::A Geek in Korea::

All my life I’ve been a gamer. As long as I’ve had free time, I’ve always had a game or two I’ve been trying (or failing) to get better at playing. Beating games or being a completionist isn’t something I pride myself on. If I stop having fun with games, I stop playing them. If I get burned out of a game or a genre, I give it a rest. I’ve been fairly lucky to have enough money to support my hobby for a long time. I’ve never grown bored gaming for long. If I am ever in a rut with a particular game or genre, I look around and try something new.

One of the things about gaming is how it changes the structure of your day. When you have a really good game sittng at home that can’t be played during work, I get excited and the day seems to take forever. I think about what I’ll be doing in my time off, and look up strategies or hints as to how to play better. (Spoiler free!)
When I get a good game that holds my interest, any free time I might have could potentially spent playing the game. This can get me in trouble when I have a portable game that gets in the way of things I should be doing. In the past, I would be known to play a game at work when my attention should be focused else where. Not so much anymore, however I do still occasionally bring my DS lite to work when I know I will have a break.

One of the dangerous things about MMORPGs is the fact that they are persistent, they are meant to be played for a long time, and they have people playing them constantly. This is a dangerous combination for a person like myself that would spend a lot of free time playing the game if there was something to do. In MMORPGs, there is always something to do. You can always level. You can always grind out another level. You can always play another level. Pretty soon, when the rest of your life whithers away, that’s all you have to do anyway.

I loathe games that are basically competitions in time spent or money spent. I don’t play collectable card games (anymore) after I learned (the hard way) that it’s not about the money you spend on the game (significant) but how much your opponent has spent (always much, much more.) As a result, games that are money or massive time investments come down to who has the most time to waste. While I enjoy playing games, I don’t play them for the "shiny loot" factor of having more stuff, or having better stuff to brag about as I play.

While I do play a variation of the MMORPG genre, Nexus War, it’s a less cruel sort of beast. It’s inherently self-limiting. Not to say you can’t play it how you want to. You can, it’s just that  my time is limited to about 100 or so actions per character, per day.  This means that even if I wanted to play it as much as a typical MMORPG I would simply be wating around for time to pass before I was allowed to do something in game again. People can fill their time worrying about raid politics, chatting in IRC about the game, talking about it in the forums, or creating fan art, but I don’t do these things.

That isn’t to say that playing the game hasn’t changed my habits. I now get up in the morning, shower, and turn on my computer. Instead of surfing news sites or watching television, I level my characters. I get about thirty minutes of game time in the morning before work, and let my action points accrue as I work through the day.  Then, at night, I return for some more leveling before I go to bed. Another thirty minutes to an hour and I’m done. This has been the pattern for a few weeks now. I might peek on a character at risk on a break at work, but I don’t do any power gaming.

The basic game is about killing others, but I also have secondary sources of getting experience like books, or crafting new materials. It works to fill the boredom of my day and hasn’t impacted my daily schedule too much. I’d probably be on the computer anyway, and when I finish leveling my characters at night, I simply turn it off since I know there isn’t anything more I can do until time passes. In some ways, that’s better than constantly having access to my characters on a Nintendo DS.

I know I am addicted to games as a way to fight off boredom and keep me in touch with other English speakers I have something in common with. It has both negative and positive impacts on my life. I spend to much time in front of the computer and not with my wife and dog. I spent too much time thinking about things of trivial importance. Such is life, and we all have our little vices.