Essentially everyone in your household creates a character and you form a group. Then as chores are done it logs them and assigns XP to the character that did it. Every 200 XP you level up.

Now, initially when I heard about it I thought that it was completely ridiculous. Then when I thought about it, if Holly and I were to do this (admittedly she does way more housework than I do), and her character got ahead of mine; I would feel the pressure to “level”. After my years of WoW, I can completely see me putting in a few minutes here and there, grinding vacuuming to increase my strength, etc.

The game preys on the hard core gamer mentality that you are letting your team down because you aren’t keeping up the leveling pace. It also gives you a measure to see that you are letting the group down. That is the key. The ability to track a metric.

As a general rule of thumb when you create what the chores are and how much XP they give, they say you should reward 1 XP for each minute the task should take.

I think one thing it should add, that it doesn’t have yet, is the ability to make a task worth more for some people. As an example, I loathe cleaning the cats’ litter box. It would be nice if I could get double XP for that. Holly hates folding laundry, it would be cool if she could get double XP for that.

When Holly gets back from her trip, I’m tempted to set this up and see how it goes…

Don’t get me wrong, I like the grey sky too. However, the grey sky is a thoughtful sky. It is an introspective sky. It can start to weigh heavily on the soul. The blue sky is fun and bright. Even the sun seems beautiful, though as we all know it is out to kill me.

Last weekend Holly was away winter camping, which left me with a void of time to fill. I ended up playing World of Warcraft. It was pretty amazing, it actually felt like old times. Much more fun than it had been during the last couple of months that I had played before my hiatus. It was great to hang out with some of the old crew and go through some of the new 5-man content with them. It was very easy to slip back into the roll of tanking.

The really funny part of it all to me was that initially while leveling from 60-70 I had a hard time getting help from people in the guild. Some of my good friends in there did help me out along the way though which was nice. However after I hit 70 and decided it was time to start doing some dedicated instancing, I respecced to Protection. After the guild heard I was protection again the offers to go in groups have been flying in.

In other completely unrelated news, I found out today that I work in the same city that Joe Sackic was born in. THE Joe Sackic! The same guy who scored his 600th goal in the NHL last night… Man, that is cool.

I’m looking forward to moving in with Holly soon. It’s going to be great to get to see her every day There are certain things that I’m going to miss about living in the heart of downtown, like being able to go next door to the grocery store, across the street to the theatre, or three to five blocks to anything else. It is all pretty insignificant though, since I miss Holly more.

I think what it really comes down to is that I’ve been on my own for so long that I’ve grown very used to being independant. It’s kind of strange how life seems to go. You start out with your family and you are dependant on them for almost everything. Then you jump out into the world and try to figure out how to be independant. Then after you’ve figured that out you meet someone and settle down a little. You have to unlearn some of your independance and learn to let that person in. You have to learn to depend on them and to be there for them to depend on too. It all boils down to no longer being independant, which is a really wonderful thing.

The expansion has brought back all of the joy and fun of WoW for me. It feels just like it used to when I first started playing a couple of years ago in beta. There are some differences, such as this time I know a lot of people right from the get go.

I do have to say that I also enjoyed my time away from the game. I think it was about a three month break, maybe more. I’ve never been good with time. It was great to spend time with local friends and get to know Holly better. It was great to go on trips and little adventures. I still plan to continue doing all of these things.

It has been great to come back to the game that I left and see so many friendly faces. So many people that I used to hang out with in that virtual world. A few of whom I have met in real life. All of us have gone through so much together.

We have faced the depths of hardship, failure and loss. We have climbed to the heights of achievement and triumph. We have banged our collective heads in frustration while struggling with challenges that have forced us to learn more about eachother and how we work. We have celebrated loudly and wildly at the end, when we finally overcame those struggles. We have all made friends and enemies. We have helped eachother grow and change as people; good or bad. We have all been a part of eachother’s lives for over two years.

