I love video games. I always have, and I expect I always will. I get a total thrill from catching rare Pokemon, taking down difficult enemies in RPGs, and even tapping like crazy in games like Disco Zoo, The Simpsons: Tapped Out and (my current faves) Ridiculous Fishing and AdVenture Capitalist.

My love of games came in handy when I was getting incredibly frustrated at wedding centrepieces. I got so miffed that I just had to put everything down and play some Dragon Age: Inquisition (killing some dragons will make me feel better about this!). That's when I realised: I could gamify my wedding planning.

Now I'm not quite at the stage where I've made EXP bars or levels to correspond to the stage of wedding planning I'm at (but I'm thinking about it). But I'm breaking things down in video game terms so that I don't get quite as frustrated at things.

Getting married is like a multi-choice RPG (like Dragon Age)

At the end, (hopefully) everyone achieves the same goal of getting married, but how you actually get there and the decisions you make are up to you.

For example, in Dragon Age, you can choose to keep a party of people with you, kind of like a wedding party. In my case, my future husband and I are doing this with no wedding party. Some things might be a little harder for the both of us to get done alone, but you can summon in different kinds of people with different skills to help you out when things get tough. We'll still be married at the end of the day and we'll need to ask for help at some point, but we won't be penalized for not doing it the same way a lot of other people have done it.

Plus you can choose to include things or exclude them, kind of like side quests

Totally optional, and not essential to the whole story, just something a little extra if you want it. For me, wedding centrepieces are necessary to the day, but that's my take on our wedding day. Others might feel that invitations are their biggest side quest, or making (or forging!) their own bridal bouquet. Whatever floats your boat and gets you to the end of your main storyline!

Finally, my wedding is not a competition

I know this has been covered on Offbeat Bride before, but knowing something and understanding it are two different things.

My sister is getting married four weeks after me, and as an anxious person, I immediately wanted to cancel my wedding out of fear that hers will be better than mine. But rage-quitting on my wedding over something like that is silly. We're two people with two distinct styles who will have two very different weddings. We're not having a multiplayer battle to the death - we're playing two single-player story campaigns, just at the same time. She might be playing as a mage and I might be playing as a rogue, but that doesn't mean either wedding will be objectively better than the other.

So if you'll excuse me, I need to go level-grind (aka search on Google and Pinterest) more wedding centrepiece ideas...