I still play the game, but not to the detriment of my real life. I play it when it's fun, and I'm starting to use the game as something I can use to hone my creative skills. I can make videos, and produce audio for those videos. I'm thinking of starting another podcast. And aside from those things, I'm gearing up to start music composition again.
Well, that's an update in a nutshell. In the meantime, check out some of what I've made. It's not much, but it's a start.
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The story's so common that its gravity to me might not be fully apparent. I was in the role of the outsider for years and years. Ater all, the massively popular game was around for about six years when I gave Blizzard my five dollars for the original, newly changed, level 1-60 content. That was plenty of time for me to hear horror stories of people getting addicted and whittling away their entire life while their life was stagnant and depressing in every other place other than the computer monitor. The idea was ridiculous, that those sad weirdos could become addicted to a video game. How could that even happen? Do they not have self control? Their lives must be truly sad to fall into this as an escape.
I knew what it was doing to me for the first portion of time. A game with that much content absorbed me for a while. I had time in the holidays and I spent 100% of it in the newly revamped game. I probably played at least eight hours every single day, sometimes up to fourteen hours, and that didnt get old for months. Even after that, I played every day, joining a raid team and being there every day. I knew I was putting too much time in the game, but it felt so good that it didn't matter, so I just kept going.
The phase that was most amusing to me was the phase around spring and summer time of this year when my interest was kind of declining. I still stayed on always, but I was not as into it as before. Even as I spent every day playing, it was maybe three or four hours and not double that, so I had reasoned that I was perfectly fine and I could stop whenever I wanted. Even with people making jokes about the WoW addiction, comparing it to alcohol or hard drugs, I insisted that I just used it to pass time in between when I played games before. As if comparing my new obsessive behavior to my old obsessive behavior made everyone totally believe I was healthy. As if.
More recently, our guild ran into troubles. Our raids had attendance issues all the time, and we were left with few people who were reliable. Those of us who stayed floated up to high positions in the guild. Being somewhat ambitious and wanting to play the leader somewhat, I was positioned as the second in command of the guild once the guild leader took a sudden vacation and our raid team fell apart. He returned only a week later and after a hard week of hard work for me and several other members, we continued on raiding. I had many more responsibilities, and while my interest had declined in raiding and the game in general by that time, I enjoyed being a leader, so that kept me in the game. The friendships I had forged in the process also kept me there, as well. After all, one of my three best friends had thrown himself into this game so hard that it was the only thing he thought about and the only thing he really was interested in doing any more. Raids were what kept him going, and I didn't want them to fail, so I kept going as well.
In the past weeks, I began noticing that my opinion of the game changed drastically. All the things I'd built that fortified my love of the game had become walls that were keeping me playing the game. It turned into a job. I was paying to play a job. I then realized when I thought of it as a job that I had come to resent and hate it, and my walls were keeping me in a miserable place that I hated.
A couple of days ago, I had a long, existential conversation with these three friends about the nature of life and our places in it. I also had a conversation with my parents, who reminded me of something important that I forgot. What I had to do was simple - you have to decide what the thing is that you want to do, and do that. Will I never see my friends at the guild again if I quit the game? Will I lose something I love doing? What do I know that I really need to do in my life?
That's why I no longer play the game. Even ignoring the massive amount of my life it had taken over, I didn't even like it any more. I hated it. I only did it because I'd forgotten how to do anything else.
It feels pretty cheesy to say this, but when I gave my items and gold away, giving me little reason to return, I felt a weight off my shoulders. I feel like I can see a path now and I'm no longer lost in woods.
Who knows, maybe I'll write more. Maybe I'll do my album. Maybe I'll get my driver's license and a steady job. I could do any of them now.
]]>I'm learning more and more that they're actually putting effort into them. I've watched about seven or so Lady GaGa videos that are about 8 minutes long, filled with weird imagery and sometimes GaGa herself talking some sci-fi nonsense at the camera. This Katy Perry one is a big production as well, capitalizing on the infamy of teen singer Rebecca Black's viral "Friday" music video. Not to mention the bizarre E.T. video, featuring Alien Katy Perry and completely random Kanye West verses that ruin the whole thing.
Some of them are good. Some of them are really long, and not that great. Some of them are a weird country style Lady GaGa song that I never heard because I didn't buy her second album. And some of them are this, which for some reason has almost 400mil views.
