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Reflecting on my ADHD is something I’m doing more often now that I’m an adult, and I’ve found that a recurring source of grief is when my genuine effort and lofty goals get tangled up with my impulsivity and lack of patience. School assessments, particularly creative projects, are where this typically occurred. I would come up with all these fantastic ideas and then, despite my efforts, struggle to put them into practice. Whether this was because of the unrealistic goals I had unknowingly set or my errant curiosity and lack of patience, the end result wouldn’t match my expectations or the effort I felt I had put in, and I would get frustrated and bitter about this disconnect.
This hasn’t stopped happening as I have grown up, but it certainly doesn’t happen as often. Now it’s not like I was wholly unaware of this situation or the impact it had, but I had never realised how or that it affected things beyond large-scale projects. This monument of realisation came from an unlikely source. It came from when I joined an online Blood Bowl 2 tournament.
If you don’t know, Blood Bowl 2 is a video game adaptation of a turn-based fantasy strategy/sports game of the same name created by Games Workshop who you may know as the makers of Warhammer. Warhammer’s Fantasy spin-off, Blood Bowl is a game where the classic fantasy races (humans, elves, dwarfs etc) engage in a hyper-violent parody of American football where teams fight it out to be the winner, often literally.
This tournament was a casual online thing with people from an online group I was in. I joined when the offer came up because it was a new and fun experience and something I wanted to try my hand at. While I was under no illusions of winning the thing, especially given the skill level of some of the other players, I was still keen to give my best effort and l wanted to do well.
So, to make this happen, I did some serious research in the lead-up to the tournament on strategy and tactics. I ended up reading all manner of online guides and watching how-to videos. I also put a lot of effort into choosing my team, comparing the pros and cons of each, and ultimately picked High Elves. From that point, I learned all I could about playing High Elves and played a few practice games.
A few weeks later I loaded into the first game, full of confidence, and then forgot all about my research and did what I felt like in the moment. The game, of course, didn’t go well, and I got rather salty about it while playing, which I got a bit embarrassed about afterwards. Nevertheless, I soon picked myself up, brushed off the poor result, and set my sights on a better result next time. But the next game and the one after that didn’t go so great. Once again frustrated that my efforts had been for naught, I started to think about what went wrong.
For starters, I had underestimated just how good some of the players were and I didn’t have the slightest chance against them. However, it would be disingenuous to blame all my woes on the skill of the other players. But if it wasn’t that then what was it? After a bit of thinking I concluded that if I wanted to do well, why had I chosen High Elves an advanced team I hadn’t played outside of a few practice games? Why had I not chosen a team that I had more experience and practice with and worked on getting good with them instead of learning how to play a new team? From there I realised that the cool factor and wanting to play something new had been a bigger deciding factor in choosing my team than the research I’d done. This desire for novelty and curiosity had driven some of my gameplay decisions as an ‘I wonder what happens if’, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if’ mentality, as opposed to proper tactics. All that research I had done ended up being another way this desire for novelty was expressed. All that reading I did about the game was for the sake of it – I wasn’t learning from it.
By the end of the tournament, I was second to last with only one win. I would have liked to have done better but I had moved on by the end of it. The tournament lasted longer than I thought it would and started cutting into the university semester. With most of the players being overseas, the awkward game times were getting annoying. I also got to experience some of that good ole internet toxicity as one of my opponents, who still ended up winning, had a tantrum when the dice didn’t go his way.
There was nothing inherently wrong with not doing well in a video game as it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but it matters in the moment. It had bothered me as a kid and teen wondering why I had struggled to get good at the games I played. Beyond games, this is in part why those school projects went awry. This desire for novelty probably exacerbated my own lack of patience and would lead me down the garden path and cause things to get derailed. It’s one thing to read that a symptom of ADHD is a desire for novelty and it’s another to realise when it’s happening and its effects.
Written by William Robertson
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