A non gaming post today (gasp). It’s actually my wedding day! A very small affair, just two witnesses, myself, my husband and the lady doing the ceremony. It’s exactly what I wanted. I’ve never had dreams of big huge weddings and crowds are not something I enjoy, but it was perfect. Tomorrow I’ll get back to the regular scheduled gaming blog posts!
As I get older I notice that it’s not just video games that have grown by leaps and bounds and that have headed into mainstream, but all sorts of things that turn “gamification” into a major hit. There are games to get chores done, games to make productivity and tasks easier, games for fun, work, and pretty much everything under the sun. Competition (whether it’s between yourself and someone else, or just competition between yourself) is a strong motivating factor, and it encourages us to push forward and better ourselves in whatever it is we’re trying to do better in.
With so much gamification in our day to day lives though, when do we get a chance to relax from it all?
Right now the 2016 Summer Olympic Games are going on. I watch every year, proud of the athletes who are representing Canada, and yes, eager to follow up on the political mumbo jumbo that constantly goes along with this event. This year while the games are ongoing I’m also participating in the “Ravellenic Games” which is an event hosted by Ravelry for the love of all things fiber. Basically you enter projects into categories, cross a finish line, get awarded medals, and qualify for laurals. You can join a team, and in some cases those teams have prizes for people who earn medals. It’s a neat way to motivate and push yourself into completing projects if you tend to be a more relaxed craft person. This is my first year participating, and the sheer number of people partaking in the event is pretty astounding. I belong to ‘Team BKAL” which is my beginner’s knit-along group. So far I’ve submitted entries to two events with a third being completed today. I’m hoping to complete a total of 8 events, but it’s only a 16 day period so it really does take motivation and persistence to keep up with it all.
In this case, for me, gamification of real life works. It DOES motivate me to push myself harder, to keep on task, to work towards my goal. In some cases gamification works in the opposite way. It doesn’t motivate me at all and I find it awkward and annoying. I don’t think that all of life benefits from this type of scenario and I think in some cases we even go a bit too far.
Having games in our life is great, being motivated and helping us overcome hurdles is something I hope I constantly encourage – but sometimes we do need things to be a little more quiet. Take time to look around and enjoy and appreciate what we have without it being a competition even if it’s just a competition within ourselves. Find the balance.
June 25th, 2006 marked the first post I ever made here on MmoQuests. 10 years has gone by since then. Ten. Years. So much has changed, and yet, not that much has changed. I started this blog writing about EverQuest 2. There are a total of 2,889 (soon to be 2890) posts, and 1,349 of them are related to EQ2. That’s a lot of posts. 260 of them are related to EQ. 225 to WoW, and 195 to Wurm Unlimited. Those are my top game categories and it’s pretty easy to see that those are also my top games. Even today, 10 years later.
This blog has changed my life in ways that I could have never imagined. A few years after I got started, I got a job working for Beckett Massive Online Gamer, and wrote articles for their video game magazine. That’s right, articles that are out in print (or were in any case). It was one of my proudest moments. I wrote guides for EQ2, Wizard 101, Aion, and others. Unfortunately the magazine shut down, it was right as the surge of video game web sites was coming up and lets face it printed publications are typically outdated by the time a buyer sees them, especially compared to web sites. It was still pretty damn awesome to go to a big box store like Chapters and buy a magazine that had my articles in it. Sometimes there was just one, other times there were as many as four or five.
Because of the connections I made at Beckett, I was invited to visit the Sony Online Entertainment studio back in 2009. It was another experience I won’t ever forget. I met with dev teams from EQ2, EQ, and they managed to slip in a Vanguard tour for me which was spectacular. I wrote about it all on my blog and it’s just so apparent to me how much of a fan of these games I was even before meeting with the people behind the games.
When Beckett shut down I started volunteering for SOE, both as a guide for Vanguard and EQ2. After some time, I was also invited to sit on their community council. A good portion of my blog and blog-related changes happened because of my love of EQ2 and the fact that I had found a method of discussing my unhappiness with some aspects of the game without being incredibly rude. I learned that developers most certainly DO listen to players but you really have to word it a particular way so that it doesn’t come across as crass. Too many people like to spout hate and disrupt things – that’s not how you get the proper attention of anyone in charge at all.
Eventually I started applying to game companies for remote jobs that were not SOE. These jobs are rare, but they’re out there. It meant I had to break my ties with the SOE Community Council though, which I still miss. Through some luck and a man named David who was willing to take a chance on me, I was hired at Carbine as a forum moderator to help work with the WildStar players and their teams. Eventually this job shifted to me being hired at NCSOFT, still mainly working on WildStar but also dabbling in Aion, and Lineage 2. My job consisted of not only forum moderation, but feedback from players to developers, acting as that barrier. I interacted with players on a daily basis, wrote reports on an almost daily basis, and invented events and games to help keep things calm in times of turmoil. I started helping out with patch notes, and learned just how valuable my sense of organization was. I learned a lot, but unfortunately contract work is contract work, and we all know how those typically end, especially if you’re working remote.