]]>In any case, I'll start on the thing I originally wanted this blog for - lastprospekt. The project has been dormant for way too long, and about a week ago, I began again on it in earnest. My world and character bible has balooned in size about ten pages since then, with real content, and I've gotten a lot of stuff written that has remained in my head for years and years.
It's a little weird nailing down stuff that is amorphous in my brain. The biggest thing I wrote down was the system of powers, which was integral to the unnamed assassin's guild I have been developing. When I first came up with a concept for it, I had been writing an espionage story with a bait-and-switch sort of hook. The story starts out with a young male being seduced by the famous adult daughter of a powerful man staying at a hotel. (In the original story, he was a young teen, with her being a pedophile, but as of now I'm unsure if I want the story to be quite that racy.) As it turns out, the young man is actually a female shapeshifter who murders the celebrity and steals some important mcguffin from the father. As far as I had gotten with the background is that she has a protege she works with, and they work for some shadowy organization. As I expanded the idea, I came up with a good way to introduce supernatural elements and "powers" into an already fantastically not grounded in real life story. My point of the anecdote was that the power was so nebulous when I came up with it, but now I have the mechanic that spawns the powers, which concerns the spirits of those with powers and how their powers live on through those they come in contact with. I've left it diverse and open, which is how I want it.
In any case, the assassin's guild, which started out as a sidestory, became a great story to introduce as a very large part of the main story. In fact, some of the characters I came up with for the sidestory were great fits for characters in the main story, and the powers were wonderful additions in giving them motivations and whatnot. I always enjoy condensing down my characters and giving ties between all the different stories I work on.
One of the other things I tend to do a lot in my stories is have major character changes. When I started with characters in 2001, there were five characters that still exist in the current story. The story was a typical Japanese anime style thing with a young male going on a quest from his small village to greater things. This main character was a spiky blonde, Tetsuya Nomura inspired protagonist by the name of Vertei. His motivation was to save his sister, Song, from the evil Harl by seeking her out in the giant mechanized metropolis Hiirol. He finds his parents captured in the jail there, and meets a girl named Celenei, and together they save Song from Harl.
Only a couple of years after I came up with that, I changed Vertei considerably. Well, not considerably. His character was still the same. I just thought it would be much more interesting to have the general Japanese anime protagonist personality stuff in a small, raven haired female package instead of a generic spiky haired male one. Admittedly, the character, who is now known as Vereille, is much different than she was even back when I changed her gender and design to what it is now.
As for the other characters, they are pretty much universally different as well, but exist in some capacity. Song remains Vere's little sister, but has gone through many name changes in the meanwhile. Song became Kerisong, Kerisong became Kerisonne, and Kerisonne was condensed to Kerinne. Curiously, her personality had not, as she remains very cheerful and optimistic in the face of Vere's skepticism and pessimism.
Celenei doesn't exist in that capacity any more, as a love interest for Vereille. Instead, the character was mostly reused but this time as Celenne, Vere and Keri's mother. Heckt, their father, is still a part of the story as well. Harl remains the antagonist, but, er, in the draft I was talking about before, he was a giant computer system. He isn't, anymore.
In my tangent, I meant to illustrate one point - how drastically I can change characters. Nothing is set in stone. Changing Vertei to Vereille was probably my favorite change, and I just recently made a similar change. For a long time, the story had a character named Garion, who was the dark, brooding ally to Vereille and the protagonists of the story. For a while, he worked with Heckt at his government organization and was meant to be the "Angel" to Vereille's "Buffy".
Three separate characters stared at me. I had for a very long time had the character of Eironne, Vereille's older sister, who had been a wonderful happy person until she was emotionally and physically hurt in an accident. When she recovers, she is possessed by forces of evil and is eventually rid of them. I also had Garion, the brooding hero who pretty much takes center stage later in the story. Then I had the character I made for the assassin's guild, a young man driven to paranoia when his teleportation power manifests itself.
Then I thought, what if all these are the same character? Essentially, Eironne was gone. Vereille no longer has the older sister. Garion and the assassin are no longer male. It introduced a wonderful little subversion of formula in that our two main characters are female, but are attracted to each other and have similar sexual tension to any male and female duo, when in most other stories they would be either best friends or rivals, which is the fate of most relationships between females. Garionne (Gah-ry-on-nay) was born.
Very excited for the future of what I have to write. I have a whole new story I'm working on, which is helping me nail down some societal things between the different races of the world that I've created. I'll talk about that at some later date.
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