Teens, Gaming, Hobbies, and more

21. January 2010 · 5 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

Jan asks about the New York Times article reporting on teen/tween media use.  I’ve had that article open all day and just got around to reading it (after listening to Bolero, which is another post).

The older my son gets and the more I spend time away from technology as part of my job, the more my views about technology have shifted.  Don’t get me wrong. I still love the Internet and all it has to offer.  My day would be horrible if I couldn’t check in with blogs, read the paper, and even catch up on tv shows, which I do via the web almost entirely.  That said, I’m starting to feel that all the ra ra about how the Internet/technology is so great and we should just let it roll on through is misguided.  I also think the opposing view, that the Internet is ruining our lives, is misguided.  But I don’t know where, exactly, the balance is.  When I was a teen, I spent a lot of time on the phone.  Just because teens today use cellphones or text, even, instead of talking, is that so different?  I wanted to stay in touch with my friends, feel connected to a community, so I made phone calls.  Once we could drive, we arranged to hang out at each other’s houses or the mall.

My son does the same thing, just virtually.  Yes, he plays a lot of Runescape, but partly he does so because his friends K. & M. are usually playing and he talks to them via the game.  It’s how he connects to them.  He sometimes uses Facebook to chat with them also.  He also has friends that live elsewhere, including a 20-something marine who served in Iraq.  Watching tv and movies and goofy videos on YouTube are also a way kids connect these days; it’s a way of having something to talk about with their friends.  Sometimes, they share those things via Facebook or texting, but they still share those things face-to-face, too.  We try to limit gameplay to an hour a day during the week and then have no limits on the weekends.  That said, I often do periodically kick Geeky Boy off the computer and when the weather’s nice, I make him and his sister go outside.  So far, they still maintain other interests.  Geeky Boy plays guitar.  He still likes to read.  And he plays a couple of sports.  During sports seasons, in fact, the weekend is the only time he really has to play video games.  Geeky Girl, too, plays sports, likes to draw, and work puzzles.  They’re both obsessed with Rubik’s cube right now.  We try to encourage them to balance all those things.

Though Mr. Geeky and I also spend a fair amount of time in front of the computer, we have other interests as well.  I’m just not sure they rise to the level of hobby.  I like cooking and gardening.  Mr. Geeky works on an open source family tree program and researches his own family history in his spare time.  We are all interested in politics.  Blogging is kind of a hobby and one I keep trying to get the kids involved in, but they aren’t as taken by it as I am. :)  I’m thinking of telling Geeky Boy he should get involved in a non-sport activity in the spring.  I do think having activities that one does outside of work and offline is a good thing.  Just like I think someone who read all the time should probably get outside once in a while.

Is gaming a hobby?  I think it is, but I also think there’s a lot of stigma around it right now.  If I spent two hours a day playing bridge, people wouldn’t look at me funny.  But, just as I don’t know any people in my neighborhood who play bridge, I don’t know anyone who games either (except for teenage boys and a couple of girls).  I’d never tell someone casually at a PTO meeting that I spent a couple of hours on Saturday morning playing WoW.  But if I spent two hours reading?  Even watching HGTV.  Those are not that different in terms of pastime activities, yet, they’re more acceptable.  As I pointed out in my post on leisure, there seems to be a real issue people have with what’s appropriate leisure time.  Or an appropriate amount of leisure time.  If I work 20 hours/wk, it’s expected, it seems, that I’ll fill that other 20 hours with housework or volunteering or some other “worthwhile” activity.

I think gaming, in part, has gained this stigma for a few reasons.  One, it’s been associated with teenage boys and younger men who are depicted as frittering away their time anyway.  It used to be filled with baseball, watching sports, just hanging out, or whatever, but it seems to me this demographic has always been expected to goof off a lot.  Shirkers.  Second, it’s had some content issues.  There’s sex and violence and things that seem unsavory.  And third, once it went online, those content issues were exacerbated and further, the online world also carries a stigma.  I used to get weird looks when I told people I did a lot of my reading online.  And once upon a time, I did an interview with the Wall Street Journal, whose main question was, how do you keep kids away from porn and child predators online.  That was 1998.  We still think the Internet is just for porn.