None of this would have happened had I not started writing back in 2006. I don’t often get a lot of comments on my blog, and my readership fluctuates, but I like to think that I have stayed relatively steady through those 10 years. My writing doesn’t change that much, even when I’ve been angry or upset about a recent video game decision. One of my most valuable pieces of advice that I can give is – be persistent. Write steadily and reliably. Write for you. I never ever expected that blogging of all things would take me to where I have gone, but I am eternally grateful that it has. Hopefully my next 10 years of adventures will be just as grand.
As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.
Pictured above is a new header I had designed by Belghast, yay! I’ve been trying to get a new header for my blog that I could use on various social media sites for ages now, but lets face it, my skill in creating these headers is pretty much zip to none. In instances like this instead of getting upset that I can’t create the header myself, I decide to find someone who can. On that same note I’ve also commissioned someone to create a new cartoon-esc avatar for me to also use across social media, so I don’t have to keep using my real picture. Now, why would I do this? It’s for a few reasons. Number one is that I’d like things to be uniform across all of these places. Number two, I’d like to do more streaming on twitch / youtube, and I don’t particularly want or need my real image gracing the pages. It took me a few days to find someone who was willing to give the avatar a try, but I’m confident that I’ll be happy with the results. I’m incredibly happy with the new header for the blog, and I’m looking forward to transitioning that header over to other media over the next week.
Speaking of media, I did do two twitch streams on Saturday. I did a short recap on Wurm Online (where the sound is absolutely horrible, my apologies. If you want you can fast forward past the part that’s playing music so it doesn’t drown out my voice so much) and then another stream later on in the day where I was exploring the Festival of Unity SPLAT event on Antonia Bayle (so much fun). I plan on picking up a new mic before too long, and I’m also picking up a webcam, something I’ve actually never attempted to do in my streams. I would like to make these streams a weekly thing, but that will depend on how busy I am and what games are on my plate. Wurm Online for example is not the most thrilling of games to broadcast unless you’re going out on a hunting trip or are working on terraforming the property.
You can follow my twitch channel if you want to be notified of streaming, or if you’d like to see the videos I’ve made in the past, I have most of them over on my youtube channel. Again I can’t promise that I’ll actually go anywhere with any of this, but it’s a nice fun little hobby on the side, and who knows. Maybe I’ll develop a knack for it over time. In the meantime, I’m incredibly happy to finally have updated my site a bit. After all, it has been 9 years since I started blogging on MmoQuests. It was time for a facelift.
As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!
For as long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated with knitting and crochet. My Dad taught me the basics of knitting when I was younger but I forgot how to do it, it’s really one of those skills that you need to keep using. Crochet was more of a self taught process. I relied on videos from YouTube, a lot of forums and suggestions from friends. I found crochet easier to pick up since you’re only dealing with one hook. I made a few stuffed animals, a simple hat, those sorts of things. As much as I crochet though I really wanted to learn knitting. In specific I wanted to learn how to knit socks. Socks are my end goal when it comes to knitting. They’re the dream that always seems just a little be out of my grasp. I’ve bought videos on how to knit socks from Craftsy, but so far all of my efforts have been thwarted. I blame this on a few things but the main one is that I’m incredibly impatient and don’t practice enough. If I try something a few times and don’t get it I tend to get frustrated and give up. That’s absolutely not the way to learn any new skills. This year I decided it was going to be my year. I have quite a large yarn stash in a bin that I’ve been neglecting, and I really want to learn how to make socks.
I started out small by revisiting the knit and purl stitch. That’s the black bath cloth in the picture top right. I finally figured out the one thing I was doing wrong every time I tried to purl – I kept forgetting to move the yarn to the front (or the back). As soon as that one issue clicked for me it started coming together. When I felt that I had practiced that enough I decided it was time to learn how to yo (yarn over, also known as an increase) and k2tog (knit two together, or a decrease). That’s the green bath cloth. That one starts out in a triangle shape as you increase the stitches, and then narrows back down to complete the square as you decrease. Both of those are very easy to do, at least when you’re working in a knit stitch. I haven’t attempted increases and decreases while working a purl stitch yet.
I joined Ravelry and started looking through the easy (level 1) and beginner (level 2) free patterns on their site. Right now I’m working on some Easy Fingerless Mitts that will help me continue my practice of knit / purl but what they also do is get me familiar with markers and how those work so you’re not constantly counting stitches. This came as such a surprise to me. I hadn’t even realized that it’s what markers were for. In crochet and cross stitch and knitting I’ve always counted EVERY stitch which makes for lots of errors because a single miss counted stitch is all it takes.
For the fingerless mitts, I’m using three stitch markers. One marks the wrong side of the piece. Two others mark when I swap stitches. Basically whenever I see the blue stitch marker (hidden here because we’re looking at the right side) I know that I knit 5, purl 20, knit 10. I swap stitches every time I hit the marker, no counting required (aside from when I placed those markers). If I don’t see the blue marker, I just knit stitch the entire row. Easy, right?
That’s where I’m at now. In the meantime I’m thinking I need a few more sets of needles. I really prefer working with wooden ones over metal or plastic, and I’m missing a few essential sizes that patterns call for. Plus you can never have too much yarn, so I’m going to be looking for a bit more of that, too.
When I first started out learning crochet and knitting, I really just didn’t like knitting at all, but the more I do it the more I come to the conclusion that I actually enjoy knitting more than I do crochet! Go figure. Socks, I’m coming for you.
stargrace