by Karen Hertzberg on Oct 13, 2009
Loading... is the premier daily MMORPG news, coverage, and
commentary newsletter, only from Ten Ton Hammer.
Greetings, Loading... fans! Karen "Shayalyn" Hertzberg here.
I'll be handling Loading... for the next three days and holding down
the Ten Ton Hammer fort while Ethec and the boys frolic...er, attend
meetings...in Las Vegas. I wonder what trouble I can get into while
they're gone. Send your Editor Gone Wild ideas to me at
href="email:shayalyn@tentonhammer.com">shayalyn@tentonhammer.com.
And now, on to the business of MMOG commentary....
There's certainly a subset of MMO gamers who are
ultra-competitive. These power gamers race to the level cap, duke it
out endlessly in PvP to stay near the top of the leaderboards, and
aren't satisfied with anything less than the best gear. But staying on
top takes a great deal of time and commitment that the average MMO
player, the one with a career and family life, just doesn't have. It's
to those gamers, the ones who have competitive spirits yet lack the
ability or willingness to let MMO gaming consume their lives, that I
dedicate this issue of Loading... Competitive by Nature, Casual by
Necessity.
You vote with what you view at Ten Ton Hammer, and the
result is the Ten Ton Pulse (
href="http://www.gunnars.com/" target="_blank">What
is The Pulse?).
Here's today's top 5 Pulse results: href="http://www.gunnars.com/">
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/41"Biggest movers today:
CityImportant
Dates
Its about six or seven years ago. My family is gathered around our
Xbox, playing the first game we ever bought for that console: Gauntlet
Dark Legacy. My husband, son and I each have a controller in our hands
and were slogging through yet another brutal dungeon, laying waste to
our enemies. Its great family entertainment.
Im the Green Archer and, despite my sons tanking talent as the Blue
Warrior, Im out in front cutting through everything in my path. My
husband, the Red Wizard (read: Innately Squishy) is hanging back,
scrambling around while the booming narrators voice declares, Red
Wizard needs food badly!
Take the fruit
I say, rolling my eyes.
As we reach the end of this dungeon, the game racks up our kill counts
and ranks us. This is the moment I wait for each and every round.
Whos got the most kills? I cry. Its the
style="font-style: italic;">Green Archer!
Booyah, baby! Boo-yah!
Youre so competitive, my husband says, and now its his turn to roll
his eyes.
What can I say? I have a competitive nature. Perhaps its because I was
the first born in my family and I enjoy the position. Or maybe its
that I was the only girl amongst male siblings and cousins and
I felt the need to prove myself. Whatever the case may be, since
childhood Ive felt the need to be at the top of the ranks, whether
those ranks were achieved by defeating everyone else at Scrabble,
winning first place in the all-school writing competition, or scoring
the highest kill count as the deadly Green Archer.
In my early days playing EverQuest, I felt the need to be at the top of
my game, too. There was no ranking system in EQ, but it was important
to me to be one of the top players in my guild--the one who was
level-capped and wore the best gear. I liked that I my guild would call
on me to organize raids. My little casual guild was by no means uber,
but among my guildmates, I was a leader.
But then one day I went to the open house at my daughters school.
Outside her first grade room a collection of the kids drawings hung on
the wall, each picture labeled with careful first grader printing: MY
FAMILY. I scanned the wall for my daughters art. Shed depicted her
dad hunched over a crudely drawn PC. My dad works on computers, shed
written. I smiled, and then looked at her drawing of me, holding a
sword and shield. My mommy plays EverQuest.
But, I run my own
business! I thought. Why
didnt she say, My mommy owns a business? or My mommy is a writer?
I cringed and slinked away, wondering what the other parents, not to
mention my daughters teacher, must think. Instead of seeing me as a
businesswoman, or even just a hardworking mom, my daughter identified
me as an EQ player. That was my wakeup call, letting me know that my
urge to be uber had led me to do too much gaming and, just maybe, not
enough living.
Dont get me wrong--I love gaming. And I still dearly love being the
leader of the pack whenever I can be. But as the years progressed I
learned that working, raising a family, and living a full life
conflicted with being a power gamer. I learned to make my peace with
the idea that I would never top any leaderboards, or score any server
firsts, or rank among the first to reach the level cap in my MMOG of
choice.
Its actually taken me a while to find a game that could satisfy my
need to feel uber while allowing me to remain the casual player that I
know I must be. Right now, Aion is that game. Among my legion Im
certainly not at the top of the food chain--Im a few levels behind the
legions leaders, my gear is decent but not top-of-the-line, and my
gathering skills are pitiful. And although this makes me twitch
occasionally, struggling against the urge to throw family and career
aside for a while so that I can blast my way to the top, Im mostly
okay with it. My character looks cool, her skills are epic, she fights
like a well-oiled killing machine, and even if shes not the best,
shes enough.
As I wander the forum community at Ten Ton Hammer I discover more and
more that our readers and the people who frequent our community are
much like me--they game for fun, and while they may have competitive
urges, theyve learned to temper them with responsibility. They are,
for the most part, grownups, even though they might not want to be.
They have families and careers. For them, MMO gaming provides some
much-needed leisure time, but theyve moved past the point where they
use it to feed their competitive spirit. Like me, theyve learned that
an MMO can be enjoyable for the journey when youre not among the elite
who's willing or able to race to the destination.
And yet, if theyre anything like me, when it comes to a weekend game
of Scrabble or Monopoly, or even a run through some multiplayer console
game
all bets are off.
Booyah, baby! Boo-yah!
Are you a casual gamer in a competitive persons body? Or have you
always been laid back? Hit the Loading
forum to talk about it.
Hottest Content:
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/wow/newsletter/issue36"> style="font-weight: bold;">WoW Weekly Report -- Karen "Shayalyn" Hertzberg and the Ten Ton Hammer
team