2001-08-23 - 8:12 a.m.
The effects of computer gaming on a growing brain ...

*yawn* I am so tired right now, I might as well not even be here ...

Hildegaard is gone. She left yesterday at four p.m. without doing half the things we meant to do or seeing half the people we should have seen. Oh well. Next time, I will discover a mysterious short in our wiring that prevents ANY of our four computers from logging into EverQuest. It's nice that she thought the game was cool, but a little irritating that it monopolized her vacation.

She levelled a Dark-Elf Shadowknight up to 8; she wanted 9, so she could start casting more than just Harm Touch, but I kept logging off early and she kept getting lost after that. The character I started to help her, a Dark-Elf Wizard, is now Level 7, and took over third place among the four characters I have actually done more with than reserve a name. The other three, in reverse order, are my Level 5 Erudite Enchanter, my Level 11 Wood-Elf Ranger, and my Level 29 High-Elf Magician.

Watching her get lost reminded me of when I tried to introduce Jocasta to the game. She had extreme difficulty with the whole mouse-look concept, and you can't really navigate a hilly 3-D world with just arrow keys. She was lost at every turn. Hildegaard did rather better; she got the hang of mouse-look after about ten minutes and could recognize landmarks the third time she passed them, but the keyboard shortcuts (like button panels and emote commands) all rather confused her, and she had difficulty navigating by location coordinates.

I was helping her find her corpse a few nights ago with a smidge of eye-rolling irritation when it occurred to me that I used to be much the same. Up until my sophomore year of college or so, maps were NOT my friends. This made long drives, at least with me behind the wheel, were more frightening than fun. And swift multi-tasking was still something that took effort for me to do.

Not so anymore. Believe it or not, I attribute the difference as much to computer gaming as I do to growing up. It's not just EverQuest. I've only been playing that since March. It's a combination of them all. The civilization games: Civilization, Civilization II, Alpha Centauri. Age of Empires I and II. Total Annihiliation: Kingdoms (I still say that Chapter 44 in that damn game is not beatable!) Warcraft, Warcraft II, Starcraft. Lords, Lords II, and Lords of Magic. Heroes of Might and Magic. Diablo I and II. I really ought to try Descent again now that EverQuest has gotten me used to the 3-D first person viewpoint -- I was decent at it against the computer, but I always got cremated in PvP. And then there are the other console titles, of which I have played far too many, but the most notable are probably Final Fantasy VII for PlayStation and the Dragon Warrior series (I, II, III, IV) for the original Nintendo. And this list doesn't even really scratch the surface.

(All of that makes it look like gaming is all I do in my free time. It's not. Before I lived with my brother, I played maybe 5-10 hours a week, max).

But, do you see a common thread there? The vast majority of my all-time favorite games require strategic planning, a sharp eye for detail, a strong short-term memory, good multi-tasking skills, and a fierce love of role-playing. I don't play to beat the games any more, that's easy. I play to rack up the best score I can, and compare it against my own previous scores. I still get lost easily on first glance, but the second time through anyplace (game or real life) will cement in my memory. I can handle juggling a lot more jobs at once than a lot of people I know (although it can get exhausting fast) and I don't just think it's my youth.

The computerized generation ... those like me, who have been around computers since their kindergarten days, or even before ... has lost a lot of time to the Box, it's true. But I think it's having more effect on us than just teaching better hand-eye coordination and straining our eyes. And it's far more constructive than television. If you have to fill up your free time with something besides socializing or reading, I really don't think computer gaming is that poor of a choice, no matter what my mother says. And these MMORPG's have the socializing part built right in!

*blink* That reminds me. I *am* on the bookaddict diary ring, and I haven't mentioned anything more mentally stimulating than a few Regency romances of late. Bad Shell! I guess it's because I've read every one of my 500-plus books on my shelves at least once, if not more, and all I have to do is glance at the back cover for most of the story to pop back into my brain. Favorite stories are fun to reread, but I like to wait until some of the plot twists fade and become surprises again! That can take years.

So, I hunted my brother's shelf last night and picked up something that I'll be reading while camping or riding the boat in EQ in coming nights. It's "Earthclan" by David Brin, which is actually the 2nd and 3rd books in his Uplift universe, bound together. I think the titles are "Startide Rising" and "The Uplift War." So far, it looks very interesting, and unlike most of the SciFi I've picked up before. I promise to report back soon.