And maybe that’s where our worry over the amount of time our kids spend online begins.  We’re worried they might find bad things or that it might rot their brains.  But I also think we recognize that it might be a replacement for hanging out at the mall or in the neighborhood, but it’s also different and unfamiliar.  Even for me, someone who spends as much time online (or more) than her kids, there’s a mystery surrounding what’s going on there.  I don’t worry too much about child predators.  We’ve had many a frank conversation around here about that.  But I do worry about not “seeing” my kids friends.  Or about what scheming might be going on in a space where there’s no possibility for me to overhear.

For myself, I do sometimes feel that the online world gets stale, that it doesn’t feel tangible enough and that I need something else to occupy my time.  And sometimes, it’s too real.  There are the mean people who show up in comments or in an online game and you think, this is my free time, I don’t need to be exposed to that while I’m trying to relax.  Much better to curl up with a book.

And I think the bleh, the sense that what’s going on right now isn’t that exciting comes from the season.  I am not a fan of winter.  I can’t take the cold for too long and feel cooped up.   And I also have less time while I’m teaching than I used to have.  When I have long hours ahead, I do often come up with several things to do–read a book, write for a while, exercise, maybe bake something.  But when I have smaller chunks of time, I have more difficulty filling it with something other than what can happen on the computer.  Which should worry me perhaps.  I don’t know.

Bleh

21. January 2010 · 3 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

I have started and stopped at least two posts, deciding that they were just too damn boring for public consumption.  My brain isn’t fully functioning.  I throw it out to my (mostly absent) readers.  What do you want to discuss?

WoW Wednesday: Resources

20. January 2010 · 2 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , ,

One thing I had not realized as a tank and/or dps was the level of resources one needs to have on hand to heal.  Sure, as a warrior or dk, I might have a few healing potions or flasks to enhance my health or my damage, but not always and certainly not for just a regular ol’ dungeon run.  But as a healer? I stock up on drinks to replenish my mana, mana potions, and reagents for buffs.  And all that costs money.  I do have an alchemist who can make mana potions, but I don’t play that character a lot, so I end up buying potions from the auction house or getting them from the guild bank when I can (my priest is poorsauce).  I can’t go into a dungeon without drinks (to replenish mana between fights) and I won’t go in without potions either.  I’ve been through many a dungeon where the tank ends up being undergeared and/or the dps draws too much aggro and then I run through mana pretty quickly.  If I don’t have a potion to get us through a boss fight, that’s bad.  And though I think no one really notices the buffs at this point, I do use my priest buffs–always fortitude and sometimes shadow protection, occasionally divine spirit.  Some people ask for buffs.  But I kind of knew that buffs needed reagents, but I never really thought about how often one must buy those to keep up.  I almost always go through two buff rounds–one at the beginning and one after a wipe (almost every group I’ve been in has wiped at least once)–but then there are the times when we wipe 3 or 4 or 5 times and then I’ve gone through 5 sacred candles.  None of these things cost that much, but I tend to keep a stack or two of 20 of most things.  It adds up.

Add to that that now that my priest is nearing 80, I’m starting to get gear that needs gems and/or is worth enchanting.  That, too, takes resources.  And gathering those resources takes either time or money.  It’s interesting that WoW incorporates these resource needs in a pretty realistic way.  It’s not points or some arbitrary way of saying you’re ready to go into battle.  You decide it’s worth investing in these things because your gameplay will be more enjoyable if your group doesn’t die because you’re undergeared or didn’t bring your mana potions.  Some people take the approach of being as resourced as possible–having the best gear with all the best enchants and gems, having a full stock of potions, food, drinks.  And some try to get buy with the least, sometimes out of necessity, aka lack of funds.  I am somewhere in the middle.  When I can afford it, either in virtual cash or the real time investment, I try to have an optimal setup for playing.  If I don’t have what I need for that enchant right now, I shrug it off.  After all, I don’t want to sacrifice too many real resources for virtual ones!

Apparently, I’m in synch with the Washington Post

20. January 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

“What if I did have 30 hours that could be filled with leisure and I was just too distracted or disorganized to find them?”

From The Test of Time.

More . . . when I have time.

Labor, Stress, Leisure, and other thoughts

18. January 2010 · 6 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

I’ve been thinking about labor for the last couple of days as I’ve tried to settle into a routine where I can get my work done for my course, keep a couple of other balls in the air, take care of a household and children, and still find time for down time.  It feels lazy to say this, but I don’t like working all the time.  I’ve tried in my life to find work that doesn’t feel like work.  I feel completely lucky to have the education and skills to pursue that kind of work as opposed to resorting to manual labor (which may not feel like work to some people, but would to me).  For whatever reason, as I’ve gotten older, the pressure of work, even enjoyable work, leads to major stress.  Twice in the last couple of weeks, I’ve endured massive headaches brought on by stress, exacerbated by my TMJ condition, which was itself brought on by stress.  A vicious cycle, to be sure.  I hate that this happens and as I’ve said before, my energy is just gone when these things come on and I don’t feel like doing anything and then I feel guilty for that which stresses me out and thus we start all over again.

From a financial standpoint, we don’t need for me to have a fulltime paycheck for us to survive.  We’ve made enough cuts now and the little bit of extra income I’ve brought in and that Mr. Geeky has earned through grants and service activities have mitigated much of the gap that existed in our spending and income right after I quit.  But, of course, there are things like remodeling projects, travel, and the looming college education for the kids that have more than once raised the issue of my going back to work.  Not in a desperate, “omg, you have to find a job now kind of way,” but in a “well, if I went back to work . . .” kind of way.

And that brings me to another kind of labor, the labor of keeping up the house and taking care of the kids, a majority of which falls on my shoulders whether or not I’m working.  Added to the general stress of my former job in and of itself was the stress of trying to manage all the kids’ activities, keep up with laundry, keep the house relatively neat, cook meals, buy food for said meals, etc.  And this goes back to the “I don’t want to be working all the time statement.”  I get most stressed when I feel like that’s the case.  So, for example, I leave for work at 8:30, get home at 6:00, prepare a meal, supervise homework, mabye a break for tv or a game or something before having to supervise bedtime.  Yes, even with tweens and teens, we still have to make sure that the kids go to bed in a timely manner.  Because there’s so little time during the week, shopping, laundry and other housework fell to the weekend, meaning that a chunk of it was taken up with work.  And, often, Mr. Geeky does “paid” work–grades papers, does research, performs some kind of service–on the weekend.  I’ve read the academic blogs; I see you out there trying to say you’re not going to work on Saturday or Sunday.  You almost always fail.

All of my self-improvement projects also start to feel like work.  Exercise, decluttering, educational activities.  It’s enough to make you go crazy.   Tim Burke’s post about the declining value/open sourcing of cultural products gets at the heart of some of my dilemma:

If the 1950s-1990s were a highwater mark for the commodification of culture in the United States, it’s partly because they were also a highwater mark for the sequestration of leisure time from labor time. For the last three decades, working Americans have seen that leisure time slowly clawed back for the sake of work or for the sake of a productivist temperment even outside of work, towards a belief that the things we do should somehow always be generating value, towards a classically bourgeois construction of virtuous leisure. . . .

Productivism again reigns as a supreme bourgeois virtue. Time spent just listening or reading or viewing, if you can’t recuperate it as time getting educated or improved in some tangible way, is shameful time, not a shared triumph of the middle-class milieu.

Tim uses these points in a larger argument about why cultural products have lost their value.  In part, it’s because we don’t have time to engage with them.  And in part, it’s because there’s an attitude prevalent now that says if you spend an afternoon reading a book or catching up on The Wire, you’re wasting your time, maybe even “our” collective time.  Tim doesn’t mention this, but there is a kind of “omg, Americans aren’t making anything, aren’t as productive as we used to be; the Chinese are going to eat our lunch” panic out there.  As I recall, though, productivity has actually been on the rise.  Anyway, this is part of my problem.  My decision to work or not work, work part-time or full-time, spend time doing household work or writing that may or not pay off, spend time when most “normal” people are working playing video games or watching tv or reading a book is getting all caught up in this productivism mentality that I have internalized.  I keep thinking not about how I “should” be spending my time based on what’s best for me personally or my family, but thinking about how spending my time looks to the outside world.  (Go ahead, send in the psychoanalysts.) And honestly, my family, even my immediate family, are part of that outside world.  I feel the need to justify what I’ve done all day, detailing the laundry that’s been done, the writing that got done, how many hours I spend prepping for class.  And that’s not coming from them, believe me.  They never look at me weird if they come home and find me in front of the tv or playing WoW.

