WTF does he do with the 'phone/remote at 1:10?

What a load of infantile nonsense.

Inconsiderate bastards certainly.

Its just like grown men riding bikes in in the woods. It just depends what floats your boat.

What we should all be doing is mature stuff like working for the man, slaving our guts out 60hours a week just to maintain our overpriced house mortgage and car repayments, building up a heavy dose of stress, weight and concurrent cardio vascular disease.

That way, we can sniff at people enjoying themselves and tell them they're so juvenile.

🙄

Well said SO. Personally, I don't do MMOs any more (just don't have the time or the inclination), but they can be a serious addiction, no doubt. I had a lvl50 priest and rogue back in the day when that was the level cap (and before I had two little children!). Solo play (ho ho) wasn't so much fun, it was the clan raids & instances that kept me interested. Problem is, you needed to devote a good 5 or 6 straight hours to it at a time to get anywhere because other people were relying on you, in my case as a heal-bot most of the time. Anyway, once I quit WC, I realised what a monumental waste of my time it was for those ~12 months or so. Not saying that applies to everyone playing MMOs, but if the "everything in moderation" saying is true, well it's pretty hard to play an MMO in "moderation" as they're very carefully designed around a grind of some sort, however well disguised it may be.

I don't know about WoW, I only dipped into Guild Wars because it was free. Its was relatively easy to pick up and drop though.

Yeah Guild Wars was/is kind of a hybrid single player/MMO thing. Didn't really float my boat. I also played SWG from beta for a couple of years, although the devs made a total hash of it.

Tags done 8)

you forgot "Surf Matt = level 1billion awesome rogue" Hora

haha, I also have a better tan these days 😀

The addictive nature of WoW was quite amazing.

I think part of it is down to the community. You became involved with people, oddly online friendships formed. The fact that you can go and raid with the same people again and chat about normal stuff as well as killing beasts.

Computer Game Fan No Time To Masturbate

can't do linky thing

Its just like grown men riding bikes in in the woods.

Really? Think about it. It's nothing like it. And your idea of being mature demonstrates nothing more than that you haven't got beyond some hand-me-down notion of what it is to be an adult. You can not apply one of your stupid criteria to me.

I ride to keep fit. It has the added bonus of requiring a skill-set which requires constant attention and an approach to learning which can be transferred to many of the other things I do in my life. There is no escape from life; it has no cure – whilst it is, or can be, good for children to explore their reactions and interactions through fantasy and role play, there is virtually no similarity between what they do and a bunch 30-somethings running around the woods pretending to slay pretend dwarves.

Its just like grown men riding bikes in in the woods.

Bro and sis in law LIVED on computer games. Once they came along to Laser Quest and didn't even register on the top ten in the game (I was first) 🙂

Its nothing like woods. The only time I was really addicted to pc games was Golden Eye on the N64.

Everytime I walk past the Warcraft shop in the Trafford Centre I hit a wall of sweat in the air 😆

For fun I go out on my bike and speak to real people, you should try it.

There have been cyclists I've met who are painfully shy on the trails. Most are cool but there are some (or maybe they just don't want to talk to me?) 😉

It's obviously not comparable to MTBing apart from a social aspect but I personally don't see it as any worse than watching TV or surfing the Internet – it's just that time flies playing MMOs so you end up burning silly amounts of time on them. Oh and don't join a US guild for raiding, it's like doing a night-shift then going straight into work for your normal job :p

I wonder….if you met a girl on one of these virtual world games do you have to fit a groin-al attachment (as worn in Red dwarf) then gyrate/hump the air?

I love how people are so quick to judge. It reminds me of the Rock Band "why don't you play real instruments" argument. Mountain biking, what's that all about, it's just a bunch of overgrown kids playing BMX Bandits.

Thing is, Warcraft, computer games in general, LARP, mountain biking, people do them because they're fun. I've tried all of them (though not regularly cos I'm a bit CDO when it comes to hobbies) and whilst I got on with some more than others personally, I can understand the appeal in all of them.

It's very easy to sit there going "these things that other people do, they're silly and pathetic" but my reaction to that attitude isn't 'gosh, how mature' it's 'gosh, what a smug, arrogant git.'

Taking Warcraft as an example; some people do take it to extremes, I know people who play (or played) most nights, it becomes a social event, and it's difficult to miss sessions when two dozen other people are relying on you to be there and will have their evening ruined if you bail. And ok yes, they're "Internet friends" rather than "real people" but, how many people have made friends on STW? Now bear in mind that these are people you talk to most nights, for several hours. How is talking on a headset 'sad' but ringing someone on a phone is perfectly normal? Real friendships are formed, people cross continents to meet each other and socialise face-to-face on the back of it.

When I played, I never bought in to the idea that I -had- to be playing x number of nights a week, as the high-level raiding game requires. Some weeks I'd play every night, some weeks I'd not touch it. A large part of that was that I had better things to do, and if I didn't then I might as well log on for a couple of hours.

One day, I didn't play for a week, that became two, became a month, and I've not been on since. I didn't make a conscious decision to stop playing, it just kinda happened. In honesty I don't really miss the game, though I do miss the social aspect a little; that said, most of the people I played with were friends in real life before I joined so of course that hasn't changed.

