Here is another topic brought to you by Blog Azeroth. This one is very interesting for me personally and I am hoping that I am not going to write pages on it.
Do you feel there is a balance between your real life and your WoW life; if so, how do you achieve it?
I would like to have it all balanced, but I am never sure I really do. I tend to play any game “too much” all the more so games that appeal to certain basic instincts of the hunter-gatherer in me. So I interpret “balance” in this case more as “not playing too much!”
A little history
I only played 2 other online games: Ultima Online and Diablo II. I played Ultima Online for 3 months, even joined a kind of guild and quit the moment that both my online friends and my RL friends started complaining I spent not enough time with them. Diablo II was a different thing, I played a lot but I only solo, remembering my UO experience. I never wanted to join a guild again. I quit Diablo after buying some pieces of equipment on Ebay. Effectively I had destroyed my own game with Ebay, but that is completely different topic.
I started playing in February 05, when the game launched in Europe. For the first *scratches head trying to remember* 40 levels this was not a topic I thought about. I played and played and played. I believe the first week of WoW was rather sleepless. The first day I had it I played for probably 12 hours straight. Of course I had to slow down.
Even though I had said “Never again!”, shortly before level 30 I joined a guild. I just cannot say no. It turned out joining that guild was a good thing. In the guild I met the person who is more than any other responsible for the way I view the game. I might have come to the same conclusions or I might have given in to my hardcore gamer longings. He said it first: RL > WoW, always. If not for that I might be in a very different guild today – or not. With a few others we changed servers after we found that a majority of the guild did not support our principle “RL > WoW” and started pressuring people into playing more. We founded a new guild together of which the most important principle will always be “RL > WoW”.
RL > WoW?
But one principle does not a balance make. So the question remains: have I found a balance between game and life? I want to say yes. But more often than not I think the game takes too big a part of my life. Not the playing itself, but the management of the guild, the reading & writing on the game (the blog isn’t that old, but I’ve spend a precious amount of time in all kinds of forums before this). Even when not playing a lot of my time goes to WoW.
So what does RL>WoW really mean? It means that when there’s a friend stopping over or a telephone call or something comes up I stop playing WoW. It means I do not make commitments to the game that “force” me to play when there’s something in my RL that needs my attention. It means I take care to meet all my friends regularly, I do sports, I cook and eat good food. I have not dropped old hobbies like reading, fotographing, cooking, pen & paper rpg, board games and what else I do. It also means I respect the same behaviour in the people I play with. I sometimes take breaks from the game for more than a few days after a particularly intensive playing phase. It also means I cannot raid regularly because I do not want to commit myself that much.
On the other hand I have shortened phone calls because I was playing. I did not go out because I felt like staying home … and played. I have come home, turned on the computer to play and skipped dinner. I have skipped out on a lot of sleep because of WoW. I admit to reading WoW blogs at work and writing posts on the guild forums. I have chatted (at work) with people about the game, guild troubles etc. Many of my RL friends are rather sick of me talking about WoW and I notice how sometimes I have to force myself to switch the topic. I stopped watching TV nearly completely (not that I ever did that so much). When I have committed to run an instance I usually finish it and I have said to friends “Oh Wednesday … don’t have time, I promised to run Kara.” Well I try to avoid that particular scenario like hell. Because I do take committments I make seriously in the game as well as without.
One thing that helps me a lot is making the game less about pixel and more about people. I care about my guildies a lot and that makes all the difference. I try not to care about the pixel part too much.
Conclusion
As with every hobby it is impossible to deny the influence WoW has had and still has. But I want to make WoW a normal and acceptable hobby for me and my friends in both worlds (there’s even a handfull that belong to both). I think most of the time it works. WoW is accepted as a hobby and the guild as the club I belong to for this hobby. That plays a big part in keeping that balance. It is less often now that people look at me like some freak when I mention the game. I still feel bad every time I play somehow.
I could write for ages about this. In the end I think most people will prefer to believe that they have achieved a balance. Those who care about this topic, are probably a bit on the side of playing too much, they probably feel a little bad about playing “all the time” and that makes one think about balancing WoW and RL in the first place. There is no way to define some limit at which RL is suffering too much from WoW playing. We’ll just all have to keep ourselves in check all the time and try to integrate the game as well as we can until such a time as society has accepted MMO-gaming as an extension of RL instead of an alternative (don’t know if that would be a good thing if it ever happened).
More of the same:
