Confessions Of A 30-Year-Old Gamer
This one has been floating around for a bit, but is worth linking - Time Magazine's Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates has a piece up called 'Confessions of a 30-Year-Old Gamer', in which he talks about his MMO semi-addiction in pretty bald terms.
I'm not sure labeling himself simply as a 'gamer' is fair to gamers as a whole - this is specifically MMO addiction, as opposed to playing Tetris on the way home - but his MMO experiences are stark, of course: "I retreated to my old haven of video games and purchased Everquest, the forerunner to WoW. The dude at the counter rang me up and laughed as he said "Picking up Evercrack, I see." I didn't fully get the joke until two years later."
Oh? "By then I was playing the game 16 hours a day. I'd gained 30 pounds. I didn't have a job. The end came one weekend when I played a marathon session, which I only interrupted for trips to Dunkin' Donuts. I quit, lost the weight, and put my life back in order." However, he does make a good and fair point in there: "What I came to understand was that WoW was not necessarily an escape, but a surrogate for a community that is harder and harder to find in the real world." So, not a hatchet job, at all - but bald and thought-provoking. It may just be the headline that bothers me? [Via T-I.]
Comments
That's hilarious. Once upon a time a very near and dear female friend of mine demanded I get Diablo II. I lost a good six months of my life on that thing. Even after I got bored and the game got repetitive to me I just couldn't stop.
Eventually, I took a vacation, and living in hostels for a month and seeing interesting real life things broke the habit, but she still plays. I think I'm going to show her that widow site the article linked to.
Posted by: Caio | January 16, 2007 6:19 PM
I'm getting pretty tired of the 'I played too much but now I'm better' articles. To counter this trend I'm writing the article 'I can't play enough, and now holidays, beer, and interesting literature keep getting in the way of defeating my electronic nemesis'.
Posted by: Rossignol | January 17, 2007 3:17 AM
30 ????
I'm 36 and still haven't touched a MMO and I plan on keeping it that way.
MMOs remind me of one of Dante's rings of hell which I'm sure to be stuck in when I die.
Posted by: spot778 | January 17, 2007 1:39 PM
Just wanted to drop by and thank you for linking this.
Posted by: Ta-Nehisi\Longaxe\Salaam | January 18, 2007 6:39 AM
Ok, so this reply might be about 10 months late. But still, I would like to say 'thx'. I might be 20 and not 30, and I might not have had as many hours of gameplay as most of you. But I had my share of real-life 'sad-realisations' that I for one will do the best I can to stay with a game of tetris on the way back, instead of a day-by-day filled experience of an awsomely great created game yet totaly off-world taking experience.
Posted by: Paul | November 24, 2007 7:58 AM