World of Warcraft
Weekend Update: 2019-08-12
Leadership and MMORPGs
Helped with your depression or mental illness / Coping with Loneliness
While I have never been diagnosed, I have struggled my entire life. My mom dealt with periods of depression and suicidal thoughts, and I have struggled with these same dark thoughts at many times during my life. MMORPGs at least in part give me a different world to join and help me to get unstuck in my own thoughts. I can focus on those “wizard chores” as my friend Grace calls them, and forget for at least a moment that I feel like i am completely unraveling as a human being. There are times when I just can’t simply cope with human interaction, and as such I probably don’t really use MMORPGs to cope with loneliness in the same manner as most people would. However there are times when I am deep in one of my “turtle mode” phases, where simply being reminded that there are other human beings out there as they scurry around me in a major city hub helps. MMORPGs allow me to be alone without really being alone, and they also give me an impetus to reach out to other human beings at times because there are many tasks that cannot be completed without doing so.Been a place you found lasting friendships / Finding real friends
My first real MMORPG was Everquest and I started playing that in 2001. Over the eighteen years between I have flitted from game to game, and during that process picked up a number of friends in each of them that I still have regular contact with to this day. The whole “Bel’s Party Van” thing came about because of my habit of gathering up people in my wake and trying to drag them along with me to the next thing on the horizon. The truth is I have met an awful lot of my really close friends through blogging as well. For sake of this topic I am just going to run through the list of people that I record the AggroChat podcast with on a weekly basis.- Ammo – We both played World of Warcraft on the same server and met at some point along the way through that. Additionally since that point we have played dozens of other games together and she has been responsible for 99.9% of the Artwork you see on this blog.
- Ashgar – We met through another AggroChat member during Cataclysm, when a bunch of people that I had played with in Vanilla came back to Argent Dawn and I gathered them up in my guild. Has become one of my closest friends and we have hung out in person several times at Pax South.
- Grace – We met initially through blogging, but I absolutely drafted her into joining the Final Fantasy XIV guild in 2013. Since then we have realized that we suffer from a lot of the same issues, and it is super important to have people in your life who understand that sometimes you cannot handle human interaction, but also want to be able to do stuff.
- Kodra – We raided together in Vanilla World of Warcraft, and have been in a lot of different guilds together over the years. We weren’t super close back then but through years of constant interaction have forged a friendship based on shared experience and amicably disagreeing on various topics.
- Tamrielo – Was one of the leaders of our Vanilla Raid and also someone that I talked to on a fairly regular basis. In the years between gaming together in WoW, I got adopted into what was then an AOL Instant Messenger chat group and ultimate was the prototype for what would eventually become AggroChat. There are times when it feels like Tam and I are the same person put through vastly different experiences.
- Thalen – My dwarven brother. Thalen raided with a different group in World of Warcraft, but this comes from an era when all of the raid groups were friendly with each other. He regularly attended our alt night events, and through many years of that we developed a friendship. He also has been drug along on many of my adventures and I am thankful that he too is someone I have gotten to hang out with in person.
