RIP

People say, "what someone does in the last days of his life reflects a lot about what is important to him".

On the last days before I finally allowed my World of Warcraft subscription to expire, I took some pictures which are telling of my motivation when I do play games.

Guess it right? I'm an achievement-oriented gamer. Some people play to lose themselves in the virtual world and the storyline. Yet others play for social reasons. But I play to win. :)

Which is why the memories I bring away from the game (beyond all the fun and the knowledge gained about this pretty incredible virtual world), are the rare equipment I amassed in my game profession as an Engineer.

I did not have much time to get all the top gear like others do, so I simply focused on getting the unique gear for my profession. The functional value of these machines are not high, but they are pretty rare and hard to get.

So a last look at my alter-ego in WoW - here goes...

Till the next time I have to study games again...RIP.

I thought it may be helpful to many of you non-gamers to read some of the literature that inspired me in the past 3 years in cyber-wellness related work. In particular, Nick Yee's Daedalus Project taught me much about how to understand gamers and why they play games. Some of Yee's work helped the folks at TOUCH to jump into helping pathological gamers. For all the recognition we've received concerning our work, we have to give credit to the guy who taught us from his work.