How Gaming Makes me a Better Graduate Student: Intro

That's right, it's about to get heretical up in here. I am seriously for serious going post a series of (mostly) serious musings on how being a GamerGrrrll (I'm just fucking withh you, I hate that shit), woman in gaming, makes me a better graduate student. That means get your chuckles out of the way and put your bling-shades on because it's about to get Awe Inspiring in here. Foh Rls.

Figure 1: Now go tell that homeboy

We will start with background and motivation, shall we, before I get into methodology and results (because I like milking solidly mediocre ideas for as long as possible. I'm d-list, ok!).

In gaming, I have found no genre taxes my patience as much as the MMO. The entire concept of an MMO (for example, WoW) is to harvest your soul and your wallet and to keep your butt glued to your ergonomically-adjusted gaming chair for all eternity. Ok, old school ninja turtles was some serious shit back in the day because if I came up out of the manhole (stfu) at the wrong time and got splatted by incoming traffic I had to start right the fuck over. That may or may not have been because my cousin feel asleep mid-game, and I was too afraid to wake him up to see if there was a save point anywhere. Because his presence was the only thing allowing me to game for more 20 minutes before my mom starting talking about juvenile delinquency.

I digress. Anyway, I have found almost universally in MMOs you have to exhibit some insane amount of patience. To be truly successful, you have to be facile with picking up new skills and abilities, you have to be ready to take directions from others more knowledgeable than you to progress, and you have to be able to interact with people with some competence to get them to listen and respect to you. I'm not saying MMOs are not a cesspool of He-man posturing, they are, but your level of competence at the things above are what will really dictate what you get out of the game. And all of these things take time, all of these things take a LOT of patience if you're picking up a system completely foreign to you and that can be extremely irritating, especially if you are very knowledgeable and Ubersauce in another community and find yourself a n00b in a different one.

And if you succeed at these things you are almost 100% guaranteed to find a camaraderie with a group of people with their heads screwed on (mostly) straight, giggling over Vent/Skpe at 3am eating a tamale while you wait for some rare spawn that only pops ever 18 hrs-2 days*.

Every one of these things has a use in graduate school. The ability to stfu and listen is hard to find in the MMO world and in graduate school and is valued by people who know their shit. You will frequently encounter people who are excellent at what they do, real pros, who would rather take someone who doesn't know diddly about squat but who will listen to what that person is telling them rather than prick who thinks he knows everything because he has ubergear (pedigree/education/etc). However, there are roaming hoards of pricks with ubergear that stick together, laughing at people who admit that they don't know everything, while they sit in their golden tower. Those people totally suck, and I learned quickly in gaming that trying to roll with that crew is mental suicide so I never felt compelled to get a taste IRL**.

Being willing to listen and learn will only take you so far, however. You need some raw talent, some quickness, something to help you swiftly learn the new milieu you find yourself in or you will become dead weight to your new compatriots. You can't stop and smell the daises, presuming that since you're not attacking anything nothing's going to aggro*** you. Such foolishness will leave your ghost running to try to reclaim your body in game, or falling victim to political, interpersonal, and karmatical (whatever) foibles of graduate school.

Being succesful, without being a douchebag, being laid back, without being useless, is a delicate balance in game and in graduate school. I have found that these two worlds can be, in a really weird way, mirror images of each other and many lessons are interchangeable.

Hey, I'm not saying to go up to your Professional Haughty Douchenozzle of choice and go 'Loool, u still butthurt over that shit brah? QQ moar'. But there are some things that are definitely of worth and those are what I will share in my series of posts.

Do u guys need a gaming glossary before I get all high-horse or u cool with urban dictionary, brah?


*And you Lineage 2/EQ folks can kindly shut right the fuck up, I can hear you giggling. I know, you had to camp shit that respawned maybe once a week and in the meantime great magma typhoons would come sweeping across the plains and skeletons would emerge from the cavernous depths of Mordor to drag you to damnation and opposing players would come rickroll you because open world pvp is real like that yo. And you had to do a calculus problem before loot would drop, what the fuck ever man, ok.

**In Real Life. Jesus.

*** Walk past a bear's cub. Watch mom come bounding towards you with murder in her furry heart-that's aggro. SIDENOTE: I played an MMO long ago that has a pretty distinctive pinging sound when you caught aggro from a mob and you'd have to turn around and Get it to Fucking Gether before whatever it was facesmashed you. This ping has turned out to be a ringtone for a certain cell phone provider and I still jump like the dickens whenever I hear it. Aggro is srs bsns.