Just don’t talk about it!

Now that this… I don’t know, fakeout? is over, I’m here to actually talk about Final Fantasy 14 and my suddenly rampant and runaway focus. I wrote out most of a blog post talking about not having an opinion about something and fell into the ancient trap that is talking about not having an opinion is still having an opinion, so I decided to delete all that but wanted to keep the title and the new opening “paragraph” because, really, this is advice that a lot of people out there need (myself included, clearly!). Thankfully, I managed to avoid contradicting my own advice since pretty much the only thing I think about these days is trying to get into some kind of actual loop in Final Fantasy 14 now that I’ve got the energy to do other stuff and have changed how I’m playing the game. My whole “take a relaxed approach and just do whatever” thing doesn’t really work anymore since my once-forgotten default (relaxed puttering) for that kind of approach is slowly morphing back into “just keep doing stuff without end” and keeping me up way too late at night. I need to create and enforce some structure on myself so I can still do fun things but maybe do them without also staying up past two in the morning–which I need to stop doing so I can actually take advantage of how much more potential energy I’ve got these days rather than my recent usual status of having a willing mind and soul but an incapable-due-to-complete-exhaustion body. Structure and a list of goals has helped with similar problems in the past–though they were coming at this from the other direction, of being so tired that I could barely push myself to do anything–so I’m hoping they’ll help again with my video game time so I can maybe return to getting a decent six hours of sleep most nights.

That said, trying to figure out what I can accomplish in about an hour of play is a daunting task. Most of the stuff I do in Final Fantasy 14 is daily stuff that could be accomplished in five to ten minutes, but everything else could take anywhere from fifteen to sixty minutes, depending on factors outside of my control. I mean, I’ll never forget the time I did a notorious dungeon aimed at level 47 characters and almost burned through the entire instance clock because the rest of the party I was with just couldn’t figure out how to not die all the time despite my attempts to coach them through it. A normally frustrating dungeon that takes a solid twenty-to-thirty minutes took almost eighty that time. And some of the daily activities for leveling characters (roulettes, as they’re called) can throw you into something that will take fifteen minutes or fifty, depending on the luck of the draw. How do I plan around those things without eliminating some of them entirely?

The easiest answer is making nightly plans. Pick my bedtime when I sit down to plan and just jot down my evening’s activity list right then and there. This would work for most formal activities within the game–things that fall easily into the times I outlined above–but there’s a whole bunch of stuff that won’t ever fit that neatly. Main Scenario Quests, for instance, can be incredibly lengthy and involved, incredibly lengthy as just a series of cutscenes, or short and quick because you’re actually unlocking a dungeon or trial almost immediately after picking the quest, so they’re difficult to plan into an evening. So far, I’ve avoided that by focusing on them only when I’ve got at least two hours of gaming time I can send their way, but I’ve also never actually stopped when I was supposed to after starting up MSQ stuff, so maybe I should just restrict progressing through that until the weekends or when I don’t have to wake up at five in the morning. It’s not an ideal solution, but I did also spend a pretty significant portion of my post-college years not letting myself play single-player or story-centric video games on work nights because I’d just get caught up in them and stay up way too late. I’ve thought about trying to reinstate that rule, but I’m genuinely not sure what I’d do with my evenings if I wasn’t playing video games. Maybe part of this recent change in my mental well-being will include me rediscovering old hobbies I once loved and could participate in a normal amount (rather than, say, staying up all night to read a single book start-to-finish).

Back when I was doing a bit better about managing how late I’d stay up playing Final Fantasy 14, I usually reserved the last hour or so of play time for doing stuff like resource gathering, crafting projects, and organizational stuff because it’s so much easier to wrap that stuff up and quit than anything with a story to carry me along. That said, one of the things I stayed up super late to do this past week was catch a bunch of stupid quest-based fish for my fishing job quests, so maybe I should also apply some more structure than just “collect stuff until bedtime.” There’ll always be more stuff I can collect, or even stuff that I’ve collected that I want to sell on the market. Better to have a firm cut-off of exactly what I’m collecting or crafting or putting up for sale than the open-ended “collect/craft/sell this stuff and then go to bed once you’re done with it all” that has kept me up trying to catch a dumb quest fish for almost an hour because my luck decided that I needed to stay up until two in order to catch it.

Regardless, I need to really work on my self-control in whatever form that takes. I’ve been letting myself off pretty easily lately, because I haven’t had the energy or focus for the kind of rigid self-control I’d need to enforce decent end-times to my video gaming, and that needs to stop. It worked previously because I felt so tired all the time that I’d just naturally hit a point where I just didn’t want to be awake anymore and that’d be enough to start pushing me towards bed and sleep. Now though, as my energy levels recover and I find myself capable of truly losing myself in my activities and passtimes once more, I probably should start setting a bedtime alarm or something. Maybe program my internet to get really bad at a certain time so I’m not tempted to stay up and keep playing video games. Something’s going to happen one way or another–I’m too tired to keep staying awake this late every night.