This week is in theory “Topic Brainstorming Week”, and at least some part of this is being aware of when you are being gifted a topic. If you simply pay attention to your surroundings, there are topics everywhere. There was a time in this blogs history where I mined topics heavily from game forums and twitter. While reading either there would come moments when I would feel more passionate about a topic than was really possible to put in a post or a tweet. These moments were screaming for me to sit down and write a blog post. The biggest challenge of course is keeping track of those ideas because they often hit at moments when you are not able to sit down at a keyboard and start hacking away at those thoughts.

Yesterday I had one of those moments hit while I was wrapping up for the day. Thankfully I dusted off my grossly outdated Trello and cobbled together enough notes to get me through writing something this morning. Trello is an exceptional tool and Beyond Tannhauser Gate featured an excellent rundown of some of its features yesterday. We personally use it every week to keep track of our Show Notes for AggroChat in part because it allows us to bump topics easily by simply moving the card to the next show. Yesterday I made a few notes in the Aggronaut board along with the links in order to feed into this mornings post.

Yesterday a series of tweets came through that both had very similar themes. In theory if I had to guess Bazgrim saw the first tweet and then created a variant that was less game specific. Regardless they both cover the same ground, which is ways that MMORPG games and the types of interaction had a positive effect on their lives. I took long enough to retweet with a few comments from the first, but I also felt like I had a lot more to say on the subject. As such I jotted something down quickly into Trello and here we are this morning talking about it. For reference the original tweet was from Warcraft Memes and can be found here. Now I am going to hit on some of the points as they relate to me.

Helped with your depression or mental illness / Coping with Loneliness

While I have never been diagnosed, I have struggled my entire life. My mom dealt with periods of depression and suicidal thoughts, and I have struggled with these same dark thoughts at many times during my life. MMORPGs at least in part give me a different world to join and help me to get unstuck in my own thoughts. I can focus on those “wizard chores” as my friend Grace calls them, and forget for at least a moment that I feel like i am completely unraveling as a human being.

There are times when I just can’t simply cope with human interaction, and as such I probably don’t really use MMORPGs to cope with loneliness in the same manner as most people would. However there are times when I am deep in one of my “turtle mode” phases, where simply being reminded that there are other human beings out there as they scurry around me in a major city hub helps. MMORPGs allow me to be alone without really being alone, and they also give me an impetus to reach out to other human beings at times because there are many tasks that cannot be completed without doing so.

Been a place you found lasting friendships / Finding real friends

My first real MMORPG was Everquest and I started playing that in 2001. Over the eighteen years between I have flitted from game to game, and during that process picked up a number of friends in each of them that I still have regular contact with to this day. The whole “Bel’s Party Van” thing came about because of my habit of gathering up people in my wake and trying to drag them along with me to the next thing on the horizon. The truth is I have met an awful lot of my really close friends through blogging as well. For sake of this topic I am just going to run through the list of people that I record the AggroChat podcast with on a weekly basis.

• Ammo – We both played World of Warcraft on the same server and met at some point along the way through that. Additionally since that point we have played dozens of other games together and she has been responsible for 99.9% of the Artwork you see on this blog.
• Ashgar – We met through another AggroChat member during Cataclysm, when a bunch of people that I had played with in Vanilla came back to Argent Dawn and I gathered them up in my guild. Has become one of my closest friends and we have hung out in person several times at Pax South.
• Grace – We met initially through blogging, but I absolutely drafted her into joining the Final Fantasy XIV guild in 2013. Since then we have realized that we suffer from a lot of the same issues, and it is super important to have people in your life who understand that sometimes you cannot handle human interaction, but also want to be able to do stuff.
• Kodra – We raided together in Vanilla World of Warcraft, and have been in a lot of different guilds together over the years. We weren’t super close back then but through years of constant interaction have forged a friendship based on shared experience and amicably disagreeing on various topics.
• Tamrielo – Was one of the leaders of our Vanilla Raid and also someone that I talked to on a fairly regular basis. In the years between gaming together in WoW, I got adopted into what was then an AOL Instant Messenger chat group and ultimate was the prototype for what would eventually become AggroChat. There are times when it feels like Tam and I are the same person put through vastly different experiences.
• Thalen – My dwarven brother. Thalen raided with a different group in World of Warcraft, but this comes from an era when all of the raid groups were friendly with each other. He regularly attended our alt night events, and through many years of that we developed a friendship. He also has been drug along on many of my adventures and I am thankful that he too is someone I have gotten to hang out with in person.

