Wait a minute before you shout, ‘fore that is straining on your voice, and I want you to fully understand the situation before jokes about my sexuality are somehow, and I stress somehow, are always brought into trolling threads. We might actually have a progressive thought here folks and I want to complete it.
That’s right you should not care about my small milestone, especially when I myself don’t care. I do remember breaching 5,000 gamerscore once and thinking that was cool. Nifty. 5,000 is a big number and 11,000, my current score, is an even bigger number. But why suddenly do I not care? 11,000 is an even bigger number, albeit a very small one in comparison in the circle of hardcore gamers, but if we looked at the scores that reaches 50, 60, or 70 thousand - what is their importance?
I personally don’t know anyone with points that high, however I have seen forum posts where users either comment graciously accomplishing that achievement or call it a “lie, lie, lie”. As a note of interest, I have also seen forum posts claiming that the user accomplished some sex act. Guess which claim fewer people believe? Is it the one where someone spent several hundred hours playing all sorts of uninteresting games or the one where a play’a just happened to be in the right place at the right time? More on that later.
You see the thing I wanted to talk to you about today, is what the value of these achievements. I doubt it is to create interesting conversation; the hours to get the achievements to produce the minutes of discussion talking about the achievements is a very large ratio, usually akin to efficiency rate the US government. Then what is the value of achievements? What’s the value of the achievements in a typical WoW account, and I am not just talking about the points. The grueling grinding that one does to get their Ranger to the level that they can use X gun (I obviously don’t play WoW). More pointedly, those who play Runescape, not a particularly fun game, what is the point of being the top player in that game?
There is a school of thought called Stoicism, and I am specifically reffering to Marcus Aralias’s take. To understand Stoicism in a nutshell, Marcus Aralias once said that sex was “Merely two bodies rubbing against each other until the ejaculation of fluid”. I’m am not hinting that is the way to think, that we must look at everything in the starkest of terms. I see grand merit in playing and being immersed in the World of Warcraft. Games certainly have value. However, anything one can brag about should not be paramount over the things one can do. I hope that everyone out there is not intending to have sex for the sake of sex and points for the sake of points.
This brings me too a crazy theory. That it is not the experience that one has in a game it is the experience one has. The connections with other people, the fun of the game, and anything else more than a foot deep. I know how simple this sounds, it’s akin to saying it’s good to have a have a happy life, but why limit oneself to one-worded replies on message boards, monotonous games that you know beforehand will be boring, and announcements of milestones that led nowhere to begin with?
While I spoke of games and sex, and I try to bring that into any area of conversation (including tuition payment), I intend this general word of advice to be applicable to all areas of life. What areas of life can you make deeper? Your friendship? Or perhaps you can get to know your enemy? Try being a liberal or a conservative for a day to see the difference (Little hint; it won’t be that different). But specifics aren't really needed, it's your life after all, and all I want is for you to ask yourself a question,
"If no one else cares about what I am doing, why should I?"
Thank-you for reading.
Log in to comment