Hopefully things slow down again after Thanksgiving. Until then, game on!

While I hated this rule at the time, as a parent now I can see the value of it, or at least some variant.

And, according to Ars Technica, so does the magazine Pediatrics.

The short form:

According to Dr. Iman Sharif, the results were clear-cut. "On weekdays, the more they watched, the worse they did," said Dr. Sharif. Weekends were another matter, with gaming and TV watching habits showing little or no effect on academic performance, as long as the kids spent no more than four hours per day in front of the console or TV. "They could watch a lot on weekends, and it didn't seem to correlate with doing worse in school," noted Dr. Sharif.

I can agree. Though my oldest is only four, my wife and I already see a huge difference in her behavior between when she watches TV or plays games on the computer and when she's not. In my admittedly untrained opinion, I feel this has to do with the amount of cognitive inputs she's receiving at any time. When the TV and computer are off, there's only so much her brain has to process. So no matter how engaging a meal or her latest drawing project might be, when Mommy or Daddy talk, she's almost got no choice but to listen.

She's a very focused kid, when she wants to be. Not having the TV or computer on makes it easier to be. 

This is an age of multi-tasking, with everyone yammering about how today's tweens are better than today's adults at it. But all I see is the continual problems. I'm no academic, but just from interacting with lots of people every single day, it seems to me that the brain can only process so much actively at a time. When focus shifts, so does attention. Are today's tweens simply better at shifting focus faster, making it appear as if they're multi-tasking? I don't know.

But what I do see is a lot of failures coming from attempts multi-tasking. People seem to think that because they can walk and chew gum at the same time, they can drive, be on a telecon, and checking their PDA concurently. Anyone who works with Crackberry users see this all the time in meetings, though it could also be any PDA or any connected laptop. Anyone who watches kids listen to music while IMing while emailing while gaming while studying can easily see that somethings not getting active attention. And it's usually the studying.

In my opinion, people need to be made more aware of their limitations. Society and commerce can expect whatever they want, and as an adaptive species, we'll always rise to the challenge in some way. However, I think people individually need to be held more accountable for what they try and attempt when they multi-task. And parents need to be more aware about the limitations of their kids, making honest assessments based on results rather than hype or hope.

Maybe it's just that people need to make that ONE BIG HUGE MISTAKE to learn. Seems to be the hallmark of humanity.

But we then veered into what features target what types of players, and I realized, fully, where I am at as a gamer.

I'm just not equipped to take these games too seriously anymore. Not the way they define "serious" at least.

Taking these games serious is the realm of others in either different stages of their life, or simply with different lives. I peaked in my need for immersion with SWG, and it took a personal toll (though nothing irreparable, because I smarted up right quick). I'm never doing that again, for the same reasons I never bother with RMTing. I can appreciate why it's done, but neither is worth it to me. Games aren't feeding us through feeding tubes, so there's only so much of that real world anyone can afford to give up.

I like where things are headed for some folks. But it's also why things are also heading in a very different direction for others. 10 years from now, MMOs will not be defined by a person sitting at a computer playing within a singular graphical client to the exclusion of everything else around them. That's because I don't think the next generation of gamers would put up with that crap. They are the very essence of multi-tasking because they wish to maintain their beed on the pulse of [i]all[/i] things. WoW is going to be a dinosaur to them.

Personally, I love what's here. I can only afford to love it so much though. There will be games I'll never bother playing beyond what I can get for free at the various AGC/GDC/GenCon/micro-E3 events that come. I started realizing that with FFXI when it was at E3 in, err, 2004 I think. I'll never buy that game, nor Lineage 2, nor most of the recent Eastern imports. They require way more of me as a person than I have any interest in giving anymore. Looking back, I was pretty hardcore for a time in the early 2000s. I don't foresee a time in my life when I ever will be again. It's generally easy ti tell how much a game will require by playing it. Sometimes though, I only need to watch who actually goes to a game to see whether I'd fit in with it

Further, I'm realizing my interests in this genre have shifted. From an experiential level, I still loves me my adventures and all. But as an observer of all things MMO, I've realized I am less interested in how businesses can leech more cash from the current diku-lovers than I am about who's making what for the [i]next[/i] generation of gamer.

That doesn't mean I'm any less excited about Age of Conan, Tabula Rasa or Pirates of the Burning Sea of course. It's just that, no matter what innovations they will have, if they require consecutive hours of play with no chance of AFKing and choosing not to log in at all sometimes, then I won't be there.

