Nowadays my parents actually encourage my gaming habits (well, they encourage my blogging habits), and it turns out my fear was a little unnecessary. They actively try to understand what I'm blogging and tweeting about all the time, though in reality they have almost no clue.
For instance, now my Mom follows me on Twitter (through her phone) and she sees every nonsensical bear thing that I say. Once I quoted a line from one of my healers who justified my death by saying this:
A few minutes later I get this response from my mom:
The tank was working and drawing fire all by himself! I would have cured the furry brave thing!So far it sounds like she's actually got a pretty good grasp of what I do in WoW.
Recently I told my family that I wouldn't be raiding so much because "I beat the game, until the next expansion. We ranked 9th in the US." Explaining that I killed the final boss in the final dungeon on the hardest difficulty might be too much to explain, and I don't want to bore them with irrelevant information.
However, soon enough they start asking questions. My sister wondered what individual rank that would put me at. I told her it would be around 90 (9th place among 10 mans). As we all know, individual rankings aren't really a thing in WoW, but my sister seemed awfully proud that I was somewhere in the top 100 ten-manners. I'll take outside admiration wherever I can find it!
Later on, my mom and I were texting and the conversation went like this:
Mom: Just curious, when did you win wow?
Me: Wednesday. I tweeted about it. Final boss was called madness of deathwing.
Mom: I see now, but you never indicate it's the last for the current release of wow. What game were you playing with spanish speakers?
Me: I was playing wow. You can get randomly paired with people you don't know and I got paired with them.
Mom: Hmmm... Do they know you've finished that kill already or that you're highly ranked?
Me: They can see by looking at my character, but I don't know if they noticed.
Mom: Does sunnier have a rank attribute or an attribute showing he finished wow?
Me: I have a title attached to my name that you only get when you beat everything. It says "Sunnier, Savior of Azeroth."
Mom: So you're a wow aristocrat? Titled, like a lord or lady? Email me a screen shot!
Me: Haha basically! I'll send one.
So here I'm attempting to explain achievements, the LFG, and titles to my mother. I'm actually really happy I get so many thoughtful questions from my family. They even listen to my Team Wafflecast podcasts! They don't really understand what I'm talking about, but they come back later and ask me about whatever I chose to talk about. Even my extended family knows about my blog because my mom told everyone about it. At first I wasn't happy that she told everyone my little secret, but she's obviously really proud of it so maybe I should be too.
It came up again the other day during a job interview. The guy who was interviewing me asked what skills I had outside of programming. I told him I like to draw and write, blah blah blah. He asked me what I write and I told him it was a video game blog. I didn't really go into much more (other than saying I was thinking of moving it toward a User Experience in Video Games blog, because User Experience is pretty valuable in software design too). The last thing I wanted was to tell my potential boss that I spend countless hours on this soul-sucking video game.
Funny thing is, I think mentioning my blog helped quite a bit in this interview. Turns out several of their employees run programming blogs, so it's a popular thing there. I got the job; maybe I got it because my blogging makes me special? Who knows.
When I explain WoW to interested non-players, I try to talk about it in terms that they understand, like ranking. I call my guild my "team of friends", I (mostly jokingly) call raids "play dates". Explaining tanking took a little extra creativity, but it looks like at least my Mom got the idea. My family knows that my character is a werewolf that can turn into a bear or a cat at will. I tell people that competitive raiding is similar to competitive sports (except without the physical exercise and risk of injury).
How do you explain what you do in WoW to interested non-players?
I have had very similar conversations with my family (mostly in an effort to explain to them why I am not free on wednesdays, thursdays and sundays). They used to be very skeptical, but since I seem to have the rest of my life in order, they are now pretty interested in what I do. Explaining raiding to my dad over dinner one night -- I had the same conversation regarding rankings -- was very amusing. My sisters have glanced at some of the blogs I have written for or linked.
ReplyDeleteFriends are more difficult. What really irks me is when people say things like "Why don't you just flake out on the game tonight and come hang out?" Yes, games are games, but.... raiding isn't like that. Raiding is a commitment to other people too.
Funny that you compare it to sports. I was a musician growing up, and did a lot of theatre in college -- I always think of raids as having exactly same priority in my life as rehearsals did. It's not more important than school (or job) but I moved hell and earth to schedule school / job around them. Raiding is pretty much exactly the same kind of commitment for me. There are 24, or 9, or however many other people depending on you to be there. Thankfully my family understands that.
Oh and I too have mentioned that I write for blogs (well, used to) in job interviews... hoping they won't go look it up, hehe. Writing a blog, even if it's about wow, shows that you can commit to providing content on a schedule. It's not a bad thing to mention.
As a college kid, I often used to have my friends wonder why I disappeared for 3 hours every weeknight into my room, and when they found out I played WoW pretty religiously there was much loling. But after a little explaining, they all understood for the most part, even though the other night I was trying to explain heroic spine to my roommate and he was completely utterly confused.
ReplyDeleteActually the best part is I tell them about my higher WoL rankings and they brag that they somebody who is "in the top 5 of something in the world". Its only when they mention exactly what I'm top 5 at when they get funny looks.
But its actually nice to have friends who completely understand that its a commitment like any others and are willing to respect me when I want to play WoW.
