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My disabled son – ‘the nobleman, the philanderer, the detective’

bbc.co.uk

61–70 of 72 posts

Re: My disabled son – ‘the nobleman, the philanderer, the detective’

#62
I suppose they're good if you really do need to escape the reality you're in. But I regret the amount of time I spent playing MMO's as a child/teenager. I invested all my time in virtual worlds instead of the real one, and had no friends because of it. I grew out of it, but I wonder how different my life would be now if I had done so earlier.

Re: My disabled son – ‘the nobleman, the philanderer, the detective’

#63

I suppose they're good if you really do need to escape the reality you're in. But I regret the amount of time I spent playing MMO's as a child/teenager. I invested all my time in virtual worlds instead of the real one, and had no friends because of it. I grew out of it, but I wonder how different my life would be now if I had done so earlier.

Maybe you would have gotten into drugs, been seduced by a crazy person and ended up with a baby, or become rich. Cest la vie.

Re: My disabled son – ‘the nobleman, the philanderer, the detective’

#64
A very touching story. Yet somehow I feel happy for him, that he had found his friends online.

I used to play a lot of MMO games when I was a teenager, not WoW exactly. I wish more kids played that genre nowadays. I think all the competitive games nowadays like dota2/lol/fortnite don't have the same feeling like MMOs. Obviously, you can find many friends in them too, but the culture is so much different. In MMO games you could just spend hours chatting with people and doing nothing else.

I'm sure there are many more cases like that and I think that MMO games are really one of the best experience in gaming. You can meet people from all over the world. It's a bit like traveling, but focused solely on people not on food/history, etc. Ofc, that's my opinion.

Re: My disabled son – ‘the nobleman, the philanderer, the detective’

#65

Very touching story. I'm remembering one of the first touching stories of an influential MMORPG gamer disappearing because of her dead: A story known as "A Story About a Tree": https://www.raphkoster.com/games/essays/a-story-about-a-tree...

It's in the linked page, but the story was not actually true

Re: My disabled son – ‘the nobleman, the philanderer, the detective’

#66
I spent a lot of my 20s playing City of Heroes. I made a lot of good, if virtual, friends there and even met my wife. If you came to my house and looked at all the family pictures hanging on the wall, among the pictures of our kids, wedding, and grandparents you'd find a screenshot of our characters[1] which we refer to as "our first picture together."

[1]http://pharylon.github.io/uploads/fire_and_ice.jpg

Re: My disabled son – ‘the nobleman, the philanderer, the detective’

#67
post #32

So many of you see this as touching and heartwarming. From the point of view of a disabled adult, this is rather a story of a man who was isolated from his community. It sounds like he didn't have friends in offline life, or disabled friends, or connections with any political ideas of having the right to an independent life. No way to live apart from his parents and manage his own personal care assistants, no college…

You're right, and I'm ashamed that despite having a disability myself (visual impairment), I missed this.

By age 25, he should have had a job. His parents should have encouraged him to pursue a line of work that can be done remotely, such as programming, design, writing, or tech support. The people who came to his funeral from far away should have included his coworkers.

Re: My disabled son – ‘the nobleman, the philanderer, the detective’

#68
Like other peers on this thread, I have at least a couple hundred days of playtime between the ages of 13 and 16. I played 9pm-2am m/t/w/f as a dwarf paladin main tank through ICC heroic 25 man-mode and as a pvp healer in 2v2 and 3v3 arenas on weekends.

Nearly every belief I now hold about what it means to be a team member, to commit to a shared and ambitious goal, I originally felt while working through the game with my fellow 24 guild mates. So much work is required to plan and coordinate with people, to re-invent new strategies after unrelenting defeat by bosses for many many months with no progress, etc.

Many of whom were my closest friends during those years!

Thanks very much for sharing :)

Re: My disabled son – ‘the nobleman, the philanderer, the detective’

#69

Very touching story. I'm remembering one of the first touching stories of an influential MMORPG gamer disappearing because of her dead: A story known as "A Story About a Tree": https://www.raphkoster.com/games/essays/a-story-about-a-tree...

It's in the linked page, but the story was not actually true

Wow. Never realized that. I remember reading about this on the official site and there was actually a tree with a memorial in the game.

But perhaps it was unrelated.

:-(

Re: My disabled son – ‘the nobleman, the philanderer, the detective’

#70
post #59

I have more than 400 days of playtime (the actual time logged into the game) in World of Warcraft, mostly between being 15 and 22 and I don't regret a single second of it. Most people not familiar with gaming don't understand that, but I have very fond memories, found friends I'm still in contact with and even achieved a level of competitiveness I'm still proud of today and mention it in my full CV (Arena #1 and Top3…

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