2x entries for the price of one!

An entry on ashtma, and an entry on barefootedness.

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Continuing the adventure

I just "dinged" level 80 in World of Warcraft. This is the final level that you can achieve in the game, meaning that I have gotten through all of the content and made it to what MMOs call "endgame." This is a pretty substantial achievement, requiring lots of time put into the character, building up abilities and levels and such. In a sense, I've kinda beaten the game. In another sense, I've only just begun to play for real.

So what have I learned during this long and interesting adventure? What are the results of this long and interest experiment?

When I first started, I was captivated by the delight of exploration. But now, that delight has faded. I've explored almost every place in the world now. There's nowhere left. So what interests me now?

One of the reasons I never got into an MMO in the past was because I could never really get into online socialization. And that is still the case. Although I certainly like my guild mates and enjoy interacting with them, I find that I don't really care about them much. More than that, I don't really gain much satisfaction in sharing experiences with them.

No... the original reason that I could not stand MMOs and online games of all sorts still exists. My enjoyment of WoW is just not tied to the game itself. The value I derive from the game is derived entirely from the experiences that I get to share with my lovers, parmonster and viesti. 80-90% of my play time in the game has been logged alongside one of them, and the rest has been done with the intention of improving my abilities for the next time I play with them.

With all of the time and effort I've put into the experiment, I expected that I would eventually find the game enjoyable for its own sake. Perhaps I would find the online interaction to be satisfying and enjoy that. Perhaps I would discover some interesting set of action-puzzles that I could derive satisfaction from solving. But nope. *ALL* of my satisfaction derives from sharing this with my lovers. Were they both to quit tomorrow, I would cancel my account in a heart beat. Without them, the game holds 0 value for me, especially now that I'm at level 80.

I do absolutely love being able to "talk shop" with the two of them, discussing play strategies, talking about cool storyline moments, sharing interesting new experiences that I find, etc. I love running through dungeons in a cooperative group, relying on each other to do their part. There's nothing like the rush of excitement you get in the game:

I watch parmonster's character start to take significant damage and lose threat on a big monster that starts to lumber towards me and beat me up. As I cry for help, viesti's character leaps from behind to tear the monster to pieces and get him away from me until parmonster can find me in the fray of battle and once again monopolize the creature's attention. Meanwhile, I dance along my buttons, healing my lovers as quickly as I can, hoping against hope that I can keep them alive long enough to kill the monsters and survive this battle.

And once you've had those wonderful adventure experiences, being able to recount them to one another throughout the day is fantastic. Discussing the epic moments that you've had. Talking about the adventures you've experienced. Discussing new plot points for your character's backstory. etc. etc. It's a wonderful way to bond with someone that you love. To do exciting, challenging, and enjoyable things like this with one another.

I asked the questions: Why are there millions of subscribers playing only with people they've only met online? Why is my girlfriend getting so deeply involved in the game that she can spend hours playing by herself and doing nothing with anyone IRL?

I don't think I'm going to find the answers. I could not find the things they found in the game, even after all this time and effort. Thus, I declare my little experiment over. My conclusion is that I simply don't understand what people see in this game, in and of itself.

But as a social game with folks I care about... I get it. So long as my lovers continue to play... game on!

Experimentation

One of the things that has really challenged me in my life is the ability to describe what it is that I'm experiencing. I generally find that my internal experiences are hard to map onto symbols and metaphors that I can describe to folks. And by being better able to describe it to others, I can more accurately describe it to myself and consider how it works in my life.

One of the big problems I've had with this is in terms of discovering a new concept, idea, project, hobby, or whatever to get interested in. In the past, I've tended to adopt such bits of stuff as my identity. "I'm a skateboarder" I'd say after a month or two of skateboarding. It made me unhappy to see myself constantly describing things as part of my identity only to have them become less interesting and appealing after a while.

So in the fall of last year, I came up with a new way of describing my newfound interests to myself and others: experiments. I haven't become a wow player. I'm experimenting with WoW. I haven't become a barefooter. I'm experimenting with barefooting. That's a far more accurate way to render things and gives them the proper weight when describing them.

I tend to have a lot of such experiments going on at any given moment in time, and I tend to launch myself into such things with intensity and glee. Because, simply put, they are rather important to me in the way they work. :)