What I’ve been thinking about, then, is what labor and how much of it I really should be doing, not from a perspective of whether or not that labor “looks good” to the outside world, but from a perspective of what makes me feel good–and by good I mean, relaxed yet stimulated.  In other words, though I like my leisure time, I’m not one who enjoys spending all day every day doing nothing but leisure activities.  Even though it’s work, I like writing.  I’ve spent an hour writing this damn blog post and I have no idea where it falls on the work/leisure spectrum.  It feels like work, but it feels like leisure too because it’s not connected to a paying job.  Getting paid to do something alters my relationship to labor, of course.  If I followed my “feel good” argument to its logical conclusion, I wouldn’t evaluate my students’ assignments this afternoon.  Instead, I’d either engage in some other kind of unpaid labor or I’d use some of my leisure time.   And honestly, I get a good feeling about evaluating student work that has nothing to do with getting paid to do it.  It’s almost like a community service.  I feel like I’m helping them improve something about their lives, which will, in this case, pay off for education as a whole when they enter classrooms.

I honestly don’t know what my answer is to this dilemma.  I just know that I need to find something that works for me, and get over my anxiety about whether or not I’m working “enough.”  The funny thing about this whole dilemma is that it comes from my freedom.  If I had a full-time job, there’d be no real issue.  I’d just do the work that was necessary.  As I’ve said a million times, I like where I am, but I’m realizing it’s more challenging in many ways that it seemed at first.

Random Dinners: Ingredients

18. January 2010 · 6 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

One thing that cookbook authors don’t usually think about is what the home cook can reasonably find in terms of ingredients.  If chile paste is what the recipe needs, then that’s what they’re going to put in the recipe and often they will offer no substitution.  Chile paste was one ingredient I had difficulty finding for this Asian Beef Noodle Salad recipe.  I also couldn’t find the noodles.  I ended up using rice noodles instead of the bean threads the recipe called for.  Our grocery store used to carry a good collection of asian ingredients, but now they mostly carry those dried meals that you just add water to.  And they do not taste good.  I found both the chile paste and the noodles at another store near one of the kid’s activities.  In my post Thanksgiving post, I lamented the sorry condition of the grocery stores in Mr. Geeky’s hometown, where you could barely find produce.  I wasn’t looking, but I’m sure you couldn’t find fresh herbs much less chile paste.

There are 2 stores where I’d be likely to find all kinds of bizarre ingredients–Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s.  The problem with both is parking.  It is impossible to find parking at the Trader Joe’s.  It’s next to the Farmer’s Market and there’s enough parking, I’d guess for maybe 50 cars.  Way not enough.  Whole Foods has even less parking and the way the lot is configured means there’s a traffic jam upon exiting.  I swear my blood pressure goes up whenever I go to either place.  I think the solution for me is to actually write or call the store manager of my current store and tell him or her that I want more asian ingredients.  I’ll let you know how that works out.

There’s also the issue of seasonality.  Technically, I think, nothing is in season here as far as produce goes, so I’m buying red peppers, knowing that they at best come from California and at worst come from South America.  I don’t know which has the worst carbon footprint, but I think about it.  And then there’s the issue of quantity.  Fresh herbs at the grocery store come in huge bunches.  A recipe calls for 2 teaspoons.  You end up with tons of leftover dill or cilantro.  In my house, it gets thrown away eventually.  This has happened with lettuce and other produce that you have to buy in set quantities but of which you’re only using a small amount for a particular meal.  I’ve tried to use some of those ingredients in lunches or other meals and it’s worked to some degree, but still it’s an issue.  My solution for herbs is to plant them this spring.  I had rosemary, basil and mint.  I just need thyme, cilantro, and maybe a couple of others.  At the farmer’s market, produce comes in smaller packaging or no packaging.  I can get a sprig of lavender and not a whole bunch.  Lettuce heads are smaller and most produce can be bought singly (true in the grocery store too of most things).

