On my game

Ok, so I went back to Warcraft.

I've had a love hate relationship with this game over the years and just got back into it after 7 months away (longer than that, as the last session was a 5 day freebie after another long break). There's a kind of hunger with addiction, with one of my addictions being gaming. You have to get the right fix to satisfy the addiction. Sometimes mine gets satisfied with beating the AI in games like Settlers IV and Moo2.

It appears that with the closing of the cricket season, the hunger for nonstop gaming is back. All addictions tend to come with some kind of cost, my gaming addiction isn't an exception there. For me, it's late nights where I stop in game for far too long. Not enough sleep doesn't do much for my being human the next day. Itunes actually helps there, as I'll queue up albums along with the random stuff. The start of an album is a good marker for a "if I stay one more track, I'll be here for an hour", which gives an excellent excuse to break off at 1am and get shuteye otherwise I'd stay until daybreak.

There's other costs too. Some of my games place physical demands that mount up after a while. Computer games causing physical issues ? Yeah baby yeah. I've been around pooters for 30 years now and have the associated RSI in my wrist. Curiously, some games actually help the wrist problem. Must start that Mass Effect adventure again. Warcraft attacks my shoulder too, to the point where I'm in actual pain from it.

Day off today. Only gaming today has been 1:1 in Settlers IV (may start another after this post). We had a Call To Arms in Eve too (Eve's addiction cost is mind numbness from tedium) which I avoided because it clashed with England cricket on telly.

I know I have this particular addiction, along with a few others. Knowing you have an issue is one step along the way to controlling it. I'm having fun at the moment though, so I think I'm just gonna ride with it.

The Warcraft guild I'm associated with at the moment is called Violence Reborn. It's dominated by Scandinavians ganging up with English members. Like all internet communities, we have people from all over the place. One of our recruitment questions is "If you were caught in the middle of a gang war between English and Swedish people, which side would you join and why ?" Gaming needs to be about fun. If the fun goes out, it becomes a second job. That's one reason I struggle with Eve, the occasional PvP I do doesn't make up for the second job grind.

VR has a lot of great people, guild chat is great fun to join in with. Crazy people make you laugh. I'm really glad they took me in when things got unbearable on Maelstrom. Eve has good people too, Luth and the other English Cultists are great mates.

And that's the key to the addiction to that particular game. Single player games are good for a few play throughs but there's only so many times you can listen to the same dialogue or so many times you can execute the Killer Tactic before needing something different. With MMOs, you're interacting with real people and there's no script.

I've come a cropper a few times there, my previous WoW existence on the Maelstrom server earned me a fair bit of respect as a player but was also blighted by a few incidents that I could have handled better. I'm still friends with a lot of people on that server (most of whom moved to Blade's Edge with VR) but there's a few things that could have gone ... better. Although with one or two of those, "better" would have involved hiring a hitman. Yes, I have had death threats from people who couldn't recognise their own addictions.

Errrr - where was I ?

Gaming addiction - reactivated
Antsy feeling of "there's something I should be doing" - sorted
(I did the washing up earlier)
Shoulder killing me - check

There's a good reason (or am I just telling myself this) for the gaming too - it allows me to kick my brain into a different mode of working. Normally, I'm multitasking and taking in 3 or 4 inputs at once. Like at the moment, I'm tapping out this post while listening to music, watching the tennis and switching tabs to forums and Facebook. When I'm gaming, I tunnel vision focus in which allows the higher reasoning part of my brain to switch off and get some sleep. I do the same at work, by opening Spider Solitaire at lunchtime and going Robot on it. It gives the bit of my brain that does the thinking to take a break.

Oh dear. This is turning into Wall Of Text territory again. I think I'll leave it by attacking something the Eve players say :

"In Warcraft, you have to go looking for pvp. In Eve, the pvp looks for you."

Not true. In Eve, the Empire regions has active police who will intervene if fights break out (unless you're at war). On my previous Warcraft server, everywhere except cities and starting zones was a PvP zone. Members of the opposite faction would come in and grief you. Nowhere to hide, unlike Eve which has stations.

So - Eve players, you have it easy. Kinda true for the WoW server I'm on now too, which operates more like Eve's Empire. Time to feed the addiction again ! Although I'll avoid WoW again tonight because of that shoulder which still hates me.