Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20171111143841/@comment-3547390-20171115232258

OCD is indeed a very confusing beast. A disorder where you are aware how messed up it is, and yet don't stop, even though you have free will and could at any time. One where you can take a seemingly basic task and make it into a complex ritual. It has taken several years to take this seriously since my issue is entirely with video games. Not food, not water, not anything I need to live. If I lived a hundred years ago, I wouldn't have had games to care about. Even further, since I think it runs deeper, there was far less to spoil and a lot less ways it could occur. There was no internet where everyone talks about spoilers nonstop, you would have to have some friend ramble about it or something like that at most. No stranger on the street is going to spoil some random book. Yet with the Internet, we got people yelling it from their metaphorical windows.

Lately I have been trying to rationalize out my OCD, figure out why I think this way. Find that groundwork if you will. I have gotten it is spoilers, but that got me questioning spoilers themselves. Why do I hate spoilers so much? Why is it that when I hear a spoiler, it destroys everything? What exactly is the harm in hearing them? All of this is rationalizing my own mind, which I am not sure I know, and so I am not even sure how accurate this is. But, it is important to make sense of things, especially if I want to find a route out.

I remember The Two Towers being on TV and refusing to watch it from the middle because I felt disoriented. Even from a young age, I feared spoilers. So this runs even further back than any of my game OCD based traits.

I think the answer was somewhat said above, I value new experiences and so actively seek them out, so spoiling experiences is essentially making them old. With games, I actively seek challenge, and spoilers on how to play the game actively takes away the struggle of learning to play it. I am reminded of times like when I would play those Doom, back then I was quick to just look up the answer. Couldn't find what I was looking for quickly? Look it up online. Usually those became my lesser liked levels for games like Thief. For Doom, the mindset was entirely different, it was done only as a reaction to the fear of broken levels, since I have encountered so many levels that are broken that it becomes impossible to fully trust a level where the answer is not clear. I have the same fear for Thief fan missions, if not more so, because while Doom levels usually have an exit, there are some Thief fan levels where it is literally impossible to beat them because of some small defective thing. But for base games, I was doing that at a young age, and I think I harbor fears that I killed certain experiences for me I otherwise would have enjoyed more. For Resident Evil 4 I had a big strategy guide I was given with the game, I don't think I even tried to play the game properly, instead just following the book like I would follow a story.

Because of the convenience of the internet, I spoiled things for myself as a child. And since then I have been compensating by trying to avoid spoilers at all, perhaps to gain back what I lost then. Perhaps it is also regret, I see that all I did as a child was cheat and thus kill any sort of challenge I could have had for myself. I didn't get any of the skill I should have got, I didn't feel I did things legitimately or had a fair experience.

But that leads the question... I spoiled Thief stuff for myself and I absolutely love the games. Even Thief Gold I would get frustration and spoil because the gamma settings meant I had no ability to even see beyond what was blatantly visible. I can say that was perhaps detrimental, several Thief Gold levels I feel are weaker, but not all of them did I spoil to get that impression and if anything I probably spoiled Thief 2 for myself years before that. Did I kill challenge like I perhaps fear... or was I just killing puzzles? Aka what I rant about in almost every one of my Doom videos. It sounds weird, say the first thing you resort to is to look at walkthroughs and you will feel like a terrible person, or even when you gave yourself numerous chances to find it. It has eaten me up inside any time I needed to resort to looking up the answer. It also doesn't help that I get easily disoriented, meaning these long chronological things build up to something as opposed to throwing me in the middle without direction (every time I stop, I often get a feeling of not knowing what to do or if I would even be able to handle anything new). And I think in turn that created my OCD as a sort of compensation, one where I avoid anything at all that could lessen my struggle. I didn't put in the effort as a child, so I am putting in overdrive effort as an adult, perhaps refusing to stop due to fearing I will revert to having no patience if I don't understand things through this complicated direction.

I spoiled Thief 2 and it is my favorite game of all time. But I felt I abused the system, I didn't put in the devotion I should have, and now I am lost in this mess. Maybe it makes it worse since it connected to my favorite game, as if I blatantly spat on the creme of the crop and my duty now is to toil the land to even be seen worthy of getting to the creme again. After all, one thing spoilers wouldn't explain is why I couldn't go back to something like Thief and just play it without reverting. The fact that doing such feels like "cheating". It is perhaps my mind's solution to my mistakes, my hastiness, when I was a child. So spoilers are just adding on to the list of crimes perhaps, of things I didn't do properly.

I feel like garbage having done the above as a child. I feel horrible any time I have killed something like that for myself. It is just puzzles... I shouldn't care... and yet I do. I hate puzzles, all they do is give me more and more regret for not solving it the way the developer intended, and it might be that puzzles have tormented me to the point that I have OCD, a condition where I have put a massive puzzle in front of me to solve. My mind's solution for "I made it too easy for myself" was "My life is a puzzle, one I cannot simply look up and cheat to".

Which begs the further question, if I have this as an answer, have I found the answer? If my life is a puzzle, there is a solution, but I am not sure what the question was. And, if it isn't, does it really matter when it is puzzles? Something which gives me misery? I feel so illegitimate saying that, I feel like I am justifying cheating, and yet the truth of the matter is that it is that which is going to make me miserable in a game. Perhaps this is even why I find most games I hate since my OCD took severe hold of myself. Perhaps it got stronger as I cheated more and more. Perhaps I hate puzzles in their entirety, enjoying the unexpected but hating the aimless searches. Perhaps I would be a happier person if I looked at walkthroughs and didn't strive to challenge myself like I do. Yet, how can I do such, especially with the feeling that doing such is one of the most abusive and offensive things you can do to a game? I can't feel like a good person after looking at a walkthrough, instead I get left with the regret that I should have done more. What sort of self-respecting gamer goes and looks up walkthroughs to everything? It is about self-respect, something I cannot have if I do such, even if I can admit I am killing things that would only make me miserable and thus possibly making things better for me.

I don't know what is going on, but I am on some trend of epiphanies lately here. Though, knowing how spoilers were a problem to begin with and how they provoked my OCD, I am not sure I know how to solve the problem. If anything, I feel more regret and misery at having had these old harbored feelings resurface.

Actually, I don't have the manual. Your link didn't include it. I hunted down the sourcebook for the story and have the copy protection pages you gave me before. But no manual. So I don't have much of a choice, even if I wanted to. Also, I am not sure about advancing, I feel like I can barely move and shoot at the same time. Just see how often I miss and get lost, there is no way I am going to be able to handle a live battlefield.

I appreciate that and it probably would help me, but as said above, this is the exact problem with my OCD and why this whole situation has been created to begin with. To accept help would be like looking at walkthroughs and thus making it just as illegitimate.