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Confessions of an Aging Gamer

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Confessions of an Aging Gamer

I had some thing happen to me this morning while playing Rift that has happened countless times.  I got a message to the effect of “Hai Belghast!” from someone that I noticed is in fact on my friends list.  However for the life of me I have no clue who it is based on the name.  Not wanting to seem like a heartless bastard I play along, until finally some nugget of a conversation triggers in my head and explains to me that yes… I do in fact know the person and who they are.  Essentially my brains filing system works really weirdly when it is concerned with other people.  I meticulously file away bits of information like personal details… hell sometimes even emotions or songs that I attribute to that person…  my brain building this complex network of only vaguely connected information that I equate to as this person.  However often times when it comes to a name… that information is filed as unimportant and is often jettisoned into the sands of time.  Now there are some folks that use the same name in every single game… and for them I have a bit more rote memorization of those names…  and even better if they happen to recycle the same fragment of a name over and over like I do with “Bel”.  However the problem is after a couple of decades of playing MMOs… I have had so many names associated to so many different people crammed in my skull that it all sort of blends together.

If you think of it like this…

  • Everquest – probably had a pool of about 500 player names that I had to memorize and associate with one another on both Veeshan and Xegony the servers I played on.
  • Dark Age of Camelot – this was a relatively small guild, and we were part of a relatively small alliance so probably 200 names or so.
  • Horizons – I got active in the larger community here so probably around 300 names that I had to sort out and try and remember.
  • City of Heroes – all told probably about 300 names as well but there was a lot of carry over from EQ, DAoC and Horizons.
  • World of Warcraft – Recently we hit the 1000 character cap in the guild… and considering longevity and activity in the community as a whole both horde and alliance side in multiple guilds 2000 names or so total.
  • Rift – Been in several guilds on several servers…  so probably around 300 names to remember.
  • Guild Wars 2 – Not as active here but in four guilds so probably around 200 names to remember.
  • Elder Scrolls Online – We had 150 players at launch… and this was a strange once since we interacted with account names not characters.
  • Final Fantasy XIV – last I checked we were at around 300 characters in the guild, and if you factor in random community folks and other linkshells that probably goes up to around 500 character names.

So not factoring other games in…  we are already up to around 5000 character names that are swimming around in my head looking for associations with some bundle of information about them.  Then there are a plethora of other games, twitter, raptr, steam and other means of contact that I have with names associated there is quite literally no way I could possibly keep up with it all.  I am trying to fake it like a pro but sometimes I fail miserably.  The problem is I want to remember, I want to know exactly who someone is just looking at a name but I simply can’t every time.  What is extra frustrating about it is… that the information is up there somewhere because I rarely if ever forget.  I just have the worlds worst filing system because I associate things with bits of information that make horrible indexes.  I mean how can you search by a feeling…  when you are only inputting a name?  Anyways so firstly I want to apologize if you are ever happy to see me logging in and I am super distant at first.  What I am honestly doing is trying to get more information from you to connect the puzzles pieces until it all comes snapping into focus.  Imagine yourself in a library where there are tons of books but no filing system… and the ones that you used last are of course the easiest to get to.  However the ones that haven’t been touched for months or years… they are going to take awhile to uncover but are eventually reachable.

I am not sure how much of this really is aging, and how much is the fact that I have way more information in my brain today that I had a decade or two ago.  I grew up in a small town where I only ever knew a couple hundred people total in my life.  Now I interact with literally thousands of people on a monthly basis, and in doing so…  I am desperately trying to care deeply about each and every one of them.  The empathy section of my brain is sort of permanently working on overdrive trying to grasp and hold as many people as I can in my monkeysphere while at the same time trying to lose as little information on the ones that just happen to slip out.  I realize this is a bit of an odd topic, and it is once again coming late in the day as I sit down at the keyboard for the first time for any extended length of time.  I guess I am proving that I can in fact write both in the early morning and in the evening.  In any case know that I really do care, I just sometimes need more time to boot up my search engine than others when it comes to retrieving any meaningful information from a name.  The image is of course not connected to this topic at all… I just wanted to somehow blunt the wall of text with a cool mount.