Improved your communication skills and teamwork / leadership
I suppose I have always come across as way more of a reasonable adult than I actually am at any given point. This is in part why I found myself straight out of college in my very first job being thrust into a supervisory role. I was the lead web developer for a fortune 500 company, and was given a team of three people to work under me. Life was fine and dandy up until the point my Boss decided that I needed to punish one of my employees for taking too long of lunch breaks. I was forced to write them up for something I didn’t believe in… and it chafed super hard. From that point forward I purposefully avoided allowing myself to be pushed into a leadership role in the workplace. When World of Warcraft was shaping up to be the next big thing, I knew I wanted a really good place to hang my hat. I also knew that I had come from a fairly unfortunate situation in Everquest, where the guild leader and his wife more or less dictated what was being done on a nightly basis. The only way that I was certain not to fall into this situation was to start a guild and lead it myself. I gathered up as many friends as I had at the time from a long line of games and sorta pointed them in a single direction. That lead to the founding of House Stalwart a guild that is still alive and kicking in spite of me no longer leading it. Each time I joined a raid I got thrust into positions of responsibility. I had a former raid leader impart upon me the wisdom that when someone is willing to step up and talk through problems in a raid, that ultimately they are going to be viewed as one of the leaders. So after having two raids blow up on me, I had a friend come to me asking me to take a chance on him. Myself, Dageransus, Elnore and Thalen all founded the Duranub Raiding Company and it thrived up until the point that World of Warcraft placed their hand on the scale creating perks for Raiding Guilds and pretty much dooming the non-Guild alliance. In all of these situations I was forced to negotiate with other players in order to get the result we needed. This meant dealing with all manner of interpersonal disputes and even breaking out bargaining tactics to make sure that the raid was able to function every single week with 25 capable and smiling faces. We poured over statistics trying to figure out how we could cultivate talent, and minimize the impact of the folks that weren’t really pulling their weight. All of these things happened without having any real power over any of the individuals we were trying to influence. There was nothing at all keeping a player from simply logging out of the game and walking away permanently. I am not exactly sure when it clicked that I was essentially doing the thing which I had avoided like the plague for most of my career. I was leading people and even having to deal with punishments and reconciliation. A transition started to happen, where I kept being pushed into taking on more responsibility at work, and with it I kept backpedaling away from responsibility in game. These days I am the manager over three different groups of development resources totally sixteen different individuals that I am responsible for. I also regularly get called in to serve on various projects which come with their own management responsibilities. None of these are things I would have ever felt comfortable doing, had I not years of experience doing the same basic thing in MMORPGs. The problem is… I can’t list 18 years of guild leadership on a resume without getting a bunch of funny looks. The boomer generation isn’t aware of it being equivalent experience. When my friends are going to places like Amazon, Google or Microsoft… they are awake to the realization that leading people is leading people. There will come a time when those hours spent convincing the Mage to give it one more try, will absolutely be resume worthy. The weird thing is… I have an underground of MMORPG gamers at work. There are a bunch of us that talk about these experiences, and I seemingly have a way of being able to tell when someone plays. When you have been called to lead a group of strangers, it is amazing how much easier it is to lead people you actually know. I have a vested interest in watching these mmo gamers coming up through the ranks, and serving as that mentor that gets what they are choosing to do in their free time. We just lost one recently that was a Mythic raider, and I hope to keep tabs on their career and maybe recruit them back at some point in the future. The very long story short… MMORPGs made a positive impact upon my life and gave me the confidence to go on and do bigger things in my own career. I feel like they are more of a positive influence on most of the individuals that I know as opposed to being a hindrance. There are so many life skills that get taught one skill point at a time when having to navigate your way through a bunch of other human beings. Once you make your own click moment and understand that what you are doing is the same thing as leadership in any other form, it will start to effect the decisions you make when the game is logged out as well.AggroChat #253 – Thiamine and Riboflavin
Featuring: Â Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
So just a heads up we had some technical difficulty while recording the show. Â Apparently the server that we use to record on was slowly dying throughout the night and culminated in a grand crescendo at the end with us all getting disconnected. Â As a result we cut off abruptly. In between these issues however we talk about Final Fantasy XIV Live Letter and the upcoming class changes. Bel talks about how Crowfall is turning into a game and feels like less of a tech demo than it did. Â Tam talks about Total War Three Kingdoms. We discuss the madness that happened after last weeks show and lots more people signing on to the World of Warcraft Classic madness. We wrap up with a topic about some of the cool stuff Games Workshop is doing.
Topics Discussed:
- …. Pation
- Final Fantasy XIV Live Letter
- Class Changes
- Benchmark
- Crowfall is Actually A Game
- Nostalgia for Corpse Runs
- Eve Offline Skill Progression
- Thalen Wants a Survival Game that Cares about Correct Nutrition
- Total War: Three Kingdoms
- Another Romance of the Kingdoms
- World of Warcraft Classic
- More of AggroChat joins this madness
- Games Workshop Continues to be Decent
- Awesome new shading paint
- Contrast Paint
- Abrupt Cut Off
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