The roots of multiboxing?

[MadMilitia]

To me it's a change of life event. I loved EQ in 99 and also D2 during the same era. Life was much simpler though. I had a job as a warehouse worker hauling skids and stocking shelves to the wee hours of the morning. I came home from simple physical labor to something much more complex.

Fast forward a decade I now develop for a large network management company. Nothing in any game can match the complexity of what I deal with in the regular day to day. Literally every working day is like an adventure where problems come up and need solutions. Not a day goes by that is ho-hum in this regard.

I also own my own home and thus deal with all the upgrades, repairs and insurance wants single handily. No kids nor wife. Thank God for that. Not to sound weird but if I had a wife and kids I'd never be on my home PC.


Just my opinion here but I think the games haven't changed much. Just me. When I log into a game now the level of complexity just isn't there for me. The breadcrumbs are easy to follow and the whole experience seems insatiable. Some stragglers do come to mind though. Dark Souls is one. The combat is unequal to anything on the market and the variety alone makes it a worthwhile encore.

[Ishar]

I guess I can sympathize a lot with MadMilitia... My 'real job' requires a lot of, eh, thought, since it's R&D focused. Small defense contractor, though, so I get to wear about 5 different hats at a time. Owning your own home is awesome, but it's also kind of an endless project.

I still like my games relatively complex, but they aren't terribly fulfilling anymore. They are more of a distraction, roughly equivalent to a good movie, or a good book. No, wait, that's probably a self-lie, since my favorite games of late have been incredibly complex 'grand strategy' games, lol. I'm also a dwarf fortress player, though I'm staying away from it for now, somewhat deliberately. So its not that games aren't complex...they are just complex in a different way. That's a bit off subject tho, since we are talking about MMO's. We [boxers] tend to take a simple MMO and make it roughly 5x-6x more complex. It's just what we do. Generally MMO's aren't really about complexity though, but about reward cycles. Thus levels, tiered and gated content, and gear resets. Gotta keep the treadmill moving somewhere. And that's ok, really.

Really tho, for me a large component of the experience was always escapism. And I'm aware of that, and cool with that. But not all of it, eh.