Weakness takes you down, makes your legs unsteady, on the verge of collapse, your ribcage quivers and shakes uncontrollably, and your back aches with the pain of just being there. You can barely move enough to bring yourself to your desk chair, and turn on your computer and left-mouse click the desktop graphic to invoke the Diablo 2 Expansion Pack game engine, but somehow you manage it and sit back to admire your effort.
You invoke the character you intend to run on this session, hoping your utter weakness and helplessness and despair don’t spill over into the game environment to bring sudden death to your Avatar, but you know that you’re just not up to the task, and you’re unable to make those “good moves” that saves the life of your Avatar time after time, but tonight, you’re feeling so damn punk that you doubt your ability to destroy the enemy creatures.
One secret to handling the weakness and despair and inability to focus is to CREATE A PURPOSE for yourself to accomplish in THIS SESSION.
Don’t try to make it too complex or difficult. It should be an easily attainable goal, some end result that you can see and feel and sense, and yet isn’t too far out of reach.
What you want to create for yourself tonight is a specific and easily reached “Attainable Goal”.
Sometimes the Attainable Goal is the next quest, sometimes the next Experience Level or a higher specific Experience Level that you feel you can attain in the time you have available for this particular gaming session.
The SETTING OF THE GAMING SESSION GOAL is the singlemost important action you will take in Spiritual Gaming Rehab.
The second most important factor will be that you take the same attitude that you would have if you were going to a regular day job, and you can pack a bag lunch or box it to bring that home to yourself. It’s a job. Clock yourself in and clock yourself out and don’t forget to give yourself Union Breaks and a full hour for lunch.
Number 3 on the IMPORTANT list is to CONSTATE IT TO YOURSELF. Constating is a simple action in which you merely describe what you see, using the PLS tech to do this in the standard 3-part scene description you use every day in your PLS work.
Once you have identified a scene and the action happening within it, you are ready to confront the combat and rescue the drops as they fall. One hint — never turn your back on an enemy unless you’re running away, and there’s no shame in running from a superior foe — live to fight another day, don’t be a hero.
But if you are attacked by fast monsters, just stay face to face with them as you fire point-blank at them. Of course, if you’re a ranged char, you’ll want to back up or run and then turn, firing at your target as you do, because you haven’t got the armor to stand up to a face-to-face confrontation.
Keep in mind that the computer calculates the probability of hits and damage and spits out the result — it isn’t a direct system. The end result is a combination of dice rolls and hand-eye personal player skills, but it IS a combination of both, and you don’t want to forget that fact. You can’t count on a direct hit even if you “should” have made it had you taken the same action in the non-virtual world you call your homeworld.
I say “nonvirtual” as if that were true, but it isn’t — it merely matches your perception of the world around you, the world in which you are presently immersed.
The fourth item on this agenda list is to be aware, continually aware, of your “player” relationship to the “game character” in the playing field. You are taking a third-person view of the action, as you might do when going external in the astral body, which is today called “EVA” or “Extra-Vehicular Activity” in NASA circles.
You should be getting a real sense both of being connected to your Avatar and at the same time being above and behind the character, flying just above and watching all the action from outside the body.
This Out of Body Experience or “OBE” is an important factor and serves as a lesson in a sense, making the Out of Body Experience part of the normality. You eventually grow to prefer the overhead view to the Behind-the-Eyes Experience you’re presently having to endure.
Getting used to something makes it easier to take, and that brings us to Factor #5, taking it easy on entry.
EASY ENTRY means that you start off in something easy when you first open a gaming session, you don’t go directly for the throat, taking on the worst bosses the minute your feet hit the pixelated soil of the Plains of Despair with lightning strikes from Souls hitting everywhere at once.
When you first start out a gaming session, go to STONY FIELD and do a full circuit, just to get the “feel” of it in your hands. Even an hour or two away from the playing field can cause havoc to your gameplay, especially in HardCore Hell, where Death is Everywhere, on all sides, and coming in faster than you can possibly react.
What do you do in a situation like that?
When you’ve experienced enough pain NOT starting a session in an easy space, you’ll learn that it’s best to Follow Advice, or Pay the Price.
Factor #6 seems perhaps unrelated, but it isn’t:
STRENGTHEN THE NEURAL PATHS.
Creating the conditions that promote neuro-plasticity are easy enough if you follow a few simple rules:
- NEVER SIMPLIFY — The more complexity you can create in any action including assignment of skill points and combinations of runes to form exciting runeword items and micro-managing those little gem chips for your crafting, the better.
- THE SHORTEST DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO POINTS IS NONE TOO GOOD — The more distance you can cover in a session, the better.
- DON’T PUT OFF UNTIL TOMORROW WHAT CAN BE PUT OFF TODAY — It’s best to not do something you feel unready to tackle than to try to do it in a state of weakness and/or personal performance uncertainty.
- TRY TO WORK OUT THE SHAPE OF THE SPACE YOU’RE IN — Make an effort to see the form of the map that emerges as you traverse a space. You’ll have undoubtedly noted by this time that the map draws itself only as you travel, not before. You are drawing the map in-game, and cannot draw what you haven’t yet seen.
- IDENTIFY ALL THE PARTS OF THE SCENE — Take the time to tell yourself what each thing is that you’re coming across as you happen to become aware of them. Get the NAME of each thing and try to remember the name next time you encounter the same creature.
- REMEMBER THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MONSTERS — Each monster behaves quite differently and takes and delivers damage differently from the others. Notice this and take note of the variations and differences between the races and character classes within each race of the monsters and creatures.
- TRY TO REMEMBER THE NAMES OF THE TRADESPEOPLE YOU MEET — Keep track of who it is you’re dealing with, and where you can find each of them. Learn the names of the major NPC figures in the gaming space.
- LEARN THE NAMES OF THE BOSSES — It helps to describe the experience if you are aware of the exact character you ran across in the playing field. Each Boss has a group of MINIONS and this is important now and becomes even more important later.
- LEARN THE NAMES OF THE REGIONS — You should know which town you’re in, which region you’re in, which act you’re in.
- BE AWARE OF YOUR CHARACTER CLASS — Don’t forget that you’re a sorc, or a zon, or a druid or a necro. The NATURE of your Self will be heavily colored and toned by the character class you’ve chosen to represent you in that space.
- MATCH THE ACTUAL EXPERIENCE WITH THE CREATED PURPOSE — The session should have a beginning, middle and an end, a stated purpose and a finishing glance at how well or poorly that purpose was fulfilled in this gaming session.
- On a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is the highest, EVALUATE YOUR SESSION — how well did you do?
- SET A SESSION TIME OF TWO HOURS — For best results, this rule should not be violated, but there are times when you just can’t spend two hours in spiritual rehab, so you make a compromise in those cases, maybe every day, as you must, in order to accommodate your life requirements.
- ACKNOWLEDGE THE RESULTS TO YOURSELF — Tell yourself verbally how you did in this gaming session and what goal you hope to accomplish in the next gaming session. Write down that goal if you need to in order to remember it and invoke it at the next gaming session.
These are just a few of the fundamental principles that apply to the Spiritual Rehab Training. As you can readily see, the whole picture has yet to be presented, and I’m preparing to do just that at the next SPIRITUAL REHAB CLINIC.
“I Survived Spiritual Rehab” T-Shirts should be made up, but I haven’t the time, so if someone wants to do them, be my guest.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby