I know we recently had a topic about what WoW has taught us, but I posted the other day about my real life job affecting my in game persona.
Do you think your real life job affects how you see people/situations in game and do you use the same methods in game you would use at work to diffuse situations? For example are you the type to just boot people/leave guilds because this is a game or would you try and sort it out considering you wouldn’t just fire someone/quit your job if someone/or situation was being nasty?
Here is my topic originally, http://wp.me/p15cBf-eg which inspired me to post the above topic.
However after reading some others posts about this I wanted to add the following to flesh out this a little bit. A few of my co-workers called me a geek, they knew I was good with computers and that I liked gizmo’s the fact that I often was looking up geek sites and reading geek magazines etc. I spoke of many games with poeple and not just WoW, so there was never any obvious addiction there. I have to explain something though, most of the people I used to work with – barely even know how to turn on a computer – let alone install a program on one.
I have since left that job I was referring to in my original post, however now that I am taking a short break from work to focus on my studies, I have noticed my attitude towards the game has changed as well. I am fairly focused on getting things done, just like I need to get my assignments done and my revision done. I don’t like it when things don’t go to plan- refer to my previous post about the stupid people and LFD….
This all meshes with kind of person I am in real life. Since I no longer have a job which defines me or a guild which defines me, I am sort of lost both in and out of game and I don’t like that feeling. I always knew that if I was lost in real life, I could log in and know/remember who i was/am…..When I was the GM of a guild there were many discussions about how to treat people in game, I was on the side of treating them like friends and people I knew in real life, but others I knew, wanted to treat them like avatars and not people they had any connection to. I wanted to use my relatinship building skills to repair breaches and build a solid foundation, but that was considered pointless by some – I am not saying either method was right, just that there was a massive difference. I guess it is just interesting to see how other people perceive people in the game and how they treat them.
In the end I think Amaranth sums it up beautifully:
In the end, my Real Life intrudes upon my Game Life, and my Game Life intrudes upon my Real Life. Both, to me, are really just my Life.
– http://speccedfordrama.blogspot.com/2010/12/shared-topic-real-life-intruding-on_13.html