my direct or indirect benefits, this is less of a problem because I don’t need to do deep introspection to figure out my motives. For the sort of stuff that comes up in Final Fantasy 14, though, a good deal more effort is required. For instance, if I’m going to make a ton of food for the group to use in our raiding events, am I doing this because I just want to give back to the FC that has given me so much and I don’t mind clicking buttons over and over again as much as most, or I am doing this because I had a weird week with the group last week thanks to a couple misunderstandings and I’m trying to prove that I’m a valuable and useful person for them to keep around just in case any of them were thinking about kicking me out?

In this situation, I can confidently say it’s a mix of the “give back” option and the mutually beneficial “we all use these resources and need more” options since I first started thinking about doing this a few weeks ago, but the fact that I actually needed to spend some time discerning this is giving me pause. I’m all to ready to do labor on behalf of other people and while I received plenty of that from the FC and want to give back, I need to make sure I’m not sidelining my own enjoyment or giving more of myself than I can afford to during this period of severe burnout (been backsliding this week, after two weeks of small but steady recovery). I think I’ve managed to strike a good balance here, especially because I’ve avoided giving any tight timelines and figured out how to automate as much of this effort as is possible (learning how to use macros is incredibly useful), but I can’t let my guard down or else I’m just going to make my burnout worse again by not giving myself time to do things I enjoy and find relaxing. I mean, I don’t hate repetitive tasks, but it’s not like I enjoy them. I’d rather be out in the world, actively doing things, rather than holed up outside the FC house clicking a sequence of buttons every few seconds so I can guarrantee that all of this food is High Quality, even if I don’t mind doing just that. My goal for this task is to do a little bit every day between now and next Monday, when our raiding group meets again, so I can present the fruits of my labor to the group as we gear up for our raid. I just wish more of them had responded to my call for labor/assistance so it was a bit more clear-cut that I wasn’t trying to prove my value to a group that would gladly take my labor and effort in exchange for nothing. Enough poeple showed up to help that I was able to gather almost all of the materials in a single evening, but I do wish more people had even just said something. Maybe next time.