Little things that make me smile
By tnturner on Mar 29, 2007 in Random Musings
I’m a pretty easy going. Or those that know me pretty well seem to think so. I was in the car coming back from the bowling alley with my wife yesterday and was commenting about my blog. You see…I’m an online gamer. Online gamers, be it MMORPG’s, RTS’ or FPS’, have addictive personalities by nature. I’ve run the gamut of games since 1998: Ultima Online, Everquest, World of Warcraft and back to Ultima Online these past few weeks, even though I’m not ‘really playing’, it’s more like a social tool for me these day. I’m in a 500+ person guild, “The Syndicate”, where I chat with my friends and guildmates all hours of the day in IRC, Ventrillo or Teamspeak.
So when I started my blog back in December, I knew it spelled trouble. Not bad trouble, but trouble to my gaming fix. That’s not necessarily a bad thing when you think about it. It could have been drinking, drugs or gambling I was addicted to. I can say with the utmost certainty that I am now broken of my gaming addiction. The craving, the NEEDING, to be online at a certain time to accomplish a certain task, finish a quest where the mob is only up for ‘x’ amount of time. I don’t miss it, and I don’t ever want to go back to that.
I have this here blog to thank for it. I hit 1500 different IP hits as of this AM. Along with getting the last of the ‘big’ continents added to the dot on my Clustr Map. Is that anything really big to think about? Not really. I equate it to the pixels I chased while gaming. But I saw that this morning as I woke up (more like my kids waking me up actually) and it did put a smile on my face. My Seeking the Wisdom of the Ages blog has put a smile on my face. I would never have thought anyone would want to pay attention to my babblings. But to those of you that do…I guess thank you. You’ve helped an addict.
Seeking the Wisdom of the Ages…
Tom.
2 Comment(s)
I can’t say that I’ve ever gotten into the online gaming, or really the rpg games. If I had the live connection for my xbox it might be a different story.
I teach 6th grade. I have a few students that play World of Warcraft quite a bit. That surprised me because I thought it was something that older students/adults participated in.
I have a 1:1 computing environment in my classroom. Whenever we have free time about 70% of my students end up on http://www.maidmarian.com At first I thought that letting them participate in an mmorpg would be a bad idea. Then I listened to some of their conversations while playing. “To get in to the chat you type backslash , join, then the chat number. We’re in number 8. Don’t talk to me out loud, type your messages to me.” Or, “No, I’m by the castle. It’s north of where you are at. Check the map and come here.”
The Sherwood Dungeon game is popular with the boys and the girls, which also surprised me. Now I just have to find a way to make sure when an admin walks through they understand how using this as free time is beneficial, but the conversations the students are having then are usually “Help me kill the spider. Hit him with your sword!”
I posted on gaming in education a few days ago. Add it into your lesson plans. If they are using geographical terms, give them some sort of ‘quest’ that they need to complete. Killing “x” number of monsters before reaching checkpoint A at coordinates “x,y”. I know in Everquest that we were able to get x,y coordinates on the map. Just a thought or 2 to try and make it educationally appropriate for your admins.
(I saw your double post, not sure if you meant it or not)