E-Mystery Wednesday
Hello and welcome to what I am calling E-Mystery Wednesday. (It bares no relationship to Slambo's Mini Mystery Monday, though I did get the idea from her, so it is more like a tribute rather than an outright theft.) I thought rather than rant about something, I will make it a mystery and see what comes of it. If this works out, I might make it a regular thing... if.
Today's tale begins with a website story someone sent to me about a person who loved to play World of Warcraft. This is a massive online game, with players from all over the world working together to find virtual items in order to make their virtual character better than everyone else's. There are quite a few people who are addicted to these types of games, playing endless hours to the exclusions of all Real World friends, family, and events. Shocking.
The story on the website was about a person who spent the past year, 30+ hours a week playing the game. He gave it up recently, and decided to share his keen insights on why these types of games are so much worse than the Real World. He stopped talking to his friends in the Real World because he had so many friends in WoW. He said that the game was so addictive that it caused him to abandon everyone who didn't play the game. So, he played and played, until he became the top character in his world. People all over the world envied him. His character had the best virtual items in all of the kingdom. Yet, he was unhappy. :( He realized that with great wealth and power comes great responsibility. He was spending 10+ hours a week just maintaining his position of power, helping out those who allied themselves with his group.
So, he quit playing, for some of the reasons already stated - too much time to maintain, not enough having fun. And he was addicted, so he was breaking this horrible addiction. When he left the game world, he started talking to his Real World friends, and they welcomed him back! Yet, when he logged in to close out his account, no one cared. Three days later, it was like he never existed online. He said that was the final and most painful part, since he spend so much time online helping others, making the game more fun for them, and yet no one thanked him while he was playing and no one missed him. But his Real World friends missed him and now they are all together, living happily ever after.
So, where is the mystery in this story? Actually, there are quite a few, but I'll just pick out two. He is upset with his online friends because they were never really his friends, yet he was wrong, why? He left the game because it took too much time "not playing", so he is in the Real World now, yet there is a mystery about his thinking, what is it?
The Edward
3 comments:
My guess is that, at some level, there is no difference between WoW and the "real" world- any world is as real as you make it.
You missed another large part of why he quit and that was because of the affect it was having on the people playing the game. He claims to have witnessed people being bad partners and bad parents due to being addicted to the game. One of the other reasons he cited for his quitting the game was that he didn't want to be responsible and/or play a part in the destruction of yet another person's life.
I work with children. Most of them are addicted to videogames, computer games, TV, videos, DVDs, and other visual media. These kids don't learn to interact or interface with humans appropriately. They don't learn that violence, killing, and death can be destructive, actually painful and long term, and final. Real life has no replay, no pause, no new game. Life is finite and if they are not encouraged to engage with real live breathing people, they are going to have difficulties with getting and holding a job, having a relationship, and understanding their moral obligation to human society. These kids and adults choose to involve themselves an alternative reality or realities that are tweaked, desensitize them to maladaptive behaviors, do not provide a real-life based framework, and may contribute to a large range of processing issues (like short attention spans, limited imaginations, and inability to distinguish between right and wrong), not to mention being sedentary (whole other ball game folks).
Don't get me wrong, I can go on a Be-Spelled or Be-Jewelled rampage or spend hours reading books, but ultimately I know that this is ephemeral and I prefer interacting with a live breathing person who's right directly across from me and not in a video/computer screen and/or made up of a bunch of statistics.
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