This week’s recipes include some beef and pork, which I’ve ordered from the farm and I’ll be picking up on Wednesday.  Honestly, it’s not that much more expensive than the grocery store and I just feel a lot better about the product on many levels.  I wonder, once spring rolls around, how much of my shopping I can do from the farmer’s market.  If I organized my recipes by season, perhaps most of it.  Sounds like a good challenge!

Friday Fun? More on the class.

15. January 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

I wish I had something witty to post here, but I’ve been working for the last three hours, retooling my class schedule.  Not only are we behind, but I started having some philosophical differences with my textbook.  They put Web 2.0 tools in with multimedia stuff like video and audio.  I mean, yes, one of the great things about blogs and wikis, etc., is that you can make them multimedia quite easily, but I wouldn’t lump them in with stuff created with a tool like Adobe’s (now obsolete) director.  Interestingly, I’m finding that I think of everything as being online and as part of the internet.  I find it weird now to think of audio or video or animation as separate from the web, though I know it can be.  I am constantly reminding myself and my students that internet access may not be available, possibly even at the school level.  But it is hard for me to imagine learning without it.

I have a million other things on my list to do today–going to the school to pick up some volunteer materials, dropping off the car for inspection, and laundry out the wazoo.  Chances are I’ll be relaxing quite a bit this weekend.

Technology tools pros and cons

14. January 2010 · 4 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , ,

With the first week of class under my belt, and lots of hands-on work with tools both in and out of the classroom, I’ve been thinking about the good and the bad of the tools I use for teaching.  I have not mastered the Michael Wesch level of technology integration.  I tend to focus on a couple of things–blogs, maybe a wiki, and usually some kind of multimedia project.  Twitter, Ning, delicious–I’m afraid to go there.  Which I know is saying something for someone who works in and is in the middle of teaching a course on educational technology.  The course is stretching me just a bit beyond my comfort zone, which has me trying out lots of new things for teaching, things I may use on my own but haven’t incorporated into my pedagogy fully.  One of my students suggested that she was feeling like the tools we had looked at so far were more useful for her professional development rather than for teaching.  I know how she feels!  Here are some of my thoughts so far.

Overall, the number of things out there that one *could* use is enormous.  This makes finding the right resource or tool very difficult.  I’ve been digging through my various networks in search of resources for chemistry and biology teachers.  It’s harder than it looks.

The textbook.  It was suggested to me that I use a textbook to provide some structure to the class.  I was glad to do so since I’d never taught this topic before, but now I’m sort of regretting that decision for a several reasons.  One, the book wasn’t in when the class began, as I’ve mentioned previously.  Two, I chose to use the electronic version for myself and told the students they could choose either option.  They’ve all chose the hard copy version.  The electronic version, while convenient, is kind of lame.  The links are not clickable.  There’s an affiliated website, also not clickable when mentioned in the text.  Instead, you have to type in the url and then dig through an index to find something.  Despite being published in 2009, some of the links to examples and external resources no longer work.  Despite being a book about incorporating technology into teaching, there are so few specific examples, it’s laughable, and almost no use of technology within the subject matter itself.  There pdf’s to print out or online quizzes to take and an occasional video to watch, but there’s no tutorial that would take you through a lesson plan or technology integration process (there are, to be fair, links to external versions of these–but you have to type the link in yourself).  Besides the technical issues, I’m finding myself too closely tied to the book.  I ventured away from it today and felt much more comfortable.  I have used textbooks or readers in the past to good effect, but for some reason, this isn’t working as well as I’d like.  Tomorrow I’ll be reading next week’s sections, so I’ll see what I can add of my own to make it much more palatable.

Google Toolbar.  My students are all using it for bookmarking and other things, so I thought I’d use it too.  I switched to Google Chrome a few weeks ago, mostly for speed reasons.  Ironically, the Google Toolbar will not work with Google Chrome.  Really?  So I switched to Firefox and lo, and behold, it works fine.  The share button is especially nice, letting you share pages with your social network quite easily.  When you click on it, it gives you about fifty or so sites that you can share the page with.  Pretty amazing.  You can also bookmark on bookmarking sites, put something into your reader and all kinds of other things.  I’m hoping we can experiment.

