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Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Heroscape

Posted May 28th, 2010 at 01:59 PM by Sylvano the Wasabus
I can’t stop thinking about this topic and feel compelled to write about it.

OCD is the short form for “Obsessive Compulsive Disorder”. (Each letter represents the word that starts with that letter.)

So many Scapers seem to assign themselves some sort of OCD that I thought I thought I should think about it.

There are people obsessed with certain figures, certain generals, certain themes, certain Societies, but most of all folks seem to talk about their obsessive need to create carefully categorized storage for their ‘Scape.

I want to assure all of you that this is perfectly normal in my opinion and even admirable.

Keeping track of information and ideas is what sets apart from the other animals who can't play Scape.

Who, with a pile of terrain and figures, could ever play without it being organized? Can you imagine? Hey guys, come over to my place and we’ll play some Scape. And then when they arrive you sort through a giant box or twelve for various figures and one more blue water tile to complete the map. Organization is practically equal to orgasm.

Don’t put yourself down because you bought storage thingys or built a new wing on your house. Even shoving children into one common bedroom so there’s a special Scape room is a good thing- the children will learn to live with other annoying beings (and you only have to lock one door!) and Scape, to be healthy, needs air and space.

We have survived as a species because of people like us- people who obsessively stored and cared for seeds for next year’s farming. Like the prehistoric people who invented plastic storage things with drawers in order to better preserve and ration their food supply for the winter. And the medieval folk who invented Ziploc type bags to keep their sharpened arrowheads separate from their need-to-be-sharpened ones.

Some other common activities usually associated with OCD are frequent hand washing –and really isn’t that preferable to negligent hand washing, or rare hand washing or annual hand washing? – and hoarding. Heroscape and hoarding are practically the same thing. You can’t really play unless you have at least three of everything, and even then you’ll be pulling your hair out in frustration (and counting the hair, tracking it on a chart, and saving it in little pill bottles) because you still need more Scape.

So far, it seems like a good thing.

But I have read that there are cases which take it too far. You may have heard about the OCD boy in Britain who counted his steps to school each day, stepping on particular cracks in the sidewalk while avoiding others. On a date called 9/11 he missed one crack and was convinced he had caused some planes to crash into the World Trade Centre. He had a nervous breakdown but was later shown that because of the time difference between England and New York, the nastiness had already begun before he left for school.

I have also read about people who will only speak in sentences with an even number of words, and if the number isn’t even, they keep adding more words until the sentence can end with an even number of words.(40)

I also read about a young man who counted words obsessively- when people spoke to him he never understood them because he was too busy counting their words. A person like this just needs to find the right kind of employment- there are a lot of jobs counting things- like- well, like the count on Sesame Street.

Apparently about one in 48 people in the United States have OCD, and it is diagnosed as often as diabetes and asthma. It would kind of suck to have all three, don’t you think? I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe again, I can’t breathe again, now four times I can’t breathe and I feel a diabetic coma coming on in 5, 4, 3, 2, .....

Interestingly enough approximately one in 42 people in Canada have OCD. I’m not sure if that make us superior to Americans, or just geographically disadvantaged. There are a lot more things to count in Canada. We don’t have as many people, true, but we have a lot more snowflakes. And maple leaves. And Mooses.

In case you’re really into moose, here’s an interesting fact:
If a bull moose is castrated, either by accidental or chemical means, he will quickly shed his current set of antlers and then immediately begin to grow a new set of misshapen and deformed antlers that he will wear the rest of his life without ever shedding again. The distinctive looking appendages (often referred to as "devil's antlers") are the source of several myths and legends among many groups of Inuit as well as several other tribes of indigenous peoples of North America. I bet you didn’t know that! I sure hope I don’t get accidentally castrated.

Another aspect of more serious OCD is “intrusive thoughts”. Folks have ideas popping into their head- this is of course okay if the ideas are good and helpful, but it’s not so okay if the thoughts are about killing others or doing messy things like that. I must admit that I often think of killing others, but that’s when I play Scape. And I usually am thinking of killing other figures, not players, except that one time but let’s not get into that.

