Balancing your real life career with your gaming
Everyone can remember a time when they were younger. The days were longer, there were no responsibilities, and playing D&D and video games could literally take up an entire fourteen hour (or more) span in what seemed to be the blink of an eye. And since back in those golden days the words “job” and “mortgage” were so far removed from your bubble existence, you could literally go on playing day after day after day without ever having to worry about when real life responsibilities were going to kick in.
Fast forward a couple of decades (or more if you are an old geezer. We still love you, but seriously -- you know who you are). The times of pouring literal days into hobbies and games are mostly a thing of the past. Time that used to be spent playing various games is now spent working a forty hour a week job, commuting to said job, paying for the mortgage, the groceries, the health insurance, the life insurance, the utilities, the cell phone, the high speed connection, the Xbox Live subscription, the MMORPG subscription, your kid’s after-school activities, and whatever other bills and sundries each unique individual happens to have. It becomes harder and harder to find free time -- and money -- to dedicate to relaxation and entertainment.
But entertainment is important. It keeps people sane by allowing them a much-needed break from the daily grind that is the working world. Even if you are one of those lucky people who love your job, there is still the need to break away from time to time, just so you don’t burn out. And for those of us who are gamers, the MMORPG is the perfect opportunity.
MMORPGs allow people to cast off the tedious trappings of their real-world selves. It allows them to immerse themselves in a world where responsibilities are only as real as they want them to be. But there is another level to entertainment that goes beyond the sheer indulgence of one’s senses, and that is the aspect of “second life” MMORPGs, or game careers.
Many of the modern-day MMORPGs feature a living, breathing, alternate reality, complete with markets, social structures, classes, societies, professions, and otherwise. These MMORPGs feature a world which is so realistic that the only way to experience it completely is to involve yourself to the same extent which you live and breathe in the real world around you.
There are varying levels of play-styles in MMORPGs. There are role-players, casual players, hardcore players, and top-end raiders. And while role-players and casual gamers are generally the type of players who simply enjoy logging in for a few hours a week, randomly participating in some element of the game purely for the sake of enjoyment, there are other gamers out there, such as the hardcore and top-end raiders, who want more than pure enjoyment out of their MMORPGs. They want accomplishment. They want to experience every nook and cranny of the MMO. To kill every mob, to uncover every quest, to see every dungeon, to beat every encounter, to indulge themselves in every aspect of the MMORPG that the developers took the time to create.
The only downside is the limitation of time. It takes time to get together with your group of friends or your guild and work your way through the progression of the MMO. Time is limited in the sense that it has to fit into the real-world constraints of your job and other RL commitments. And unless you are one of the lucky few who get paid to play, you have to face the reality that your time in-game is rather limited.
Many gamers assume that if a player is hardcore, or a full-time raider, that they have “no life.” The most common phrase that gets tossed around is “you must live in your parent’s basement.” And while this may be true for a very small number of players, the vast majority of competitive, progressive players are adults with jobs, real-life commitments, and the one thing that sets them apart from the rest: an ability to structure, schedule, and ensure that their game sessions are spent making forward progress in the MMORPG. This knowledge is only obtained through real-life working experience, not by hiding out in the basement.
In much the same way a five year old child cannot handle the responsibility of taking the keys to the car, driving down to the grocery store, and buying a gallon of milk, most sheltered teenagers living in their parent’s basement lack the necessary skills and real-life knowledge necessary to make a successful game career coincide with their real lives. They haven’t had the time to experience the real world and grasp, first-hand, what it takes to make it work.
The first thing most casual players say when they look at the requirements of a hardcore guild in an MMORPG is “ewww, it’s too much like a job.” What many people fail to understand is that the various structures and regulations set in place by hardcore guilds are there not to make it like a job, but to make sure that what limited time they have to play the MMO can be spent in a manner most productive to their play-style: progressing through the content of their chosen game. And that is something which cannot be done if a lackadaisical attitude towards gaming is taken. If people are just logging into the MMORPG and going willy-nilly about their tasks with no real structure in place, time is wasted.
Balancing a game career with your real life career is an important balance to be maintained. Just like golf enthusiasts spend most of their waking moments away from the job and family enjoying their favorite hobby, gamers do the same. Setting up structures, schedules, and minimum requirements ensures that the players involved in MMORPG progression guilds can continually progress forward. Nothing is more frustrating than logging in, knowing you only have 3 hours to play, and then spending an hour or more of that time looking for a group to go do a quest. The difference between most guilds and the progression guilds is that a schedule is set in place for the latter so that when you log in you know there is a group waiting for you, ready to move ahead on that quest, to kill mobs, to beat the dungeon, to defeat the raid boss, or so on and so forth.
Balancing a game career with your real-life career means structuring and scheduling your hobby to maximize your forward progress in said hobby. It means scheduling dungeon runs and raids. It means having a level minimum on players who wish to join you or the guild in the MMORPG, to make sure that the people involved are all on the same wavelength. It means setting up a minimum requirement for armor and weapons and skill, to make sure you don’t have to waste time dropping back to help someone who doesn’t take their hobby as seriously as you do. The structures and schedules exist to protect the limited time players have to invest in their hobby, and make sure that they get to do what they find most fun: progressing through the content of their chosen MMORPG.
At the end of the day the majority of progressive gamers who live the hardcore lifestyle raiding full-time are working professionals. Dentists, lawyers, programmers, designers, authors, business owners, and so on. The vast majority of gamers who are at the top are people who arrived there by taking their real-life success in terms of managing their careers and transferring that knowledge into the MMORPGs they have such a passion for.
Successful guilds exist through structure, management, and schedules based upon examples taken from successful careers in the real world. Children living out of their parent’s basement lack the necessary knowledge to make such an undertaking a reality. It’s not simply about spending 40+ hours a week playing the game. It’s about balancing your real-life career with your game career, and having the chops to be successful at both.
