Baldur's Gate 3 and Exposure Therapy:
I have played more than my fair share of Baldur's Gate 3, Genshin Impact, and Witcher Wild Hunt. I feel like the world is my oyster and I have this innate primal need to explore absolutely everything that the game has to offer. On the downside of that, it means I rack up lots of hours in each of these games respectively (over 130 in BG3, most likely over 200 in Genshin, and about 30 in the Witcher even though I haven't even made it halfway through or explored to the extent I want to). In the game, I feel almost this sense of decision-making anxiety on whether I'm following the right path, making the right decisions, or even having fun. Most of my time in these games is spent wandering around and deciding what to do, but not wanting to do any of it.
At worst, my decision-making anxiety forces me to stop playing the game because I can't decide what to do next. In Baldur's Gate 3, a new Tactician (the hardest mode) save file is being bogged down under the fear of failure and death. The main question in my mind is why do I feel like this? It's a video game and it should be incredibly fun for me to play! Is there a way to use open world video games and my anxiety surrounding them to my advantage?
So why am I playing these games in the first place if it's actively making me anxious to play them? Two words: Exposure Therapy.
Exposure therapy has been getting a lot of attention on social media platforms where people actively put themselves in the most uncomfortable situations possible in order to better themselves. I've seen these videos go one of two ways: either the person doesn't get rejected or the person bullies and harasses the people around them to not reject them. Fortunately for me, and all of you, I don't make videos of myself going out in public and embarrassing myself for clout. I embarrass myself by having a blog, and I embarrass myself by playing Baldur's Gate 3. I decided to do a little experiment to see if I could do exposure therapy in a video game, where my decisions don't affect me in the real world. My failures and my mistakes are between me and my save file, and no one has to see me fail. So, I put a series of plans in place to start my video game exposure therapy.
Step 1: Go down to Balanced.
I know I just said earlier that I was proud of myself for doing Tactician and that I wanted to see myself fail in order for this to work, but being Tactician put me in a catatonic state.
Step 2: Do what I love and fuck the rest.
I realized that I wanted so desperately to please my companions (who aren't even real people) even if it meant that I had to do things I didn't want to do. I would only do side quests that I was really interested in, and skip everything I didn't really care about. For this particular playthrough, I wanted to focus on things I had never done before (Spider Matriarch, Grym, Blood of Lathander, actively starting fights and being a menace, etc). I started to have a lot of fun when I didn't feel the need to complete every quest that was set before me, and I enjoyed my time much more.
After realizing this, I could easily see parallels to my own life. I figured that the root of all of my decision-making problems in these games where I'm allowed to do what I like is in my people-pleasing. I feel like I'm betraying the game if I skip quests, I feel like I'm disappointing my companions if I don't finish each of their quests to the fullest, and I feel like I'm disappointing myself when I rack up all of these hours in the game doing things that I didn't even want to do in the first place.
So did my exposure therapy work? I would say so. After starting to play Baldur's Gate with myself in mind, I started to be more confident in my ability to say both yes and no to people. When my grandma asked if I wanted to have lunch, I ended up actually saying yes (usually I would have said I was sick and then feigned illness for the next several months). When one of my friends simply said they couldn't make something I realized that I could say the same thing without making up some elaborate excuse on why I couldn't do something.
Life is way too short to be catering to the likes of everyone around you, and sometimes you just need to stick to your guns in telling people to fuck off. So I guess the moral of the story really is to "do what you love and fuck the rest."
