Day 3

I headed out of Thunderbluff today. Truly I didn't go anywhere, I'm still in my chair stairing at my avatar, Gref, who looks to be taking the elevator down to the ground below the plateaus Thunderbluff is on is a graphic representation of the character the came world has created for me who is in turn made from the same stuff the world is: polygons. Even deep than that I could say that like our world is made of atoms virtual worlds are made of 1s and 0s, bytes form the basic matter of these worlds. Like atoms we can't see because they move so fast, bytes we can't see because they are processed at blazing speeds by our computers. Are these pertinent questions to my explorations? Possibly, but I can't help thinking of them as I stare at my collections of pictures from my adventures so far.

Unlike travelers in the real world I don't have to worry about carrying a device separate from my mode of travel to take pictures. I merely press the “Print Screen” button on the upper-left hand side of my keyboard and a snap shot is taken. This snap shot ability does cause my computer to pause a little bit and the words “Screenshot Taken” appear on the screen, or something of that nature. This is one of many moments in players must suspend their disbelief, quite frankly MMO's like World of Warcraft are filled with more moments which require a suspension of disbelief than any other game I've played. Frequently, it is of a nature that should be completely unforgivable,especially since the goal of many other games seems to be to remove as much evidence as possible that the player is in fact involved in a game, and rightly so, but why not here? I ignore these moments because I want to enjoy the game. “The dirty little secret of gaming is how much time you spend not having fun” wrote Stephen Johnson in his Everything Bad is Good for You. He was trying to defend games by claiming that they did not in fact back offer instant gratification, as so many parents claim. In a similar vein I'm trying to say that much time is spent in these games searching for that perfect moment of Zen or what have you, when the player has a transcendent experience with the game and forget the real world for a little bit. I believe this the sort of thing all media attempt to offer us, escape, but there truly is a problem here that places these sort of games in the realm of drug addiction. Playing the games becomes a seeking of the perfect high so to speak, or at least to peak for longer or more powerfully than previously done. Now this isn't true for all players all the time, I know I've felt this desire at times. Especially on particularly bad days. Otherwise why do I play these games? Recently the drive has become social in a teams sports sort of way. I want to get my character stronger a long with helping my team mates to get stronger so that we can tackle increasingly difficult challenges. But I digress, I'm not even talking about my experiences on the Runetotem server.

Alright so I began to head down the road away from the Thunder Bluff when I was overpowered by a pack of wolves and died. Thankfully death has few draw backs for my virtual self. Upon dieng I am left paralyzed on the ground and presented with decision as to whether or not I want to release, to release is to be sent back to the nearest graveyard where I am given back the ability to move as a ghost. The bonus of being a ghost is that I get to go practically where ever I want. The drawbacks are that I can't interact with anything. Perhaps this is what it's like to be left to wander the Earth in spiritual form, except that I've always imagined that if a ghost concentrated hard enough she could effect the real world. This of course is not the case, since the virtual world is bound by a tight set of rules, and as a ghost these rules say that I cannot do anything but run around. Although as a ghost there is one important thing I can do and that is return to my corporeal form by either asking the Spirit Guide who looks like an angel wrapped in a bit of heavy toilet paper who will return me to life at the expense of damaging my equipment, or I can walk back to my corpse and resurrect at no cost but the time it takes me to walk there. I opted for walking, therefore I cam back to life in much the same condition as the way I left it, perhaps a little wiser.