Really, when it comes down to it, how is playing something like WoW any different than being on a hockey team, in a theatre group, part of a band or part of some other random club? You end up hanging out with a group of people. You forge friendships. Undoubtedly there are teams formed. You all work together. It’s just, that now you can do it from the warmth of your home in your comfortable chair. You still face challenges. You still celebrate victory. You still practice to get better.

For me meeting up on a Thursday night to raid is like going to brunch or dinner with my RL friends, but with better food (some of my friends have poor tastes in restaurants). Maybe comparing it to a poker night make even more sense though.

I am trying to play it slowly and enjoy the leveling this time around. Pacing yourself is important. Doing the quests, gaining experience, and growing your character can be a great deal of fun. I don’t care who gets to 70 first. Once you hit 70, everything goes back to being raiding and PvP again.

So the real trick, is to find that happy balance of gaming and life. Ah, the eternal struggle. (No, not really. Life always wins )

I saw this blog post about WoW today and saw far too much of myself and my guild in it. I can’t even begin to count how many times since I have started playing that friends have asked me to go do something and I’ve said “Sorry I can’t. I’ve got a raid tonight.” And well… that’s just wrong.

If it was just one night a week, it wouldn’t be so bad, but it’s a four nights a week ordeal.

Plus, since moving out here to Vancouver life just seems busier. I have so many friends out here that it almost seems a little ridiculous at times. And of course, now there is Holly, with whom I would spend every waking moment if I could.

I’m sure something else will take the place of WoW. Hopefully it will be a little less rigidly scheduled though, or just take less time period. Something more casual.

Maybe it could be making root beer, or birch beer (which is kind of like drinking peppermints), like I’ve been reading up on. The point is, there are a million things out there that I could be doing.

It all started off with the student loan people and the goverment messing me over as usually. About a year ago they integrated two of my student loans into a single loan. Well, that sucked. I had to reschedule payments etc. Recently they de-integrated the loan back into two individual loans, and they didn’t tell me :p I wasn’t aware of this until I applied for a line of credit and it got turned down because of some outstanding payments needing to be made on one of the sperated loans. The part that really drives me up the wall over this is that I have the money in the bank to completely pay off the whole loan, but it has already marred my credit it seems.

I had to take a day off work and spend hours on the phone getting it all sorted out. At one point I literally spent 23 conescutive minutes bouncing around their automated phone system.

The good points of the day were very good though. When it was over with the student loan people I went back to bed for a couple of hours. I decided it was an order-in night and ordered in some pizza which was pretty good. Then in World of Warcraft our raid group got our first Nefarian kill! To top it all off he dropped the Breastplate of Wrath, my 8th and final piece for my Wrath armor. After all of that, when I got fully buffed and used all of my trinkets and abilities I broke 15,000 hit points

I hope that this is a sign of things to come. Hopefully soon I will get my Legplates of Wrath and my Bracers of Might.

In life things are grooving. I seem to have found the root of my insane headaches that I was having Thursday, Friday and part of Saturday. Since news on Friday they have faded. Tonight, I’m supposed to get news about my future. I guess this is technically The Future: Step 5, where I consider the future to be everything after High School.

Step 1: College
Step 2: University
Step 3: HB Studios
Step 4: Ubisoft
Step 5: ???

I love it when people read my resume. I always have. Ever since I hit a certain experience level. I especially like that they are chronologically reversed. So people read backwards through:

- Handles audio for seven platforms over five languages for 35 SKUs solo.
- Technical lead on one of EA Sports’ highest ROI projects ever with a small team.
- Did everything on two games.
- Did everything on one game and worked on the port to another platform.
- Dropped out of University.
- Two year diploma in Artificial Intelligence.

If it were listed the other way around people would single in on the “Dropped out of University” part, and that would immediately cloud their judgement on everything else.

Listed as it is people read it and they think: OMG Code Ninja! We need this guy! All of a sudden instead of wondering why I dropped out of University they start thinking “He must have been so bored and confined by University.”

So, tonight when I know more, if I know more, others will know more. I hope I know more, and then I can plan the letter…