They say opposites attract, but I’d be inclined to argue that opposites don’t stay together, not for the long hall at least.  As far as things go to be opposites on, gaming tends to be pretty clear cut: you are either for it, engaging in it as a hobby and a passion or you’re against it, regarding it as childish and a waste of time.  Stereotypically, the example always tends to be a less-than-attentive husband and a nagging wife.  But what about couples who are both into gaming?  What about the couple who can both scream a blood curdling war cry and slaughter the enemy and spend tender moments curled on the couch together? Mark and I are this couple, and we’ve learned alot from gaming.

Teamwork- One person takes the hits, the other heals them without running away (not that I’ve ever ran mind you… no seriously).

Trust – Learning to rely on your healer, aka the wife, who has assured you she isn’t going to run away and leave you to die this time.

Respect – You want the acheivement and by God, everyone in the room is staying until you get it.

Communication – “FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST WHAT THE F IS THAT A-HOLE DOING? NEED HEALS NOW PLEASE!”

Compromise – I got the last piece of loot, you can have this one.

Acceptance - You’re far more elite than I will ever be.

Committment- You mean to say we’ve been on this raid for 5 hours?

If you have any to add, share in the comment section!

I went to log into WoW for the last time today, having made the decision to go ahead and cancel my account, only to find that the account was already closed.  I hadn’t logged in in about a week, but I must’ve canceled the subscription right after renewing for three months, preventing it from automatically billing me. It’s funny, a part of me must’ve known then that any longer wasn’t needed.

This was the last of gaming in my life and I feel ready to move on from it.   MMO gaming has been the biggest hurdle for me over the last 10 years as I’ve slipped in and out of addiction with various titles.  Whilst a part of me will always want to renew that old Everquest account, or read about WoW’s next expansion, I know it’s for the better if I don’t.  I feel free from it, in a way I never have before. I’m not giving these things up because I feel some responsibility to do so now that Little Doodle is about to rock my world, merely I am letting these things go as I feel ready to do so, and ready to move on. I don’t think I’ll ever return to WoW, a part of me feels I “beat the game,” having been there, done that, and got the achievement to boot.

But I am very grateful for the time I spent in WoW, because without it I would’ve never met my husband.  Two people, so perfect for each other, on opposite sides of the globe should so happen to meet in an online game and fall in love.  I am very grateful to have met him, and now we are married and expecting a little one and our love continues to grow.  I also met some really awesome people through our guild as well.

It’s a shame it was already closed though, I guess the gold shall be buried with the characters and not given away lol.

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I didn’t think it was over until Mark and myself got the xbox 360 flashed a month ago… then, I knew:  my gaming days were finished.  Interestingly enough, in large part, it isn’t even due to the impending arrival of Little Doodle, more this unsatisfied feeling and bad taste in my mouth with the current state of games/gaming/gaming community that has left me hanging up my towel.

Like many gamers around my age, the journey began with the original Nintendo Entertainment System.  I was four, and I remember what it was like to engage in that “other world” shown magically on the TV screen.  Now, 20 years later, that magic feeling is replaced with feelings of mediocrity, some of which is the gaming industry’s fault, some of it mine.

We burned nearly a dozen games for our newly flashed 360 and one after the other, as we put them in to play, struck me as being just carbon copies of the last:  Bayonetta, Dante’s Inferno, and the like all felt like God of War rip offs, in which only the character and the setting having changed.  They brought nothing new.  Prototype and games like it felt like I was doing nothing more than transporting the character from cut scene to cut scene, a mere guide inbetween movie segments.  Even the transporting of the character to yet another cut scene wasn’t a challenge, as they conveniently marked where you should be going on the map every step of the way.  And I asked myself what was the point? It wasn’t fun, it wasn’t free roaming, or free will, or even a challenge.  Game after game that we burned went into the 360 and back out again, with nothing but a sigh and shrug.

Of course, there have been a few games which have completely captured my imagination and attention in the last couple years: Fallout 3, Oblivion, Guitar Hero, just to name a few of the games that I truly loved and enjoyed.  I have fond memories of the N64 and older systems. I’ve always loved MMOs and RPGs.  But it now seems so inconsequential, nothing more than a good time here and there.

World of Warcraft, my last gaming hobby, will not last much longer either.  After all, alts can be fun but when you’ve “been there, done that” on your main character you find yourself asking, “what’s the point?”  Lately I have found myself wanting to watching videos on how to bathe a newborn or read an article on breastfeeding than log into WoW.  I want to get out and do things more than sit indoors and get that next level.  I suppose this new evolution was to be expected as the weeks went by in my pregnancy.  I just never thought that I would feel like I’m ready to be done with it, ready to move on and ready to embrace this new phase in my life.

And then there is gaming as a whole.  At the risk of sounding like a hipster, a part of me feels done with it now that it’s become “Like totally awesome, dude!” to everyone.  Everyone has their own podcast, everyone has their own website (including me, at one point), 12 million people play WoW, and sometimes it all leaves me wondering if people are actually enthused for the release of the next mediocre title or are they just playing it up in order to match the status quo? Gaming since you were born? Step in line, so was everyone else our age into gaming.  It’s become too chic for my tastes, too mainstream.  Release parties and the like are for movies and vapid celebrities, not the things we used to play in the dark by ourselves.  Not the things we were picked on in school for liking.   Mainstream gaming ruined the MMO genre in my opinion.

And then there is my fallacy, as well.  I’ve been an MMO addict for the last ten years.  I regret my senior year in high school because, instead of hanging out with the people I was about to move 1000 miles away from, I spent most of it locked in an addiction to Everquest.  Countless sunny days and opportunities have gone by in the last ten years that were completely missed. I don’t want to continue making this mistake.

I won’t be getting rid of my things, and it’s not like I think that I’ll never ever play again.  Who knows, once Little Doodle is a bit older and that next hot MMO comes out I may give it a go.  But the days of marathon gaming,  late nights and morning energy drinks, the obsession with the next level,   the new game release must-have, the ten thousand gaming community boards,  are over.  And I am not sad in the least.

Life is moving on, in new and exciting directions.  92 days to go.

Last week I canceled my World of Warcraft subscription, burnout strikes again.  I couldn’t simply leave it at that, being the massively multiplayer online (MMO) hobbyist that I am, so I went on the interwebs to see how previous games I had played are fairing in the shadow of the unstoppable juggernaut that is WoW.  Sadly, I found nothing more than merged servers, dwindling populations, and development teams who had all but quit every which way I turned.  That’s when it hit me:  WoW has killed the genre.

Don’t get me wrong, I like WoW as a game; my current burnout is sure to last a few months and, barring I don’t find something that captures my imagination, I’m sure to renew my account down the line.  But as far as MMOs are concerned, it really is the only popular MMO. Looking back over the dozen or so titles I’ve played over the last ten years, I find myself adorning the rose colored spectacles of nostalgia for games-gone-by and “how it used to be.”  And these are my thoughts.

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Can you pinpoint the exact moment in time where you grew to like something?  Where you knew you’d develop a desire for something?  A singular moment in an infinite stream of experiences and passing seconds we take for granted, moving faster than life itsself.  For MMORPG gaming (massively multiplayer online roleplaying games) I can.  The obsession began nearly ten years ago, in Best Buy, with the exact same artwork shown in the banner above.  I had watched my cousin play Asheron’s Call for no more than a lazy half hour one afternoon, and I can remember being stunned by the concept:  an online world in which many players worldwide played and interacted in.  Gaming for me up to this point had been a solitary activity, or one done on a simple multiplayer mode with one’s siblings.  This was new.

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