No problem really. I don't expect every game to be for me. As long as they capture enough players for their own business needs, nothing's done "right" or "wrong".

It's just that now more than ever I need to honestly assess what's right or wrong for me, and in doing so, that cuts off a fair chunk of the diku-inspired and virtual lifestyle side of the genre as they are currently defined.

But included in both is the concept of change, and how to manage it.

Some rather big happenings at work lately. The company isn't small, so it takes a certain threshold before change is noticed by everyone at the same time. Reorgs can do that, particularly in a place with many offices around the world.

I consider myself an agent for change. I'm sure I'd carry a political distinction if I cared enough to label myself. Basically I'm just not someone who's going to agree with a solution only because it's how it's always been done. There are those occasions where doing something because it's always been done is a good thing (like staying to your side of the road, or keeping your cold cuts refrigerated between use). But I only consider that viable when there's a clear benefit to doing so and not just because someone else doesn't want to exercise some brain power.

I take a long view on things, both in this genre and in my life. I love these games, but even at my peak of enjoyment, a fundamental shift in them doesn't bother me as much as it seems it does others (ie, SWG NGE). This genre is, has, and always will be fluid. Getting used to something is getting complacent about it, becoming less prepared for change. Sure a few RMTers have to rethink how they exploit the system, or maybe someone who's previously been the Master of Everything isn't anymore, but both are transient.

I consider life itself a bit like that. I'm on the tail end of what some consider the Gamer Generation. Our outlook on life is very different from the prior generations, particularly in the business world. There's a lot of detail in that book, but the part that stuck out most to me is one I've carried with me since leaving High School for College:

We are our own masters.

People make excuses. Whether in game or in life, there's always some person or event to blame for something or another. Specifically in MMORPGs, there's such stuff:

• Condemning twinking or powerleveling because someone else can now achieve goals slightly faster or while looking better.
• Condemning RMTing because it enables others to bypass systems in a game they personally don't find fun.
• Marginalizing entire strata of player styles because they're not uber enough to like the upper 0.1% of the nuts who live and breath endgame PvP for 6 hours a night.
• Someone openly berating fans of a game they themselves never played, or didn't like.

Some say these actions are part of a culture of anonymity, people confident in their stealth presence to spew whatever nonsense comes to them. I don't think that goes far enough. Rather, I think it's because these people don't like change.

People learn something and master it. At that point, they either move on to something new or try to maintain their position as a master (or both). The people who want to continue their mastery become ultra conservative about the game, preferring things the way they area and that's it. Any minor change requires they rethink what they've mastered and how. Exit Statements, those eulogies people write when they leave an MMORPG, are born of this. These people don't like a specific change, or change at all, and decide other people care enough about their disinterest in adapting.

Real life is like that too. Not a day goes by where there's not someone in the hallway complaining about something. Management, payroll, vendors, processes, weather, whatever, all sorts of things that person has nothing to do with yet which keeps them up at night. What bothers me about this isn't their complaints about stuff they can't change though, it's about the stuff they can.

Everyone's empowered, if they're confident in themselves. It's nice to feel all warm and cozy in a job or a game, but the reality is that nobody has complete and absolute control over their position. Everyone from the CEO on down to the players have events that will force them towards change.

It's not easy. Make no mistake about that. It took me years to get to a point where I can love a game but leave it the moment it's no longer fun. I wrote my eulogies, sold my stuff, deleted my characters, all that typical "I am done, hear me roar!" stuff. But years later, I just quietly hit the Cancel button and move on.

For the most part it's because I don't think anyone cares that much. Fans of a game may know me well enough to say goodbye, but my leaving does not impact the fun they're having. Non-fans of a game don't care enough about the game to know who's coming or going anyway. And the in-betweens, the fence-sitters not sure if they want to stay or go shouldn't be relying on the actions of others to help them decide anyway.

Life isn't much different either. I've got a job I love in a company I could retire from if it's still around and I'm duly rewarded for my efforts. But I only control so much of my position there. Someone six pay grades above me could close a division because it's good for the company, and I'd be gone. So all I can do in the time I have is learn, execute, and support. That's partly just basic professionalism, but it's also personality. Both of those are trans-job, things built into a character that exists outside of a single office.

I don't know if I came to this place in my psyche because of MMORPGs or because of real world experience. I find it completely fascinating though that at this point I can no longer tell the difference