Edublogs.  I decided that since this was a popular platform for K-12 educators, that I’d give it a try.  After all, it’s built on WordPress, which I’ve always liked and am familiar with.  I also recommended the site to my students.  Two of them went with Edublogs, two with WordPress.com.  During our “pimp your blog” segment in class today, we found some major differences between the two.  I already knew that the widgets/plugins available via Edublogs were limited, in part, I’m sure, to keep things simple.  But, there were some key plugins that weren’t available in Edublogs that I think should be.  One, RSS Feeds.  It just seems silly that I can’t include a simple RSS url that will then display the latest posts from that feed.  I’d love to be able to do that for my student blogs, which for now are just linked to.    I don’t see why a handful of other plugins besides the very basic ones provided, couldn’t be included for free.  Considering that the target audience for the site are K-12 teachers, many of whom shell out their own money already for classroom supplies, you would think that more free stuff would be readily available.  Wordpress.com includes the RSS plugin, btw, as well as many others that Edublogs does not include.

Widgets, gadgets, embedding objects.  Without the more automatic widgets for WordPress available, we resorted to the tried and true method of cutting and pasting lines of javascript into the text widget.  It works, to be sure.  But it’s a little over even my fairly tech savvy students’ heads.  Both Google reader and delicious have codes for embedding their feeds into any web site, but they’re both pretty hard to find, and delicious’s is nearly impossible.  Part of this is that a lot of blog applications now allow you to include these things with the click of a button.  WordPress.com had a delicious widget, so that one could enter their username and voila! delicious feed.  But some people want or need to go old school.  It’d be nice if those scripts were more easily found or foregrounded.

It’s hard to keep in mind that I’ve built up my tool collection over several years and that I may have switched specific providers of tools–from Bloglines to Google Reader, from Blogger to WordPress–I’ve developed an understanding of how these tools work that my students don’t necessarily have.  For me, switching products is like buying a Toyota after driving a Pontiac for years.  Sure the gear shift is in a different place and the radio works slightly differently, but I still know how to drive the car.  For my students, who’s familiarity rests primarily with Facebook, email, IM and course management systems, it’s a little like riding a bike and then learning to drive a car.  Yeah, they both have wheels and gears, but the functionality is quite different.  Warning: learning curve ahead.

WoW Wednesday: Stopping to Smell the Virtual Roses

13. January 2010 · 1 comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

Many have complained that WoW has become mostly about the grind.  With the ability to gain experience and rewards that turn into gear through PvP, quests, and dungeons, the end result, some imagined endgame where your character has the perfect gear set, is what people focus on.  I took a step back in the last week to see some content I hadn’t seen on any character yet.  I hadn’t seen it because I leveled past it, barely giving it a second glance as I moved on to bigger and better things.  So, my priest hit 68 and I immediately hit Northrend and a few Northrend dungeons even.  But I  hadn’t seen huge swaths of Outland and had only done a few of the dungeons there.  I was hitting a wall, though, when it came to healing the Northrend dungeons, so I decided to go back and do the Outland ones for more practice.  It worked out well on a number of levels.  First, I was definitely better at healing these dungeons, for the most part, so I felt more confident and could more easily hit my healing stride.  Second, the gear I got in them was still pretty good for me.  Third, I gathered tons of materials for my professions, which I hadn’t quite gotten to the level of being able to use them in Northrend yet.  I still needed Netherweave and Arcane dust, things that could only be found in Outland and which could be found in abundance in the dungeons.  Finally, I got to see some really cool places.

I would venture to guess that everyone who plays WoW regularly has been to all the Northrend dungeons.  If they hadn’t before, they have now, through the dungeon finder.  But I know plenty of regular WoW players who never went into Magister’s Terrace or Mechanar or even Archatraz.  But now I’ve been to those places, and they’re pretty cool.  The groups I ended up with were in the same boat.  They’d never done the places before either, so we’ve all marveled at certain rooms or commented on different mechanics, like flying around for the last boss in Magister’s Terrace.  We’ve taken it more slowly and appreciated our virtual surroundings.  That just doesn’t happen in the heroics I’ve been running, which are a rush to the finish so that one can accumulate more emblems to exchange for gear.

