on Obsessions

Egads - a post! Let me explain: So I have a terrible habit of becoming easily obsessed with things. Blogging, however, has not yet become one of them. It is more like an outlet to deal with these sorts of obsessions when I am not actively seeing a therapist.

I stopped blogging before because I went back to New York from my parent's home after summer vacation to continue my schooling (not that I have many regular followers who would notice at this point. Or ever.) I did, however, have some time left to do other things... This was around the time that Mass Effect 3 came out and I really began playing. Well, to be more precise, I watched my boyfriend play it, and I was so intrigued, I started from Mass Effect moved on to Mass Effect 2, and somewhere during that play-through, I caused my boyfriend's X-Box to permanently red-ring. During the time I was playing Mass Effect, I kept thinking about how it would be fun to do a blog post about the series. But playing the game clearly took priority over writing about it. In the downtime between trying desperately to resurrect the old X-Box, buying a new X-Box, and transferring the save files between the old and new using a friend's working X-Box (really long story, quite entertaining in itself), I thought about writing the post, but still - getting through the second game and onto the third in all its glory (bad ending and all) was my top priority and, thus, no blog post was ever fully written. I still have quite a few drafts that I never felt were polished enough for me to publish including a rare fan-girl rant about the wonders of Garrus; I may someday revist, finalize and post them.

However, I now have a new obsession on my hands... WEDDING PLANNING. It has consumed almost every fiber of my being. My then-boyfriend is my now-fiancée and I couldn't be more excited. In fact, I could really stand to be less excited. I haven't been able to sleep for the past few days and every time I close my eyes I envision more and more details of what my perfect wedding would look like. An important note is that my hubby-to-be and I are not planning to have our wedding until at least a year from now - more like 14 months away. (Raise your hand if you think I should continue actively seeing therapy! Don't have your hand raised yet? We'll change that by the end of the post, I'm sure.) I'm quite confident that I made myself sick by not going to sleep until I had finished an inspiration board collage to show to my planning-helpers (I get sick easily which is made worse by lack of sleep...)

"Wow, with such early and visionary planning, you'll have your wedding just the way you want it!" might be your thoughts. Well... No. A lot of what I'm thinking now are small details and have many conflicting elements which I would HATE if I put all of them in one wedding (that whole "less is more" and yada yada yada). Everytime I see something I like on Pinterest (which I just joined for just the purpose of wedding planning and had never used before), I think "That would be great, but how can I mesh it in with my color scheme (which I've decided on years ago and still love) and theme?" And it's hard for me to negotiate between weeding out old ideas to replace with new ones that I might find inspiring, and sticking with what I know and love and have dreamed of for years!

About every 5-10 minutes this weekend, I'd ask my hubby-to-be a wedding related question. "Do we want..." "Should we..." and he pointed out to me, "You know, with this wedding over a year away, if you spend every moment of every day between now and then thinking about the wedding, you're not going to enjoy the wedding very much, you'll just feel stressed and crazy." And I know that, personally, if I spend every moment trying to get every detail just right, I know I'm going to be freaking out on the day-of wondering why every detail is not just right.

Not only that, but I'm just barely learning what wedding planning entails! I've now seen lots of checklists and consulted with my wiser friends who are now veterans of the matrimonial process, but I learn best by doing, and it's quite nerve-wracking for me to think that, no, I can't just plan a "trial wedding" and see how it goes before moving on with the real thing. Well, someone could, maybe, but I certainly don't have the time, funds, or sanity for that.

So the mention of funds and sanity brings me to why I have started to blog about this again. Because I am not actively seeing a therapist (no insurance makes sad-wallet), and I no longer have school (graduated a couple weeks ago from my Master's program), and I'm currently looking for a new job (no money, but lots of time!), I've decided to try blog about my wedding planning process to:

1. give me something to do
2. organize my thoughts & planning
3. give me some sort of thing to look back on in the years to come unless the internet explodes
4. manage my obsessions, maintain my sanity, and help me sleep at night
5. share my creations/creativity

So, about that last point, given that I feel like am a poor mental-health-counselor-eligible-for-licensure-currently-unemployeed-seeking-entry-level-job, I want to be able to make this in a reasonable budget and I know our location is going to eat up a lot of expenses - and I want to give a lot of this wedding a personal touch - so I plan to get started early and do much of the creation myself. I'm not usually much of a DIY person, but I really love crafts, design, and putting my own work into a day that will be one of the most special days in my life is now, well... an obsession. I will update this later with a picture to break up this wall of text.

on the Psychology of Star Wars: The Old Republic

So here's where look super geeky with a mix of my educational side and my gamer side. Small beginning disclaimer: this is in no way any sort of scholarly article, and is really just my ramblings about how some psychological theories along with the game play of Star Wars: The Old Republic may interact. As you read, please keep in mind that I am NOT saying in any way that SWTOR is bad, that games are bad, or any sort of that nonsense. This is me just throwing my ideas and how I string the elements that I encounter in life together. Also, please note that I am really quite insane and tend to take things I see in games and movies with me in real life and incorporate parts of them in to myself. I will explain further what I mean, but I wanted to throw out there that I realize not everyone is like this, and so my worries about the implications of SWTOR in real life may not apply to everyone.

Now that we have that out of the way...

