I spent the last weekend (well, two weekends ago as this is getting posted) doing pretty much nothing but crafting and a deep dungeon run in Final Fantasy 14. It might have taken eleven intense months, but I think I’ve finally gotten tired of crafting. I’ve been making gear for people and the amount of mind-numbing macro-clicking involved in it is driving me more and more rapidly insane. I have done nothing but lose myself in crafting, the grind for various currencies, and trying to get new gear for the last month or so and it is burning me out like nothing else has. I’m not at risk of no longer wanting to play the game or anything like that, but it made me kind of glad that I had to take a week off for holiday travel. I don’t know that I’m going to be changing much in the next couple weeks as we run up to the release of the next patch, but I’m really hoping I can at least take a break from crafting a few hundred materials and gear pieces every week. I mean, I’ve still got a lot of stuff to do as I’m writing this two weeks before it gets posted: crafting and gathering food to make, a couple gear sets to wrap-up, one more set of gear to entirely produce, limited currencies to earn, and so much questing to do in order to be fully caught up for the start of the whatever comes with the next major patch, but I hope I can get at least another week away from all that before the update drops so I can do other stuff like level other jobs and work on finding some roleplaying opportunities or do literally anything other than constantly grind away at preparations for whatever the next patch is going to require of me to make the next gear sets.

Everything left to craft but that one gear set is on its final step. I’ve got all the materials gathered or crafted, so all I’ve gotta do is click macro buttons until I’m out of stuff to use, but that’s still no small time commitment. The nature of crafting at the highest tier of the game means that each sequence for a top-tier item takes at least a minute to run through and two macros worth of crafting abilities in sequence. I can’t really break my focus on it to do something else without adding a chunk of time to the process and likely breaking my focus on whatever else I’m doing to make sure I click the right macro for whatever I’m making, so it’s just onerous. I’m going to try to fit all this crafting into the space between activities for something to do while I wait for queues to pop, but I might still need to dedicate some time to it in order to get through the few hundred crafts I’ve got to do in order to turn all my ingredients into finished products. I’m already tired of it and I’ve barely done anything, and yet I’m still not willing to take the logical next step and get some kind of outside tool to automate it.

I’m pretty neutral on mods for Final Fantasy 14. I can appreciate wanting to get some kind of graphical tweaks for your character in order to make them look the way you want (I’m quite tired of my character having octagonal limbs and boxy fingers, myself), but I’ve discovered where my line is while talking about my crafting with fellow players. There’s apparently a tool that will automate your crafting beyond what is built in to the game, meaning you can set up a complex task with a lot of steps and walk away, letting the tool handle it all for you. Learning about this and actually considering it beyond being a source of relief for my boredom and exhaustion made me realize exactly where my line is for what I consider to be acceptable and unacceptable modification of the game: if it is something that fundamentally alters how I interact with the game, I think it is too much for me. A tool that would get me through clicking a few buttons when trading? Sure. One that imports an external reference to into the game so I don’t have to leave it constantly to look stuff up? Absolutely, yeah. Something that allows me to make progress on things in the game without needing to actually interact with the game in any way? Definitively no. At that point, I wouldn’t even be playing the game anymore. Knowing it’s out there, though, explains how a lot of other odious-to-craft things get sold for so little money. If you can set it up to make a whole bunch of stuff overnight while you sleep, it makes sense that you’d probably be willing to undercut the prices on those things by quite a bit since you can cut out the cost of your time. Which is probably why most of the money in these kinds of crafts is in selling the raw materials.

So I’m stuck doing all this work myself, one macro-press at time, but at least I can live with myself and ensure that I’m not going to wind up disengaged from the game because I’ve wound up automating too much of it. As dumb as most Adam Sandler movies are, I still think about Click all the time because it really emphasizes the idea that the biggest waste of time is living a life without being engaged with it. If you can just disengage and still get what you want out of the process, what’s the point? All that’s being done is undervaluing the actual labor of people who are willing to spend their time on difficult, boring tasks. All you’re doing is trying to have your cake and eat it, too, so you can get the benefit of doing all the exhausting work without having to actually put in the effort. I mean, I understand the game economy enough to have a feeling for just how much of the game is probably propped up by this kind of labor, but I think that anything dependent on this kind of abdication of personal involvement should probably collapse under its own bloat. So what if stuff gets more expensive? That’s the whole point of having a tension between crafting and not crafting! Either shell out the big bucks or go through the hassle of making it yourself! Anyway, I’m going to go do my weekly raid and then spend some of my real human lifetime making digital ceviche so my friends who are going to help me with crafting have the food they need to craft stuff well enough for it to be useful in the gear for the upcoming patch. Better to labor by choice than to automate it and devalue the skills I’ve spent all this time gaining.