Basically I have a long line of people that I have interacted with and then adopted, and most of these come from MMORPGs. I grew up in a very small town and never quite felt like I really belonged to any sort of engagement that was available to me. However through the internet and especially through online gaming I have found my people in droves. Understanding just how special this is has also lead me to my “collector” behavior where I try and gather folks up and drag them along with me. There are a lot of you that are probably reading this that have been adopted, and probably more that will be adopted at some point in the future. It is a thing I do.

Improved your communication skills and teamwork / leadership

I suppose I have always come across as way more of a reasonable adult than I actually am at any given point. This is in part why I found myself straight out of college in my very first job being thrust into a supervisory role. I was the lead web developer for a fortune 500 company, and was given a team of three people to work under me. Life was fine and dandy up until the point my Boss decided that I needed to punish one of my employees for taking too long of lunch breaks. I was forced to write them up for something I didn’t believe in… and it chafed super hard. From that point forward I purposefully avoided allowing myself to be pushed into a leadership role in the workplace.

When World of Warcraft was shaping up to be the next big thing, I knew I wanted a really good place to hang my hat. I also knew that I had come from a fairly unfortunate situation in Everquest, where the guild leader and his wife more or less dictated what was being done on a nightly basis. The only way that I was certain not to fall into this situation was to start a guild and lead it myself. I gathered up as many friends as I had at the time from a long line of games and sorta pointed them in a single direction. That lead to the founding of House Stalwart a guild that is still alive and kicking in spite of me no longer leading it.

Each time I joined a raid I got thrust into positions of responsibility. I had a former raid leader impart upon me the wisdom that when someone is willing to step up and talk through problems in a raid, that ultimately they are going to be viewed as one of the leaders. So after having two raids blow up on me, I had a friend come to me asking me to take a chance on him. Myself, Dageransus, Elnore and Thalen all founded the Duranub Raiding Company and it thrived up until the point that World of Warcraft placed their hand on the scale creating perks for Raiding Guilds and pretty much dooming the non-Guild alliance.

In all of these situations I was forced to negotiate with other players in order to get the result we needed. This meant dealing with all manner of interpersonal disputes and even breaking out bargaining tactics to make sure that the raid was able to function every single week with 25 capable and smiling faces. We poured over statistics trying to figure out how we could cultivate talent, and minimize the impact of the folks that weren’t really pulling their weight. All of these things happened without having any real power over any of the individuals we were trying to influence. There was nothing at all keeping a player from simply logging out of the game and walking away permanently.

I am not exactly sure when it clicked that I was essentially doing the thing which I had avoided like the plague for most of my career. I was leading people and even having to deal with punishments and reconciliation. A transition started to happen, where I kept being pushed into taking on more responsibility at work, and with it I kept backpedaling away from responsibility in game. These days I am the manager over three different groups of development resources totally sixteen different individuals that I am responsible for. I also regularly get called in to serve on various projects which come with their own management responsibilities.

None of these are things I would have ever felt comfortable doing, had I not years of experience doing the same basic thing in MMORPGs. The problem is… I can’t list 18 years of guild leadership on a resume without getting a bunch of funny looks. The boomer generation isn’t aware of it being equivalent experience. When my friends are going to places like Amazon, Google or Microsoft… they are awake to the realization that leading people is leading people. There will come a time when those hours spent convincing the Mage to give it one more try, will absolutely be resume worthy.

The weird thing is… I have an underground of MMORPG gamers at work. There are a bunch of us that talk about these experiences, and I seemingly have a way of being able to tell when someone plays. When you have been called to lead a group of strangers, it is amazing how much easier it is to lead people you actually know. I have a vested interest in watching these mmo gamers coming up through the ranks, and serving as that mentor that gets what they are choosing to do in their free time. We just lost one recently that was a Mythic raider, and I hope to keep tabs on their career and maybe recruit them back at some point in the future.

The very long story short… MMORPGs made a positive impact upon my life and gave me the confidence to go on and do bigger things in my own career. I feel like they are more of a positive influence on most of the individuals that I know as opposed to being a hindrance. There are so many life skills that get taught one skill point at a time when having to navigate your way through a bunch of other human beings. Once you make your own click moment and understand that what you are doing is the same thing as leadership in any other form, it will start to effect the decisions you make when the game is logged out as well.