You may have noticed that I have stopped posting any stories for a while. No, the stories haven't stopped, I have due to the fact that I have too many other things to do at the moment. I am hoping to be able to pick it up again some time in the future; meanwhile, if someone else would like to post any or write something, email me at eqdailygrind@hotmail.com.
Onto something else: Two recent blog entries ...
View From the Top (October 17, 2006) - The preamble:
"The top of what you ask? The height of World of Warcraft greatness.
A few weeks ago, a good friend of mine quit playing Warcraft. He was a council member on what is now one of the oldest guilds in the world, the type of position coveted by many of the 7 million people who play the game today, but which only a few ever get.
When he quit, I asked him if he would write a guest blog post about the experience. What follows is a cautionary tale about the pull an escape from reality can have on you."
From Tom's "Practical Philosophy" (October 7, 2006) - Accompanying email extract:
"I was going to write something on MMORPGs in the past, but frankly I just ran out of steam - the whole issue is so embedded in the irrationality of an individual's decisions that it's hard to generalise and come up with common themes, other than the most obvious (and therefore least edifying) ones.
However, I have linked above to something that I vomited out after reading a slightly annoying news article. I have come to reckon that we play online games not just to have fun in being who we want, but in living in a world in which we are free to 'read' others however we will - a place where our bitterness can spill everywhere, our prejudices fly freely, and where nothing can give us food for thought if we don't interpret it as useful."
3 Comments:
Ain't it the truth!!
Nov 3, 2006, 7:38:00 AM
That stupid article didn't have a place for me to post, so I'll post here in attempts to clarify. I was born and raised on the computer. At the age of 6 my family got our first computer and by 8 I was lying to people that I was 14. By the time I was 11, I had discovered the world of FFRP. You don't probably know what that is. When Diablo 1 first came out, FFRP was in the Guild Members chat room. A room transformed by text into a tavern, where all sorts of characters resided. This was the very beggining of my addiction. At 10, I started voyaging into the chatplanet FFRP rooms. At 11, I was an established member of the GreenDragonInn.
The only reason I am so well-educated, have such passion for reading, writing, and all things linguistic, I am sure was this. Here, at the age of 11, I met my fiance. Actually, I knew from the moment we talked 'ooc' that I would marry him. Beyond all things in the world, my heart swelled with inexplicable joy every moment we exchanged our typed words. Never once have I not been myself on the internet. Having grown up with it, I find it extremely easy to express my personality through the typed word. I am exactly how I am typing to you know, and would say exactly these words to you. He too grew up like this, and so we knew eachother before ever meeting. A few years later, he moved to my state, we got engaged, spent joyous years together, and a few years after that he passed away in a car accident.
The moral of this story is not the sadness I felt at his loss, but to you tell you that the internet is in no way evil. People who fool themselves into believing they are different people on the internet are truly fooling themselves. In each human exists a wide array of emotions. In the 'Matrix' series, he stands in front of 'God' and on these 'tv screens' are playing his many different reactions. The internet is a safe place for us to bring out the other portions of our personality. And vent it. Instead of bottling up our cold pervasive sides, we emulate them into a sadistic vampiric character (Not talking from experience, my characters usually are all exactly like me 'irl') instead of say, kids taking guns to school and shooting up their classrooms. The internet introduced me to the one and only soulmate of mine whom I love to this day though his passage was a year or so ago.
Even though I engrossed myself for hours and hours in an imaginary world where vampires and dragons existed, it is only the fools who loose sight of reality. Those people won't succeed unless they want to succeed, regardless of some game. You cannot ever blame a game (MMORPGS being very close to IRC FFRPing in my mind) for encouraging poor behaviour, you can only blame the people who played it.
And my 7 years that I spent with my fiance, are the greatest 7 years known to man. And to me, and I met him on the internet. He lived an entire country away from me. (Alaska) And yet, it was only through the miracle that is the internet that I was able to meet my soulmate. If I had never met him, I would have never been able to experience our love. I would not be who I am today.
Moral:
Goddamnit, I love MMORPGs. And the internet. And it's not wierd these days to take a spouse from one.
Apr 12, 2007, 12:44:00 PM
Noone's here to tell you what to do with your life and how to live it. So why try to justify it so fervently? No matter which perspective we choose to live, being judgemental and insisting that "my life is better" is just wrong.
May 3, 2007, 8:16:00 PM
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