The topic I am really curious about is the impact of decision making and the view of morality as we see in SWTOR and how it might influence individual feelings of morality in real life.

First, for those of you who are not familiar with the gaming realm, SWTOR is a very story-line based game, where you can pick different things to say or do in quests and conversations. Some of these decisions are trivial, with no impact whatsoever other than making the non-player character (NPC) you're talking to react in a different way initially, to other decisions that affect whether someone (again, an NPC, not anyone in your party) dies and/or determines what rewards you obtain. Some of these decisions will gain you Light or Dark side points, which may affect what gear you can wear, or lightsaber colors you can have. So when deciding what to say, you will be shown whether your decision is a Light or Dark sided option and yes, you can be a Jedi that has become aligned with the Dark side, or a Sith with Light side alignment (I don't think you can ever actually change factions though).

Secondly, for those of you who are not familiar with the psychology realm, I will explain one of the key theories in my thinking: Cognitive Dissonance theory. So while I've linked to the Wikipedia article on it for those of you interested, here's just a quick run-down. Basically, if we see ourselves behaving (speaking and/or doing something) in some way that is inconsistent with beliefs [we think] we hold, this causes cognitive dissonance, which is anxiety inducing, and we must make some sort of alteration in either the behavior or the beliefs in order to remove/reduce this anxiety. This is, of course, dependent on there being no other explanation for our belief-inconsistent-behavior, such as payment or other rewards. FOR EXAMPLE: one of the simplest studies of cognitive dissonance was to have subjects come in to a lab and perform some very meaningless, useless, and especially boring task. It was after this task that the real experiment began - upon finishing, the subject would be asked to tell the next person coming in (really just a person working for the experiment) that the task was fun and enjoyable. In one condition, the participant was offered some sum of money (like $20) for lying, and in the other, the participant was offered either no money or some piddling, negligible amount. Then, before leaving the lab, they filled out a survey which included questions about how fun the task was. For those who were offered the larger sum of money, the survey was overall rated as boring, and not fun, while those who were not offered that money rated the task as fun. Basically you have the people in the former condition thinking (probably outside their awareness), "Why did I say that was fun? Well of course I SAID it was fun because they gave me $20 to do so - but it really wasn't fun at all" while those in the latter condition would have been left with thoughts such as, "Why did I say it was fun? I guess it must've been pretty fun, but they gave me $1 to say it was fun... but that's not enough money to make me lie, so I guess it was fun." This is just one of the examples of this theory, but we see how inconsistency between behavior and beliefs can result in a change in one or the other, when there is no other explanation that adequately accounts for the inconsistency. And, because the behavior is usually hard to change (on account of it being in the past, and not necessarily going to be repeated), it is usually the thoughts that are altered.

So now that we know that SWTOR makes you choose between Dark and Light side behaviors, and that if we see ourselves doing something inconsistent with our beliefs, we might end up changing those beliefs. So how does this impact morality? Well if we consider the Light side as inherently good and moral, and the Dark side as bad and evil, then the game's labels of some decisions as Light and others as Dark then we are making decisions that are already labeled as "moral" or "immoral." This is where I start to have a problem and I, personally, start feeling a lot of cognitive dissonance.

Lets start with a concrete example: there's a Trooper (Light-side) quest where you're asked by a mother to find her missing son who had been kidnapped. When you find him, he says he would like to leave the planet so his kidnappers won't find him again. Your two options, at this point are to give him enough money so he can escape the planet on his own (Light-side) or have him go to his parents (Dark-side).

Here, in playing a Jedi, I feel as if I should take ALL the Light-side points (_o/ <-- Allie Brosh pose) and be the ideal Jedi, but goddamnit, I'm ASIAN. I'd HAVE to send a kid to his parents if they're so worried about him! So if I had picked the Light option to give him money, I would've been feeling quite a bit of anxiety over my decision - thankfully for me, this was actually my boyfriend playing and I was watching while my computer was going through a reset-to-manufacturer's-settings (a whole story in itself). But what about the alternate explanation - could there be some sort of reasoning behind a decision that would've been inconsistent with my beliefs? Well, as my thinking went, it was, "It's just a game, I should take the Light-side option to get all the Light-side POINTS....... but... it's just a GAME and the points don't do much, so I should do what I think is right." So on the one hand, the "just a game" argument could be used as justification for inconsistent behavior, but paradoxically could be seen as inadequate reasoning for the same thing - it all really depends on the individual person's point of view.

So, here's where I feel like it may have a broader impact. I wonder if it is possible that I'm not the only person that feels these moral dilemmas between picking decisions that are in line with their character's Light or Dark alignment, and their own personal beliefs, values, and morals. I mean, if the Dark/Light points and alignment had a greater impact on the story and on others' interactions with you in the game instead of just changing what gear you can wear and what colors you can use for your blaster or lightsaber, then perhaps there would be enough incentive to make a decision that goes against your personal beliefs without causing cognitive dissonance and the resulting anxiety. If there is such a greater impact, then I haven't played the game enough yet to find it. But I wonder if Jedi/Sith morals will begin to set itself into people's value sets because of the role of cognitive dissonance.

I do like how being able to play on either side kind of blurs the line between "Good" and "Evil" though, as some Dark-side options have some very good reasoning behind them, and could be very logically justified as being for the good of others.