Ole Bald Angus the Monk is an MMO-playing dude that I got linked to by Jeff Freeman, who's In The Industry and all awesome and stuff. Angus writes a lot, and he writes really well. (of course, you have to be willing to interpret him a little; call it personal style.)
I only check him really every once in a while, but he wrote something this january that hit me right in the gut. It's about games as surrogates for human attention. As is usual with my blog, what I'm about to say won't make a lot of sense until you go read his thing, so go do that. And yeah, we use the same default blog theme.
Back yet? no really, go read it.
OK. This reminded me a lot of Broken Toys, an essay that Scott Jennings (aka Lum The Mad) wrote for lumthemad.net way back in the day. It's a seminal work about the value that people place on games -- especially virtual worlds -- and the expectations they have of them. Well, that's not true. It's about what happens when the games, and their operators, don't meet the expectations of the players. I tried searching the archives on Scott's blog for it, but I can't find it right now because I can't think of a better search term than "broken toys" for it, and since that's the name of the blog IT'S ON EVERY PAGE DURR.
Anyway.
Angus hits it on the head, or more appropriately suckerpunches it in the gut, on this one. Can I change the way I think about my current addiction so as to make it less of a totally unhealthy thing? o_O
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