Saturday, February 12, 2011

Success in WoW and Life

The other night my friend, named in game as Sail (and soon Qail, as he switches mains from a warrior to a rogue), were sitting around talking, playing some Call of Duty and drinking a few Heinekin (okay, he was playing, I was drinking...) and we got talking about some of the people we knew in game. We both tend to be in fairly social guilds, and as such know quite a bit about the real world personas of our fellow raiders and ingame friends. One of the things that we quickly got caught up in is that so many of the people we know seem to be extremely successful in Real Life. In fact, we seemed to notice a correlation between successful raiders being successful in their vocations.

Disclaimer: I am not in anyway suggesting that all Successful People (in RL) could be successful raiders, or that all successful raiders must be deffinition be professionals or anything of that sort, this is merely a recount of our observations. (If anyone reading this feels that I have come too close to mentioning your real-life identifiers and would like me to remove any sections please let me know and I will do so immediately!)

A quick list of the vocations we noted:
Stock Broker
Software Company Owner
Mechanical Engineer
Professional Skydiver (apparently instruction is where most of this money comes from!)
Software Engineer
Criminal Defense Attorny
Surgeon

Now this is by no means an exhaustive list of the people we discussed, nor is it a list of all the people we mentioned as being "successful vocationally," but I am curious if anyone else from other guilds or servers has noticed this as well. The reason it is so noteworthy to me is that society still seems to view gamers as almost exclusively a) teenage boys still in highschool or b) adult, unemployed men, who live in their parents basement. This ties into a bit of what many other bloggers have mentioned about how hard it is to come out to your RL friends, acquaintences, even family, about your gaming habit. If everyone openly talked about this sort of thing, look at all the people that would quickly help break this stereotype!

Let me know if your In Game friends seem to have a high instance of vocational success!

2 comments:

  1. It has always struck me how successful in real life our group of friends are. I agree that it would probably help the stigma of gaming if we were all to "come out of the gaming closet."

    btw- I like the new pages and format of your blog! Looks good. :)

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  2. I guess as a cigarette lighter repairman I'm the exception or are you calling me a lousy raider?

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