Day Six

So the grand pathetic total comes to six. Six (6) WoW-free days. Sigh. I haven't not played WoW for this long since I went to Mexico last Thanksgiving. Not even WoW could have won a duel against napping, tacos and marguaritas. Not that I tested that assumption what with leaving my computer at home for the duration.

Can't say I'm proud of this. But neither will I say I'm entirely ashamed. Nor am I a going to promise never to play again because I'm almost certain that would be a lie. Plus, the expansion comes out in less than a month. Hah.

The addiction, any addiction, is bad. But the game, the playing of it, was good. Having never been much of a gamer, I can't even begin to describe how much I learned. At the age of forty, I had no idea that there was even that much left to learn. I mean, okay, I don't know squat about wine, or geopolitics, or car repair or adult responsibility or, heck, all the things I still don't know which induce that panicky feeling upon walking into a really good library and thinking, "I'll never be able to read all these books in time!" You know, in time for death.

I'm a learner. I really am. Moreso, I'm an autodidact. I mostly know how to teach myself the things I don't know. Find a book, a website, a text, read it, practice, rinse, repeat, learn. It's a process I comprehend and have mostly mastered. I like learning, I love reading, museums, talking to people who know things I don't know. If I sound defensive about it, it's because I am. But cut me some slack, I'm coming out of a year of game addiction which my educated-person persona finds embarrassing.

Smart girls don't game. Except that's a total crock. Smart people do game. And having now gone into the world, seen it, played it, lived it, I feel pretty strongly that the whole gaming thing marks a fundamental shift in the sorts of things which experience fundamental shifts -- culture, society, education. There are enough of the smart-people-types out there writing obtuse academic tracts on all of this to back me up. Smart people game and will continue to do so in increasingly large numbers. Gaming may even make people smarter.

Which isn't to say that everyone needs to run out and start playing games. In the same way that no one needs a television, no one needs to play interactive video games. And just as television has been a certain evil, so too with gaming. Of all people, I'm certainly the last person to downplay the evils of too much gaming. Me with my grand total of six game free days in a year? Yeah, I'm not going to be denying the negatives any time soon.

But the positives, and the just-plain-interesting neutrals, can't be discounted. With the numbers of people playing these sorts of games, the numbers of games being produced, and the sheer, raw, crazy amounts of money being made by the industry (note to self: find facts to link to sometime soon), it's safe to say this isn't some trivial fad that we're going to grow out of. Interactive games, specifically of the sort labeled MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online), are, like television and the internet, a pervasive (or soon to be pervasive) fact of modern life (give or take the standard 'developed world' disclaimers).

I regret having become a major addict, although I suspect that might have been unavoidable, but I can't regret finally becoming aware of and participating in that world. It's a world that millions of people live in now, a world that millions more will be entering soon and most importantly a world that today's kids will be growing up in. Whether or not the next generation games for some fixed, parentally-supervised three hours a week or are given open access to full-blown, sleep-depriving, school-destroying, unmonitored playtime, they'll be growing up in a game culture unlike anything my pong-playing, video-arcade generation ever saw. Furthermore, the networked aspect of these games makes the landscape fundamentally different from that of the gaming generations younger than mine despite their wide-scale access to and fluency with console and handheld games.

It's all about the network. The web began by connecting a bunch of isolated, marginally interesting text files via hyperlinks and suddenly the whole internet exploded in ways pretty much no one ever expected it would. I can't even venture a prediction about what networking will do to these isolated, vaguely three-dimensional, entirely cartoonish, marginally interesting game worlds, but I've lived through enough technological surprises (MySpace anyone?) to safely say that Something is going to happen. It usually does and I like to be prepared for these technology-type changes.

I can only hope that my decent into MMO space taught me more than how to equip a weapon, organize my bag space and script macros. At the moment, the only skill I'm really proud of is my newfound ability to resist launching the application. While I learn to perfect my mad, not-gaming skillz, I expect I'll be extensively revisiting the exciting world of full sentences, punctuation and possibly communication with the real world. The irony that the wide world of blogging has become the "real world" is something I hope we can all take a moment to stop and ponder.