by Frank Paynter on March 8, 2006
I love games! As a kid I was heavy into Monopoly, Risk, and Boom or Bust. I had a different set of friends for each game, but sometimes there was overlap. Monopoly was about Bruce Turnbull, his brother Jeff, and anybody else we could dragoon into my cool damp basement on a hot summer afternoon. Boom or Bust was Dave Rustick’s game, played at his place in "Sylvan Estates," a development taht ruined some perfectly fine pasture land, a field that was great for kite flying and model airplanes before they raised all the new houses, paved the streets, put in the lamp poles and a thousand nursery trees that are grown now and make the place look a lot less barren than it looked in those days. Risk was the purview of the Borrowman kids, Steve and Betty Jo. Betty Jo was brutal, forming alliances and then turning around and crushing an erstwhile ally.
These games were played face-to-face with snacks, and beverages, and a social context different from the text based, computer mediated, Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games.
I still enjoy chess and backgammon, a friendly game of poker. Bridge. I played my share of Adventure in the seventies and early eighties, but it wasn’t fun. About all I learned is that "Real adventurers do not use such language." But today three bloggers blogged gaming and I find that interesting. Gary Turner is off to the races. Jeneane is mulling over the possibilities of Second Life. And I’m dissing World of Warcraft, which you might expect me to do since I have a firm conviction that warcraft sux.
Raise your hand if you read Orson Scott Card (mine goes up in classic Horshack gesture). If you raised your hand, you know about Ender’s Game. Well, the aliens have not invaded, and if they had, you aren’t as bright as Andrew Wiggin anyway, so whatever fantasies playing MMORPGs feed, you won’t save the world that way. I promise.
by Frank Paynter on March 8, 2006
Welcome to World of Warcraft: The Text Adventure.
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.
Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and
down a gully. There is an elf with an exclamation point above her head
here.
>Talk elf
"Alas," she says. "There is a great darkness upon the land. Fifty
years ago the Dwarf Lord Al’ham’bra came upon the Dragon Locket in the
Miremuck Caverns. He immediately recognized the …"
> Click Accept
"Hey," the elf protests. "This is important expository. Azeroth is a rich and storied land, with a tapestry of interwoven …"
Joi Ito showed me a huge bird that his character was riding across fabled lands to some meet-up with members of his World of Warcraft krewe. He wondered if I might like to try the game. "Too much," I thought, and quietly demurred. MMPORGs have that sweet seductiveness of an illicit drug. They’re a mind space where the "real" world is allowed to disappear and a new reality is implanted. I am not known for my moderation. I could see getting down into one of these spaces and not emerging for a year or three. That wouldn’t be good for me.
Jess relays a similar concern. Coincidentally, Joi turned her on to the game too. (Well, it’s not so much coincidence as community… I know Jess through her interactions on the #joiito channel a few years back, which I think is how she’s connected to Joi). Here’s some of what she says….
My first impressions of it weren’t that great and I didn’t think I’d be playing after the free one-month trial was over.
…over the next couple months. I started playing more
hours and would stay up late the next morning trying to learn more
about the game. When I was browsing the internet I was looking at WoW
websites for more info on the storyline, races, items, and abilities I
encountered while playing. I even bought a six-button mouse so I could
easily right-click and move my character around better, and got more
memory so it wasn’t so choppy.
That wasn’t enough though. I was
advancing in the game and getting to know other players, but real life
was changing too. To have more game time I starting cutting out other
things I liked to do. My television watching decreased to zero, I
stopped watching DVDs that were coming in the mail, updating my blog,
visiting websites that weren’t in my newsreader, or checking my email.
I was addicted to this game and was having fun.
I’ve heard that the production values on these games are first rate, that production expenses exceed those of the more expensive major motion pictures. But it’s a good investment. It’s like a legal license to sell crack.
Edward Castronova, in a Washington Post interview, says,
i know as a dad that my gaming time is not nearly as much as others’.
but
you have to understand how wide the distribution of individual
circumstancres is in this country. very wide. there’s millions of
people with jobs going nowhere, who are bright and sociable, but who
are trapped in social environments that are not so good. theyre
probably the prime candidates for this. and i dont really blame them.
society is letting them down.
Castronova’s concern that "gaming time" not cut into "dad time" begs the question. Is a "gaming dad" like any other "absent dad?" Does parenting permit compartmentalization of personality attributes? Would the kid who finds himself having to drag dad away from the wizards and elves in their scanties, be any more or less wounded having to drag dad out of the bar? It’s been observed that these online gaming communities are "the new golf." Call me a loner. I wasn’t that enamored of "the old golf."