Waterless Thanksgiving

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Waterless Thanksgiving

I realize it is late, but if I blog now it still counts right?  Today was an extremely strange day, but I am now home and mostly happy and sane.  This whole adventure started last night when we heard on the news that my home town was on the brink of being without water.  The irony in that statement is that the town is named Nowata…  and this is essentially a running punchline that I have had to hear my entire damned life.  Tuesday morning an explosion rocked the Airosol chemical plant in Neodesha Kansas, roughly sixty miles from my home town.  In the process of fighting the fire all sorts of strange chemicals ran off into the Verdigris river…  that feeds the water supplies of a bunch of towns as it travels its way down and eventually joins up with the Arkansas river.  Namely this meant that the town I grew up in had to shut off water at midnight last night to keep from getting any contaminants into the system.  It was estimated by noon today that the taps would run dry as they only had about ten hours worth of water available in the tower.  When I first heard that I thought… well I guess there goes the plans for Thanksgiving, because surely no one was going to attempt to hold a big meal without access to a bathroom.  I would be wrong.

When I finally got a hold of my mom this morning she acted completely unfazed by the news, like it was silly for me to think that dinner might be off.  She just said that she was telling people to make sure they used the bathroom before coming.  She also said that we could always just go out behind a building…  remember I come from fairly humble roots.  My wife backed out because she needed to assist a friend of ours from trying to move out of her apartment, and in part because I don’t think she liked the concept of attempting Thanksgiving without running water.  Thankfully as it turns out they had prepped pretty much all of the food minus the bird well ahead of time, so it was just a matter of cooking a small turkey this morning.  All in all it went as pleasant as it could be given that it meant hanging out with my blatantly racist uncle and my sometimes extremely paranoid aunt.  My conspiracy theorist uncle did not make it, so there is at least that.  I love my parents dearly though and I appreciate the effort that my mom put into trying to make a proper Thanksgiving happen.

It has been rough the last few years because over time we have lost what I call our “anchor households” being those locations and individuals that glued the holidays together.  One by one I lost my grandparents, and with the death of my wife’s step father… and her father and step mom turning snowbirds and RVing full time…  we really don’t have much of an infrastructure for proper holiday observation.  We are not the hosting type, because honestly we are the ones that start a timer from the moment we eat…  because it starts ticking down until we have reached our fill of other human beings.  It is hard being an introvert in a very extrovert-centric family.  There were a whole slew of volatile topics discussed, but I essentially knew it was going to happen before hand so I had prepared myself for it.  All things considered though, it wasn’t a bad afternoon and I wound up staying around four hours which is probably a new record for me.  That was honestly the point where I decided… I should probably head towards someplace with indoor plumbing that worked.

Waterless Thanksgiving

The highlight of the day however was seeing the army of orange fuzzballs following my dad around when I went home to see the handiwork on his new porch.  Also of note I saw two wild turkeys that have apparently been hanging around my folks house.  The cats though were adorable as can be, and one decided it liked me… and hung out beside me on the porch.  It of course screamed its little head off because my dad has gotten in the habit of feeding them wet catfood… and they apparently thought it was well past feeding time.  I love my family, but I never really felt that connected to them.  What I mean is to say that I never really fit in or seemed to think in the same way as they did.  Going home and visiting them is draining, because I feel like I have to put on my “Mark” suit, meaning I shift into the person that they expect me to be without really meaning to.  Being in my hometown always feels suffocating, because I have so much history there… and there are still a large number of people who remember me as something that I probably never was.  All of this makes me appreciate the life I have built for myself, my amazing wife, my furkids… and the family that I chose.  There are so many of you out there that may or may not actually read this… that I am thankful for having in my life.  While there are so many of you that I will probably never actually meet in the flesh… it doesn’t make each and every one of you any less my family.  I have a habit of adopting people… and I am thankful for each of you that I have in my life.

