I work in the computer industry today, but I really have grown disenchanted with computing in general. As I repeat over and over to folks: anything powered by electricity is termporary. What I work on every day has very termporary value. This can be a bit disconcerting. But, then again, it pays the bills. And *that* is real.

Ultimately, our lives are in the physical world. The virtual world is one blackout, one protocol upgrade, one disk failure, one obsoleted technology away from oblivian. Digitize all of our knowledge, sure. But if it is not printed, it’s life expectancy is far shorter.

Folks, the virtual is just that, a facade. Steer away from it and enjoy reality. In the end, reality is far more interesting - just a bit harder.

To each their own (addiction). Here is a tale: I have always been allergic to advertising, and I don’t drink Coke. Show me cool looking beautiful people drinking Coke (or using any other consumer product)… I don’t buy it, literally. But one day I was sitting in the office and heard some egghead on a boring radio station start talking about his monumental academic history of Coca-Cola. _And after listening to that I went out the vending machine and bought a Coke._ Pathetic. I’d rather I was easily manipulated by smiles and pert breasts.

Anyway, thanks again to Jason for one of the most insightful sites on the Web. It’s just my own problem that I happen to be addicted to this sort of stuff.

“do you think you would’ve had those insights, had you not slogged through all the conscious material? I can definitely see how something like architecture might consist of collecting a lot of miscellaneous crap that you don’t really understand, until you finally reach a critical mass of knowledge where it all suddenly “turns on.”".

I totally agree, that’s exactly how it feels. We keep ‘inputting’ more and more information in terms of possible conscious design solutions and then suddenly a good one appears out of nowhere.

In other words the input process is more than reading the brief - it’s doing the bad, concious-level designs too.

[quote]to our average “serious” player this equates to anywhere between 12 hours ([b]for the casual and usually “useless” player)[/b] to honestly 10 hours a day, seven days a week for those “hardcore” gamers. During my stint, I was playing about 30 hours a week ([b]and still finding it hard to keep up with my farming[/b])[/quote]
Emphasis mine.

Note the first comment in bold. If you’re playing an online MMORPG to be social and be part of a tight group (read “guild”) of people, you’ll probably gravitate towards high-end guilds. High-end guilds put a lot of pressure on their members to be “useful”. This segues nicely into the second comment in bold. Farming tends to be the bread-and-butter method of being “useful”. All this talk of being “useful” is really about “keeping up with the Jones’s”.

Hence this comment:
[quote]there is truly no end to the game and every time you feel like you’re satisfied with your progress, another aspect of the game is revealed and, well, [b]you just aren’t as cool as you can be again[/b].[/quote]

Now, WoW doesn’t have to be anything at all like a civilized nightmare, I have a theory where what you get out of an online MMORPG has more to do with what you bring into it than anything else. If you’re having trouble with those qualitative skills we tend to bring up now and again, then you’re probably going to fall hard.

Finally, I wouldn’t say it’s just a distraction. On the other hand, some of the things that people get wrapped up in [b]are[/b] distractions. Case in point. Alcoholism is a distraction. Whatever issue(s) a person is having, it will only address the immediate symptom(s). It fails to address the underlying issue(s) that the person is having. Similarly, I would say that most, or more probably all, of the worlds WoW addicts (as opposed to players) rely on WoW to treat the symptom(s) of their discontent without actually having to struggle through their issue(s) for a real resolution.

That’s the Prisoner’s Dilemma at work. There’s more pressure to “keep up with the Jones’s” in an online game. It’s an odd parallel to civilization that probably speaks volumes about our society….

Although, I’ve known 2 friends drop out of college due to games, Ultima Online being the first, and Evercrack as well.

I enjoy the excursions into the digital fantasy worlds from time to time, a game like Neverwinter nights holds more appeal to me–since you can play it in a campaign mode (no need to play online).

I find that the online “worlds” such as Wow and the like, usually leads to avoidance of “real life”?

I may play NWN2, but looking back, its hard to justify the amount of time spent in a distraction–be it fun or not, when the world presents us SO MUCH to learn, and health and relationships don’t tend to support themselves without putting some time into them.

I hope you all Dream by day, not only by night.

[quote]
Would the Deer Spirit be willing to speak to the shaman, if the shaman hadn’t spent all that time tracking deer through the woods and developing that relationship—or to put it in neuropsychological terms, would his “thin slicing” have mattered, if he hadn’t such a large base of observations to draw from?
[/quote]

If the shaman didn’t listen, would he have heard?

If the shaman didn’t care about Deer, would Deer have bothered?

We’re getting to the roots of animism and what I think is how people are supposed to live. I’m glad to see this kind of discussion, it’s helping me to crystallize a lot of my thinking, and it’s long overdue in general at any rate.