Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

Cognitive dissonance

EVE players are masters of cognitive dissonance.

Defined, the term describes a mental state in which you convince yourself that a situation is an overall net positive despite having many more negative aspects than positive ones.  The simplest example is "I didn't want that ship/moon/system/region anyway."  Of course, if you really believed that you would have sold the ship or given away the moon, system, or region months ago.  You didn't, but you convince yourself that the loss is really for the best.

With that in mind, I invite you to read through this somewhat unintentionally amusing blog post "The War Against Super Capitals" by Wilhelm Arcturus at The Ancient Gaming Noob.  Well, it's amusing in context.  I count no fewer than ten examples of major cognitive dissonance (they're quotes from the piece):

• By the time it came to Drake Fleet, there were few pilots willing or able to jump into Scimitars.  I was able, I just wasn?t willing.
• ...it would take as many as five titan bridges to get us to our destination.  As it turned out, due to bad planning, we were not even going to get one.
• Then we jumped into chaos.  And TiDi.  And Lag.
• ...the EVE client doesn?t really like [it when you try to use the game's UI under heavy TiDi].  It starts to get erratic...
• ...[for our Drakes], a single volley being enough to destroy most of our targets.
• But this time my EVE client was starting to come apart...
• I got in there and tried to loot some and ended up grabbing wrecks full of Scourge missiles...
• We didn?t kill the CSAA.  Mission failed on that front.
• We then turned for home, which was trial only because TiDi chased us most of the way home.
• Both sides will no doubt declare victory.
• All in all it was a heck of a fight, and a nice way to end the month.

That last one is the one that really sells it for me.  ;-)  "This fight sucked in ten different ways, but it was fun!"  That's cognitive dissonance.

I'm not trying to make light of TAGN's experiences; he's a great blogger who I admire a great deal.  His post does a better job of describing the fight than themittani.com's coverage.  You can see many Goon pilots also saying how much fun this was.(1)  It's funny how good humans are at convincing themselves that negative experiences are actually positive ones.

And EVE players are masters at it.  We've all got this particular skill trained to V...


(1) The few IRC/NCdot pilots that try to comment are almost instantly shouted down by Goons.
Source: Cognitive dissonance