Balance

I've been playing the game for almost 3 years now and I've had my fair share of neglecting RL for the game, but I like to think that I've found a much happier balance in life at this point. The game use to be an issue of conflict between me and my spouse. I would play too often or when she needed help with the kids. She still reminds me how much she hated it when I would play all morning on Saturdays. More recently I've cut back my playing time and this has greatly decreased contentions concerning this game, and added more balance overall to my life.

In my opinion there are certain things that should always supercede playing WoW. If you have a family they should always come first, you probably shouldn't lose your job or fail a class because of the game. Your health and personal hygiene would be bad to neglect as well (lol - don't forget to eat & bathe).

The people who don't do this make the rest of us look bad. These idiots give gamers in general a bad name and are the reason people do studies that claim that WoW breaks up marriages, makes students drop out of school and increases the crime rate in the lower 48 states. Its pretty common sense if you think about it.

Yes, I understand WoW is more than a video game for those probably reading this blog. Most non-WoWers think of our game as something that should be easily set aside like a nintendo game. They don't realize that we consider this game more of a hobby. We all have hobbies, our just consists of killing demons and dragons and stuff with our guild on-line.

Now, I have kids, young kids. My oldest is 3 years old, and I have 2 others that are younger. I have come to the point where I try not to play when they are awake. So, I play in the morning before I go to work and intermittently after we've put the kiddos to bed. We got a second account so that my wife and I could play together. Now its together time instead of contention time (of course those times when our computers are being stupid we are still contentious, but not with each other). Now its much more balanced. Of course we aren't raiding (we're still level 78), but we'll get there. We'll never be hard core raiders. We'll never be doing the hardest raid. We're okay with that. We are much happier this way and we can always talk about WoW through out the day if we want.

Now, during holidays all of this balance stuff is kind of thrown out the windows for us. Its a good thing there aren't holidays all the time.