14
Feb 12
I write about dragons on the internet, Dad
When I moved in with my father, part of it was a genuine interest in reconnecting with him, and part of it was a keen desire to help around the house and simply keep him company. My dad turns 83 this year, although you couldn’t really tell that from looking at him or talking to him. He grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere, worked for Dow Chemical for an extraordinary number of years, retired, and somewhere in between had two marriages and five children. (I’m one of the products of the second marriage.)
He has seen quite a lot in his life. He saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarves when it premiered in theaters in 1937. His first car was a Model-T that he dug out of a neighbor’s manure pile and inexplicably got running again when he was 14. He served in the military as a paratrooper, worked with some of the first computers in existence, and can fix just about anything I bring to him, regardless of how technologically advanced the thing is. He hasn’t grown old so much as he’s watched the world get older around him and adapted to it as time goes on.
And yet I still have this terrible reticence about trying to explain to him exactly what it is I do on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday evenings, and what I do for a living.
A Sunnier Bear had an absolutely lovely post about this in which she talked about her own experiences explaining WoW to her family, who not only follow her progress but follow her on Twitter as well. While her family doesn’t quite get all the nuances of playing the game, they know enough to ask her questions and they actively try to understand what she does with her free time. And that? That is a pretty cool thing to have, right there.
In contrast, I don’t talk about my gaming with my family too much. They have a brief understanding of what I do, but I don’t go into details all that much. I believe I coined the term Computer Thing for raiding with my Dad; when I moved in, I explained that I had things I did on certain nights, and when he asked for clarification, I said I was doing computer things with friends. As time went on, I explained a bit more about what I was doing, how it was a game, but a game with 24 other people all working together. He thought it was a neat idea but left it at that.
When I got the job here at WoW Insider, it required another explanation of sorts. This time, I explained that the computer things that I did three times a week with friends involved a game with a big old, huge story and a lot of books behind it, and I was going to be writing about that story. On the internet. For people to read. I don’t know if he got it at the time, but he was delighted that I was writing and getting paychecks for doing so, as he used to write when he was younger (when he wasn’t digging old cars out of manure piles).
My brother and my sister don’t quite get what I do, either. They understand I write about video games, but neither of them play, really. My sister has a family of her own with four boys to take care of, so there’s little time for video games. My brother works long hours at a job that pays relatively well, and he doesn’t really feel the need to play games like WoW when he’s done at work. Usually he just watches movies or something along those lines.