When I played WoW, I typically just told people that it was interesting because it was complex, and required large groups to complete. My Warlock required a lot of study and experimentation before I could DPS as high as I did, and that kept me engaged for years where simpler games did not. Additionally, though many games have multiplayer, and even co-op, very few games require co-op to accomplish a goal, and even fewer require more than 2 people. The concept of needing 9, or 24, or even 39 people besides myself just to have a chance at success is fascinating to me. In a normal game I feel like I bested the villains, but in WoW I was defeating foes so powerful that they could have killed me with a glance. But because I worked with my friends as a team, we prevailed.
ReplyDeleteI loved this post, and it made me a little jealous to say the least. My mother-in-law has pride in remembering the name of That Game We're Currently Playing, but no one has ever actively taken an interest in what we're doing or what I'm blogging about. That's really cool that your family does TRY to understand. It sounds like they care about you an awful lot. Gives me warm fuzzy feelings!
ReplyDeleteThat's very cool that your mom not only follows your interests, but is interested herself and wants to have conversations about it! I imagine some of those talks must be really confusing for her, haha. But still fun!
ReplyDeleteWhen people ask me about it, or when I explain it to potential girlfriends (lol), I say it like this:
ReplyDeleteSo I've got a group of nine other friends, and we make a group of ten people. We all agreed that we would play together from 8 til midnight a few times per week. Alone, we can still play the game but we are totally unable to do the same things that we could do if all 10 of us were together.
I play the role of group protector. I try to keep the group from taking damage. Other people try to heal up the damage that does get through and other people try to kill the enemies that are causing us to take damage. Once everything is dead, we win. If we don't mend the damage or prevent enough damage from coming in, we die. I play a role in which not many other people do, so if I'm unable to make it the group can't really pull someone in to take my place, they'll be underexperienced and their character won't be powerful enough. Same goes with the healers, usually. The damage dealers, however, can usually be replaced (lol).
Usually I don't get any more questions than that. At least one former girlfriend picked up the game and played with me for a while! She went druid because I showed her that they can be kitty cats. >.>
-Karnadas
I am fairly jealous that you are able to have cool conversations like these with your family. Definitely not possible in my family, and even when my friends (all who are non-gaming folk) ask me about WoW, it always sounds like they're trolling me when they're asking. >.<
ReplyDeleteA great while back I posted this for a website called GamerLimit.
ReplyDeletehttp://nofuneral.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/wow-translated-to-english/
I follow the Sean "Day[9]" Plott way of thinking: "If you're talking to someone that has no idea about video games and you're excited about what you're talking about, they will be too."
ReplyDeleteThis is the approach I take with my parents when talking about WoW, the theorycrafting, and podcast I do. They think it's really cool (especially the theorycrafting and podcast part). My brother is easy, since I've raided with him since forever. He even listens to the podcast as well.
I actually recently had the opportunity to explain a raid to a friend of my roommate. She's a very intelligent (studying to be a lawyer), hot, blonde woman that found WoW sort of intriguing. I explained a raid is sort of like a puzzle except only half of the pieces are the same at any given time. The other half of the pieces changes for everyone, since that's actually them. If you don't succeed at solving the puzzle the first time, you can always reset it and try again. She seemed to understand it very well and actually spent about an hour just watching me play.
I'm glad your parents are so supportive! It's funny you originally referred to WoW as TBC to your folks. For the longest time, WoW was just "my game" to my parents and my guildies were just "friends from my game". Then my mom asked what game it was I played and I made the mistake of saying "World of Warcraft."
ReplyDeleteNow, my mom still calls it "my game" but my dad seems to have honed in on the "war" part and calls it my "war game". My mom plays Farmville and the Sims so it was pretty easy explaining the commitment to her. She knows I'm a cow who can turn into a bird or a bear and that my friends and I team up to kill bad guys but that's about it.
I'm always having this conversation with my family.. We are kind of scattered across the world, my brother in LA, the other brother in Italy, one sister in the philippines and the remaining sister my parents and me living in central europe where we are from. We try to skype regularly to stay in touch and that's unfortunately on a raid day of my guild, so I always have to drop out after half an hour or so.
ReplyDeleteTo explain I used a sports team as example. We can only train teamplaying when we're playing as a team, we have a goal and everyone needs to commint to overcome the challenge. They had quite some problems with it at first but now understand it.
I even got my brother into it when he was on a visit... he like played a whole day and then stopped as he said if he didn't stop now he never would.. so... he's quite understanding for my fandom :)
love this post T^T wish my family were like that too but thats not gonna happen tho considering trying to explain gaming to my father who have no idea how to use a computer and went to war at the same age that I'm playing wow. He often says I'm too old for gaming (nooooo... i wanna play till i retired XP)
ReplyDeleteThe only excuse I got is I play with foreigners and it help me improve my english!! ahahaha (asian here)
" I call my guild my "team of friends", I (mostly jokingly) call raids "play dates"."
ReplyDeletehahahaha is that what you call us? I thouhgt for sure you hated us.
I don't tell anyone I play wow, much like Vivos, my parents don't know, my friends don't know, (except for one who plays), my coworkers dont know and I don't see the point in telling them :o
Kinda weird considering i spend 4 nights a week leading a guild lmao
-Pask