At some point I realized i was close to finishing all the Outland dungeons, so I’ve quit queuing for Northrend ones.  I had to venture into one located in the old world that very few people do, so I dragged a couple of my level 80 guildies with me and we knocked out that one and the next one.  We also ventured into a raid that none of us had ever done.  We ended up dead practically before we started, but vowed to come back.  It looks pretty fun.  There’s something about seeing new stuff and having new experiences that I really like.  That wonder of, oh I’ve never seen this before.  It’s happening in my quests somewhat, too, since I’m tackling some questlines I never did on other characters.  Once you hit 80, it’s easy to run out of those experiences.  Luckily, I haven’t.  There’s still plenty of places I haven’t been, quests I haven’t done, raids I haven’t seen.  And they keep adding new things all the time.

Focusing on the new, on completing quests, on doing dungeons just because you haven’t done them makes the game feel like less of a grind, like you’re doing it for fun again instead of competing for some imaginary brass ring.  I think, too, it keeps the game in perspective.  I haven’t played as much lately as I’ve been sick and/or have been working and there have been times when I’ve missed a day where I’ve thought, “Damn, now I’m 2 frost emblems behind on getting that new set of shoulders.”  Seriously, that’s not a good way to think.  It makes you all anxious and shit when you go into the game.  Now, if only I could get those PuG tanks to slow down a little.

Careers

13. January 2010 · 9 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

Laura at 11d has an interesting post and comments about giving advice to current grads about what careers to pursue.  There are comments trying to speculate about what industries are hiring, suggestions to do what you love, and suggestions to become a plumber.  I have a son in high school whose love of video games leads him to consider video game development as a career.  But, he has not done anything toward developing a game aside from a camp he attended back in sixth grade.  We bought him software, but he’s barely opened it.  And game developing isn’t the glamorous job most gamers think it is.  Yes, it can pay well, but the hours can be long, and if you’re at a start up, the risk that you won’t have a job when the launch fails is pretty high.  NPR had suggested that game development was a job that is surviving the recession.  May be true, but may not be cut out for everyone.  The thing that I’m aiming for when I talk to my kids (and sometimes even my students) is to keep their options open.  Don’t narrow your field of study too quickly.  Choose a field that you like, but that offers a variety of options.  Someone in the comments at 11d suggested math.  I suggested computer science.

I came out of college at the tail end of a recession.  I, like many of my classmates, escaped to graduate school.  Some went to law school or med school.  The ones who didn’t typically became accountants or worked for financial institutions.  I was vaguely aware that the economy hadn’t been good, but I didn’t think about choosing a career that was financially viable.  My biggest concern was finding work that was fulfilling.  That may have been a naive way to go into things, but I suspect that many a college graduate thinks this way.  Had I been thinking solely about money, I would have taken my English degree and headed off to law school.  Or I would have continued with my Business or Economics major.

I have never considered a career something that you do from 9-5 for money and then go home to other things.  It’s always been tied to my identity and values.  I couldn’t work at an investment bank because its principles are contrary to what I believe in.  I’ve always said, of course, that if I really needed the money, I’d do almost anything.  But first, I’d try to do something that I felt good about and that made me feel good about the contribution I was making.

That said, I don’t envy recent grads.  I think the advice of “do something you love” is good advice as long as a) they can find a job doing that and b) they understand it may not make them rich (unless they’re in love with working at a top law firm or being a doctor or something).  And quite frankly, what you love sometimes changes over time.  There are things I didn’t enjoy that I enjoy now that had I liked them back when I was 22 I might have made a career of it.  Like Intellectual Property issues.  There is a point at which the cost of retooling oneself exceeds the payoff.  I think I’m there.  Going to law school doesn’t make much sense for a 40-something washed up academic who isn’t at all mobile.  Likewise med school.  But maybe that’s just me putting limitations on myself.  The recession certainly makes one think slightly differently about doing things for money.

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