1988 saw publication of UU minister Robert Fulghum's essay collection All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. I'm more of a Grand Unification Theory kind of guy but I also find value in homily-esque fragments of philosophical observation ala Fulghum (or Bombeck, for that matter), and even koan-style nuggets ala Eric Hoffer.

AIRNTKIL from MMORPGs
I said I'd taken Wizard101 about as far as I could without spending real money, and then proceeded to farm top-notch gear for my characters' levels and mess around with pet training and stuff. Almost as if I was going to continue playing. Almost as if I was in danger of breaking down and buying that gateway "crown" pack to unlock just a few low-level areas... Which is silly, because I have neither time nor money to keep plowing into MMOs. If not FFXI, for which my heart still yearns often, then certainly not Wizard101. But FFXI is dead to me, pretty much since the advent of Abyssea when they slapped long-time players in the face by making all the brutally difficult older content "easy mode".

Oh, I played along for quite a while, but the Abyssea nerfing was what degraded it from a satisfying hobby to an empty expression of obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

Even Castle Age hath made a liar of me, twice in fact, first in that it is decidedly an MMORPG, when I said I had to retire MMORPGing as a hobby unless I hit the lottery. And second, in that I've spent real money on it, despite my former claim that aside from the traditional basis of subscription-fee (which MMORPG devs earn, I guess), I wouldn't spend real money on imaginary "progress" or virtual shinies in general. For Dungeon Overlord I broke that resolution; Castle Age merely followed through the opened breach.

So a theme that's been coalescing in my head over the past week has been: The intersection of All I Really Need to Know, and gaming, because I recognize that I really neeed to summarize the lessons learned, and move on. So what have I learned from gaming? The biggest lesson, which overshadows any other take-away from Wizard101, is that I still do have a dangerous capacity to get... beyond "immersed", more like "sucked in" or "submerged", by MMOs. So Wizard101 is getting uninstalled. I will miss Brianna, Cheyenne, Calamity and Morgan. I screenshotted them, maybe someday I'll recompose them into a montage. But not today. I like to imagine they are living happily ever after in adjacent dorm rooms, leveling their pets together, teaching each other spells, and trying on each others' gear won in the fairegrounds and from farming Harvest Lord. Whooboy, I sure spent a lot of time for not much return, playing Sorcery Stones in the fairegrounds. There is a strange lesson to take note of there too; perhaps one that game designers are well-aware of, that with behavior-mod techniques, a player can be manipulated into amazing amounts of time and effort investment for arbitrarily paltry virtual rewards.

If I was going to do a sincere ripoff of tribute to Fulghum, I'd say some stuff about teamwork, manners, sharing and giving, being knowledgeable and organized, etc. But frankly, if people don't figure that all out from real life, they're not going to learn it from a game. So what did I really learn?

It's enraging when somebody jumps in, uninvited, on something I'm working on, and starts telling me what to do.

The "dollhouse" (sub)game theme is evidently a very popular one, a guilty pleasure for me so I tend to be more quest-and-level oriented, but FFXI could have exploited the dollhouse much further. Also, pets; Wizard101's pet-training is quite a bit more varied than FFXI's chocobo raising and racing was. Maybe both aspects have expanded since I last played FFXI.

People with pet spiders might be perfectly nice, but they should leave their pets at home, not run around Wizard City with them.

I dunno, I'll add more if I think of it.

I hadn't played Might + Magic II since Sep.9, so that got... not even uninstalled, just delete the game directory and DOSbox shortcut and that's what we called "uninstalling" back in the day. Dunno what the lesson there was. Perhaps that CRPGs have come too far for me to want to bother replaying games like that and Wizard's Crown/Eternal Dagger, much as I loved them in their heyday. Maybe something a little more profound, like, you can't recapture the peak thrill of exploration by revisiting someplace you already explored.

The jury is still out on the issue of SMAC/AXF. I've puzzled over what exactly my lessons are from Civ and SMAC, for well over a decade now. So that's staying installed, gonna sweep out the save-game folder though.

* * *

AIRNTKIL by answering yahoos
I've mentioned answering yahoos several times. That's another thing I can get sucked into easily, because it makes me think, and even if people can't be bothered to google answers to their own frivolous questions, I can still learn from the exercise. I like to learn. Perhaps that pastime, more than anything else, has informed my developing philosophy of the relationship between information, mind, and education. Basically, that term-paper-writing is no more noble an expression of learning than multiple-choice test performance. I know, many teachers disagree, but I take my inspiration from Dr. George Rotter, my Psych II professor whose class I aced with minimal attendance simply by following his textbook reading plan. It was not easy reading, but it was well-organized.

But several factors are coming together to reinforce my stalled "decision" a month or two ago, to set yahoos aside. First and foremost, it's still an enormous time sink. Second, challenging and meaningful questions are getting harder to find. And third, maybe the straw that broke this camel's back: the new site design has somehow ruined my mojo.

I was going to defer a detailed study of "What I Learned from YA R+S" but in fact, thinking about the lack of "challenging and meaningful questions" made me realize questions that increasingly and fruitlessly occupy my time fell into a few neat categories:

"If God cannot create a rock too heavy for Him to lift then He is not omnipotent". The false premise is in defining "omnipotence" to encompass self-contradiction in terms. A stone that overwhelmed omnipotence would not be a stone, and the omnipotent being who could not lift a stone would not be an omnipotent being. God also cannot create pigs that are simultaneously dogs, nor a blade of grass so green that it's red. This tells us something about the limits of language and logic, and nothing profound about God nor omnipotence.

"Why do Christians reject almighty Odin/Zeus/FSM and His Son Thor/Heracles/whatever?" Always answerable with "Names and religions are many, but God is One, whether you call Him Allah, Brahman, YHWH or Zeus". I haven't turned away from Odin All-father, I just call Him "God" to avoid the confusion that arises from use of the old pagan names. And of course I reject mistaken concepts like blood sacrifice; Quetzalcoatl does not want human sacrifice, the Aztecs got that part all wrong.

Calling out the fact that God's existence is unfalsifiable by empirical means, as if that necessarily speaks ill of the intellectual integrity of theists. Answerable by allusion to abstract objects of geometric study (points, lines, circles, triangles etc.) for which there is no evidence of real existence, but which are nevertheless such useful symbolic ideals that we have no qualms about letting "geometrists" teach public school students for a year.

Socratic questions about doctrine, usually asked and answered ritually by Papists or Watchtower proselytes and their sock-puppet accounts.

Questions calling out repugnant minority doctrines like eternal hellfire as if they were represntative of the whole or even the majority of Christians.

Questions calling out trinitarianism's avoidance of meaningful terms. One God (Adonai) plus One God (Jesus) plus One God (the Holy Spirit) does not add up to One Gods. Well, this is why I describe myself as unitarian (but not universalist) modalist, not trinitarian. But actually Fr. Andrew gave us a fairly satisfying umbrella idea of trinity that covers modalism. Someday I might polish that concept up into something concise. Ultimately it's not something I feel is really worth harping over daily on YA R+S.

So, I won't say I'm "done" but I've lost a lot of interest very quickly. "What I learned from YA R+S" is pretty much a closed chapter.