Today, while taking my daily walk, I passed another guy on the street and attempted to time my nod perfectly so that he would see it, but so that he wouldn't see it early enough that we would be stuck looking at each other for an awkward amount of time. We missed the window. He said a muffled greeting as I passed, and I don't think he saw my nod at all. This is one of the only interactions I've had with another person today.
After, I came home and played some 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dead Island 2 and my character Amy started talking up a storm to everyone she met. I didn't think anything about it. But when I wandered into a room where three NPCs were having a conversation that I couldn't join, I felt some of the embarrassment you feel when you walk into a room where people are deep in a conversation that doesn't involve you. This got me thinking about how much easier it is to talk to people when you're a video game character.
Even before the pandemic, I worked from home most of the time, while also going to t✃he library a few days a w🌳eek. Now, three years in, I am out of the habit of going anywhere else to work and, worse, out of the habit of making small talk.
But video game characters are almost never socially anxious or awkward. In Dead Island 2, Amy is constantly walking up to people (who are 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:usually standing on balconies) and chatting them up. My life would almost certainly be more intere🌠sting if I just talked to everyone I met and accepted their quests. This is much harder in real life. Even if you do it, the quests are much less intere𓂃sting. Your objective is usually, "Leave me alone" or "Go away."
That isn’t a problem for video game characters. I grew up playing RPGs on Nintendo handhelds and in those games, striking up a conversation was as simple as standing in front of someone and pressing A. In 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokémon, I talked to everybody, hoping to plumb the game's deepest depths. For a while, I even kept a record of all the information I found by talking to NPCs in a notebook. That quickly became too much work and I gave up, but I never stopped feeling the impulse to get to know everyone in each new town.
Part of the beauty of games like Pokémon or Zelda, though, is that your protagonist is ܫsilent. This is the optimal way to kill social anxiety. If I never had to speak, but everyone knew they had to come up with interesting stuff to tell me, I would never be nervous again. Sure, Link isn’t really a character. But he’s goals.
I guess what I’m trying to express is that it’s nice to be part of a community, to feel like ther✨e are people who are interested in talking to you. But it can be hard to not feel anxious about how you’re perceived, especially if you don’t🅘 have to interact with people much as part of your job.
When I was a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:door-to-door pest control salesman, I didn’t feel any of this anxiety. I just went up to people’s doors, gave them my pitch, and when, 99 percent of the time, they weren't interested, I moved on to the next door. I guess, in that job, I was the one repeating my line of dialogue to anyone who would listen. I was the NPC. And it was liberating.