I often wonder how serious my OCD is , usually when I’m restocking the toilet paper. I come from a long line of hoarders and I’ve built a special dispensing shelf by the toilet that holds four rolls, plus the one in use. But the thing is I don’t let it run down to two rolls or one roll- I always make sure there are four rolls. I know I have five children and TP disappears really fast sometimes but I think I’m obsessing. And compulsing. But I guess it’s pretty innocent so far, and no one has gotten hurt. (I wonder if it is because every place I visit always has three squares of TP left when I need many more than three?)

I think people should just take it easy. Isn’t it a bit OCD to define and label everything and call them disorders? We have to have some way of behaving- they say bees are “preprogrammed”- I bet we are too. So why fight our own natures? It can be a good thing, if we can figure out a way for it to be. Right? (1076 words). (1077 counting “words”.) (1079 counting “counting “words””. Oh no.....
Total Comments 4

Comments

Old
MegaSilver's Avatar
Another nice blog StW! And as I said before, I really hope you were serious about coming to my next tourney. (I'll even let you pay for a reduced entry fee.) Maybe all of your kids can participate in the tourney as well?

Here are my comments:

Quote:
Organization is practically equal to orgasm.


Quote:
And the medieval folk who invented Ziploc type bags to keep their sharpened arrowheads separate from their need-to-be-sharpened ones.
But wouldn't the sharp arrowheads pierce the Ziploc bags?

Quote:
But the thing is I don’t let it run down to two rolls or one roll- I always make sure there are four rolls.
I haven't heard of that one before...

Quote:
Isn’t it a bit OCD to define and label everything and call them disorders?
The disorder-finder-people solve thier OCD by making disorders to cover thier OCD.

MegaSilver
Posted May 28th, 2010 at 04:16 PM by MegaSilver MegaSilver is offline
Old
ZBeeblebrox's Avatar
LOL...great blog!
Posted May 28th, 2010 at 04:57 PM by ZBeeblebrox ZBeeblebrox is offline
Old
Great blog. You need a follow up to this about the effects of OCD on playing the game itself.

For example, I can't stand when you see a hill that was made out of two different types of terrain (Like say sand to build it up and lava on top), because you see the brown sides leading up to a red tile. I have literally rebuilt entire parts of a map because I saw the terrain doing that. And I also hate overhangs on the sides of maps. Like when a part of the map doesn't have anything under it and you can see the table under it. That always bugs me for some reason. I generally just deal with this one, but I do try to fix it if I have extra terrain left over from building a map. And water tiles can't be on the same level as the surrounding terrain, they have to be a level lower.

But oh god, it gets worse. My cards have to be lined up perfectly. They all have to interlock together with a little space between each card. All the figures have to be perfectly on the hex. All my figures always have to be pointing towards the enemy (double spaced figures always make me mad because sometimes they aren't facing the enemy, and it always bugs me).

I obviously don't have it as bad as some (That boy from Britain story gives me hope for myself, as does that show Hoarders), but still. OCD makes people do funny things sometimes.
Posted May 28th, 2010 at 09:03 PM by Warlord Alpha Warlord Alpha is offline
Old
Rÿchean's Avatar
Funny, as always.

My brother does not organize his heroscape collection. He has the original master set boxes. Some boxes are for terrain and the others are for figures, still another is for dice, cards, bits.

Now that might seem like some sort of system but it so isn't. It drives me nuts. So much so that when I go to his place to play, I bring my own figures, cards, and bits because I loathe spending the time rummaging through the 3 figure boxes to find the figures I need. My nephew also prefers to just use whatever I brought rather than dig through the boxes. Sometimes I even bring my own terrain already set up for the map I want to play on. It saves so much time.

Oh and the terrain! No rhyme, no reason just all thrown in together. Water with lava, snow with road, swamp with grass, all hodgpdged together; Oh the horror!

I try to explain that his set up time would be cut by 2/3s if he just used some sort of organized storage system. Sure it might take a tad longer to put it all away, but I would rather spend a few minutes after game to put things away than spend countless minutes digging through stuff before gaming. It erodes the deisre to play when you have to dig through everything.

I simply cannot deal with it. I am so used to my system (hell any system) where I can place my hand on the required cards, figures, or terrain in quick, efficient fashion.
Posted June 2nd, 2010 at 12:27 PM by Rÿchean Rÿchean is offline
Updated June 2nd, 2010 at 12:44 PM by Rÿchean
 
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