Nostalgic, uninformed hogwash

Catchy phrase. Here’s an article about a guy who stands bravely athwart the tide of “OMG!! We must uninvent the internet and go live in trees now!!! Think of the children!!!!”

And here’s one of the people he’s writing about, Dr. Hilarie Cash, who runs a retreat center in the woods for patients afflicted with addiction to video games and sex.

Probably all you have to do is introduce them, let the magic work itself, then see them in six months for treating the brand new addiction their recent beloved introduced them to. Nice scam there, Dr. Money.

Which might be enough entertaining linkage to detract from the fact I haven’t been blogging lately. But anyway.

I plod steadily forward in WoW. I’m at a complicated point where to explain the guild and power drama would take up too many boring paragraphs, suffice to say I’m restless again and am once again entertaining thoughts about “how can I find people I’m relatively compatible with who still want to raid a lot and try to get server firsts.”

And although I am relatively clear on the competition part, the compatibility part is changing even now, as living a virtual life teaches me new and startling things about what kind of people I enjoy and what kind I despise, and what kind are sort of like my real life friends.

Frankly, I think that’s what’s really behind the addiction – and like in the “Better Pencil” article, taking the current pseudo-psych alarm about new forms of communication makes as much sense as Plato complaining about how kids these days were spoiled by paper and their minds would rot from lack of memorization.
Suddenly, you can filter your friends strictly by intellect. Not just as in IQ, or educational background, but by whether they are proactive or lazy, obsessive or scattered, efficient or rambling, sarcastic or serious. Being married to someone who can’t figure out how to keyboard turn their way out of the noob area is no big deal, but gaming with someone like that is frustration waiting to happen.

I’ve been pondering that as I set up my little sim village, each personality trait represented, and wonder about the sims who happen to share them and will eventually encounter each other, and then the football player and the farmer will have something to talk about with each other, and so on.

So far the game hasn’t crashed yet, and at the same time it’s sort of boring and sterile. I want to like it, to interact with it, but I feel the invisible hand of the developers twisting my little virtual arms, demanding “You WILL live a stifling Mary Sue simlife in this Truman Show-like suburb
and you will not only LIKE it, you will get all excited about the Thanksgiving expansion where you get to visit Egypt and turn into a mummy ghost.”

Umm, no. Especially when I have a dreadful premonition that Egypt will be full of randomly generated sims with names like “Eduardo Takanaga.” At least some of them will be dark skinned with blond Beatles hair wearing suit coats with cargo shorts.
Until then, it’s downloading furniture and fashions from sims3.com for twenty bucks a set (cleverly disguised as “sim currency” – I can’t really rant about the economics because it’s actually more efficient than having to buy a new $20 box of CDs for equivalent content).

Sims 3 might be awesome in the future, but for now, I think it needs a lot of work. Or maybe those mods I mentioned earlier need some work, so the gamer can get in there and tweak the settings to do away with things like off camera death and other “bus actions.”

Gamer angst aside, I’m having a pretty good week. I got the extra fast violet proto-drake in WoW, after working on achievements for a year. My death knight is tearing up battlegrounds, having discovered the concept of getting experience in them. And my druid got some gear.

Now if I could only loot that stupid brewfest mount.