So sure, there will be a percentage of people who do fit the stereotype, but for every 'Hand Solo' there will be dozens of normal, regular people who just happen to be in a different room to their friends whilst gaming.

LARP is an odd one. It looks barmy to an outsider but, having played a couple of times, it's quite a giggle. Thing is, these people don't actually believe they're orcs, you know. Well, most of them don't. (-: If I was to compare it to anything, it's kinda like paintballing. From one point of view, Paintballing is grown men running around pretending to be soldiers, how sad is that? Take paintballing, swap toy guns for toy swords, swap the battle strategy for puzzle-solving, add a storyline and you've essentially got LARP.

Funny how these things come around. When I was at Uni, you could replace most of the above with stuff like D&D. How much stick did that game get from people who didn't know the first thing about it? I've played very little D&D but I've played other RPGs (Shadowrun was a big one for me) and they're huge amounts of fun. Intricately woven stories that rival movie plots, with twists and turns as the players try and solve the mysteries and work out what's going on. You roll a few dice to resolve chance situations, but it's closer to something like a Murder Mystery evening (anyone done that? Is that deemed 'sad' too?) than the image most people have of spotty teenagers dressed up as wizards playing with plastic model monsters.

I'll try anything, pretty much. It's how I rediscovered biking. Sometimes I'll think "y'know, this isn't for me" but at least then I'll be in an informed position to judge rather than being the one standing and mocking from a distance like the big lad at school whose eyes were too close together.

Oops, christ, that went on a bit. Sorry about that!

Point is, I'm not defending WoW particularly, it just makes me cross when people make sweeping assumptions about others that aren't true.

One other thing that just occured to me. How many people follow their football team week in, week out, home and away games, then watch it on TV as well, then spend all the time in the pub with their mates micro-analysing every nuance of the game?

You know what? They're not so different.

3 fish,

My 'stupid criteria' wasn't aimed at you, and served as a handy example. However, please feel free to attack it in any reactionist way you feel appropriate to prove your point.

You've demonstrated your lack of empathy and inability to accept that others may choose to live their lives differently from yours in the Sharki thread as well as here.

I suggest you go and play with Barnes, who demonstrates similar characteristics. Perhaps you can have a go on each others high horses?

(To be fair to 3Fish, if I was being regularly woken up at 4am, I'd have patience failure as well.)

Cougar +1.

Which sounds a bit DnD, I suppose – I've got a magic Cougar +1. 😆

Thank god for that, I thought I'd get ripped apart for that.

Who put the 'robe and wizards hat' tag on here? Laughed my head off at that, well done. (-:

cougar +2

well said!

no difference to people who spend hours completing the perfect lap on a racing game, or days completing final fantasy games, or weeks on red dead redemption, and so on and so on….

(for the record i dont play computer games, never owned a console apart from a Wii that only gets used for 4 player mariokart about 10 times a year)

ohhhh and being honest… it really does smell of stale body odour the moment you walk near the reading war-hammer/d&d type shop 😉

As an aside, the worst place I've found for that stale sweat smell is Gamestation. It really does seem to attract those for whom soap and water is something that's for other people.

most things in life are enjoyable if you do them with friends 🙂 (friends that wash and dont stink of stale sweat!)

Who put the 'robe and wizards hat' tag on here? Laughed my head off at that, well done. (-:

😉

my mate dropped out of uni in the first term cos he was playing so much, when i returned from uni 4 years later he was still playing it – 16 hours a day, 7 days a week!! 😯

You've demonstrated your lack of empathy and inability to accept that others may choose to live their lives differently from yours in the Sharki thread as well as here.

All that has been demonstrated is your inability to be critical of something you like. My empathy is fine.

Leeroy Jenkins has the right idea.

It came out in the wash that the Leeroy video was staged. Very funny though.

(and, god damn whelps)

All that has been demonstrated is your inability to be critical of something you like.

My objectivity is fine thanks, but fill your boots if you perceive I have these inadequacies and it makes you feel better about this discussion.

My point is no greater than 'live and let live', which appears to be something you don't like.

Anyway, I've got a bathroom to clean, which, come to think about it, is probably more fun than talking to the intolerant.

My point is no greater than 'live and let live', which appears to be something you don't like.

And where have I said anything to the contrary? I'm not saying that anyone should/shouldn't do anything – other than play 100db make-believe outside my house at 4am – merely that my opinion is that something is childish nonsense. To put it in a way that you might be able to understand, imagine that I said I think yellow cars look stupid. Does that mean, or even imply, that I think nobody should have a yellow car? No; of course it doesn't. Learn to read and quit projecting your woeful reasoning abilities onto me.

Played WOW but quit as it saps way too much time and if you can't submit every waking hour to it your left behind.

Played EVE that was good fun when we played as pirate type characters, we'd be chased all over the Eve universe by the main corps one of them basically controlled huge areas. They got wiped out though by someone working there way into there corp, building trust until they had access to there assets, then they cleaned them out.

It's a funny thing as it's just like a forum at times, best scam we did was just chatting to a guy saying there's no way he had as much in game money as he claimed. He gave me and another guy 100s of millions of isk to prove it, we then killed him repeatedly as we then has so much isk we could afford to replace our ships. He cancelled his account and made another.