Waterless Thanksgiving

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Waterless Thanksgiving

I realize it is late, but if I blog now it still counts right?  Today was an extremely strange day, but I am now home and mostly happy and sane.  This whole adventure started last night when we heard on the news that my home town was on the brink of being without water.  The irony in that statement is that the town is named Nowata…  and this is essentially a running punchline that I have had to hear my entire damned life.  Tuesday morning an explosion rocked the Airosol chemical plant in Neodesha Kansas, roughly sixty miles from my home town.  In the process of fighting the fire all sorts of strange chemicals ran off into the Verdigris river…  that feeds the water supplies of a bunch of towns as it travels its way down and eventually joins up with the Arkansas river.  Namely this meant that the town I grew up in had to shut off water at midnight last night to keep from getting any contaminants into the system.  It was estimated by noon today that the taps would run dry as they only had about ten hours worth of water available in the tower.  When I first heard that I thought… well I guess there goes the plans for Thanksgiving, because surely no one was going to attempt to hold a big meal without access to a bathroom.  I would be wrong.

When I finally got a hold of my mom this morning she acted completely unfazed by the news, like it was silly for me to think that dinner might be off.  She just said that she was telling people to make sure they used the bathroom before coming.  She also said that we could always just go out behind a building…  remember I come from fairly humble roots.  My wife backed out because she needed to assist a friend of ours from trying to move out of her apartment, and in part because I don’t think she liked the concept of attempting Thanksgiving without running water.  Thankfully as it turns out they had prepped pretty much all of the food minus the bird well ahead of time, so it was just a matter of cooking a small turkey this morning.  All in all it went as pleasant as it could be given that it meant hanging out with my blatantly racist uncle and my sometimes extremely paranoid aunt.  My conspiracy theorist uncle did not make it, so there is at least that.  I love my parents dearly though and I appreciate the effort that my mom put into trying to make a proper Thanksgiving happen.

It has been rough the last few years because over time we have lost what I call our “anchor households” being those locations and individuals that glued the holidays together.  One by one I lost my grandparents, and with the death of my wife’s step father… and her father and step mom turning snowbirds and RVing full time…  we really don’t have much of an infrastructure for proper holiday observation.  We are not the hosting type, because honestly we are the ones that start a timer from the moment we eat…  because it starts ticking down until we have reached our fill of other human beings.  It is hard being an introvert in a very extrovert-centric family.  There were a whole slew of volatile topics discussed, but I essentially knew it was going to happen before hand so I had prepared myself for it.  All things considered though, it wasn’t a bad afternoon and I wound up staying around four hours which is probably a new record for me.  That was honestly the point where I decided… I should probably head towards someplace with indoor plumbing that worked.

Waterless Thanksgiving

The highlight of the day however was seeing the army of orange fuzzballs following my dad around when I went home to see the handiwork on his new porch.  Also of note I saw two wild turkeys that have apparently been hanging around my folks house.  The cats though were adorable as can be, and one decided it liked me… and hung out beside me on the porch.  It of course screamed its little head off because my dad has gotten in the habit of feeding them wet catfood… and they apparently thought it was well past feeding time.  I love my family, but I never really felt that connected to them.  What I mean is to say that I never really fit in or seemed to think in the same way as they did.  Going home and visiting them is draining, because I feel like I have to put on my “Mark” suit, meaning I shift into the person that they expect me to be without really meaning to.  Being in my hometown always feels suffocating, because I have so much history there… and there are still a large number of people who remember me as something that I probably never was.  All of this makes me appreciate the life I have built for myself, my amazing wife, my furkids… and the family that I chose.  There are so many of you out there that may or may not actually read this… that I am thankful for having in my life.  While there are so many of you that I will probably never actually meet in the flesh… it doesn’t make each and every one of you any less my family.  I have a habit of adopting people… and I am thankful for each of you that I have in my life.

Whose Fault Is This?

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Per the title, quite possibly the least meaningful question it is possible to ask about anything. We learn it early, we learn it from everything around us. We obsess over the answer, as if the answer had any significance whatsoever. Spoilers: it never does. In relationships, in business, in politics, in parenting, whether the event in question is good or bad, we ask this question constantly. We’re also really bad at answering it, or of doing anything useful with the answer once we have it. Perhaps we can definitively assign blame, then what? Are those to blame then exiled? Social pariahs? Sometimes. Sometimes we eliminate them in a variety of ways, removing them from “positions where they can continue to do damage”. Oftentimes we seek revenge for their wrongdoings, exacting vengeance in the name of justice as if any data anywhere suggested that was effective. What all of these things do is drive  a desire never to be caught, for even the tiniest mistake. Never be at fault, never be the one to blame. It is how small errors pile up until massive systems come crashing down. It is how those seeking to exploit the system find loopholes and get away with them. It is what makes it ever harder to answer the question “whose fault is this”, because we all know that it will be a Very Bad Time for whoever that person is. What do we gain by this? Do we correct the error by identifying its source? Can we even accurately identify the source, or is that, like many things, more complicated than a simple pointed finger? Does ferreting out those responsible change the past, or adequately ensure that errors won’t happen in the future? Not really. Instead we spin our wheels unproductively, generating acrimony and paranoia to no real end. We get very worked up over the pursuit of this unknown, as if knowing it is an end unto itself. My mother has a question that she poses whenever I or anyone else is getting worked up this way: “How would that be productive?” It’s a question that comes from a lifetime of clinical detachment, a need to separate conscious thought from emotion lest the latter overwhelm you. It can feel heartless; when I confide in her that I’m trying not to have an anxiety attack over my current stress level, she asks what having a panic attack would accomplish. Nothing, obviously, and to the wrong target that would be infuriating. For me it’s a redirection, a shift in focus and a hint at a better question. I get anxious when I ask the question “what is going to happen next?” — it’s not an answerable question and it’s possible to expend a lot of energy trying in vain to find an answer. It’s stressful to pursue unanswerable questions, but “How would that be productive?” hints at a better question: “What would be productive?” At an uncertain time, my mind works to find certainty, and I get anxious if I pursue questions that can’t be answered. Pursuing questions that CAN be answered, ones that add value and are productive, gives me something for my mind to work on and lowers my stress level. For me, it’s a stepped process. I might not be able to answer “What happens next?” and I might not be able to answer the better “What do I do next?” I’ll take that a step deeper, if I don’t know what I should do next, I’ll ask “What can I do next?” Sometimes this isn’t enough, and the next question becomes “How do I find out what I can do next?” If I can’t answer a question, I step down until I get to a question I can answer, then work my way back up. So, “Whose fault is this?” is really two questions. One is “How can we stop this bad thing from happening again?” and the other is “How do I stop feeling bad about this thing that has happened?” The unspoken thought process here is that finding the fault allows us to answer both at once, by “eliminating” the problem. Unfortunately, that’s not how problems are fixed, especially with people. At the very best, it brings up another question: “What do we do with this knowledge?” There’s a different question that I’ve come to prefer: “What do we do next?” It helps us move forward productively, and helps us focus our efforts in a way that bears fruit. It skips the assignation of blame because the followup step to finding fault is inevitably “okay, now what?” which is where we’re getting to anyway. It sacrifices vengeance for forward motion– we will go on and if you are not with us, you will be left behind. It outs your actual saboteurs while allowing those who have made honest mistakes to atone. It is not forgiveness, it is efficiency. Exacting punishment requires resources that would be better spent on forward motion. We are a social species; being left behind is often punishment enough, and exceptions tend to make themselves known. I spend a lot of time now trying to pursue only questions that have productive answers, and determining what those questions are. I want to ask actionable questions, I want to pursue trains of thought that have a tangible effect. It’s called in some circles a “bias for action”– a bias I’ll readily admit to.