I guess I kept thinking I was missing something… it just wasn’t as much fun as I thought it would be… but I didn’t want to quit, because I love quest games. Back in the 90’s I played all of the Sierra quest games… Police Quest, Space Quest, and Kings Quest… online gaming was a simple progression of that, it added the capability of interacting with other people.

Some people can take it too far, and live more in the virutal space than in reality. I’ve thought about why this is and I think its that folks may find the virtual world (1) more rewarding, and (2) they’re more in control of it.

What I’ve found in a very short time of being a member of a kinship and playing on a server with more players.. is that more people make the game more enjoyable. First of all, the kinship is so incredibly cool, because here are a group of folks (some are even my age who enjoy doing stuff I enjoy. Secondly, it is much more fun to see PCs (Player Characters) running around the landscape in and out of towns than it is to be there all alone.

Still even with the increased number of players it’s the kinship with whom I’ve already interacted more than I have with others in the last 1.5 years that is… making my virtual day!

Thank you… Creations of the Light!! What a blessing!

My problem is that my attention span (not long on good days) moves from one thing to another, to another, to another… returning to the 1st interest, then to the 2nd… ad infinitum.

I love my Lord, my family, gardening, counted thread embroidery, reading, playing with clay, rug hooking, and gaming as in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (also called MMOG or simply MMO).

My favorite earthly author is J.R.R. Tolkien (isn’t that surprising given the number of articles I’ve written on him and/or his work). Tolkien was one of the world’s greatest etymologists and worked at Oxford. Quite simply he loved words and could put them together so beautifully as to make one see, feel, sense something… to make it real. I love him, I look forward to meeting him in the future as he was a believer too.

So quite naturally my favorite MMO is The Lord of the Rings Online (LoTRO). In 2007 when I began playing I thought it’d be a good chance for me to witness to others by putting Tolkien’s work into his perspective. I felt this was necessary due to the number of folks, particularly younger gamers, who see only the fantasy or role-playing and not the truths with which Tolkien was concerned. You see, Tolkien believed that truth could be expressed through myth.

I do all that I love individually going from one thing to the next… basically, I’m an obsessive – compulsive person… throwing myself whole-heartedly into things, limited to one at a time (two at best)… but I also get bored with one thing after awhile… so I change… plus my husband and I have both had medical problems this last year and we did a trip to Europe… all of which must be squeezed in… I look forward to retirement simply to be able to enjoy doing the myriad of activities I enjoy the most… ALL of the time.

In gaming I got rather bored… bottom line.. it was lonely… very few people played on the server I was on and the “groups” (aka guilds or kinships) with which I came in contact left me cold… after all, what did I have in common with them beyond the game? … not much, if anything… who knows… after some research I found Creations of the Light (CotL) a Christian group that enables me to play my favorite game with a group of people with whom I share a lot more than just a game….. so I’m off… not to see the wizard… but to be an elf or a hobbit or simply a woman… in Middle Earth…. to solve puzzles and save the virtual world….

Some links…
The kinship – Creations of the Light at http://lotrocotl.com/
The game – Lord of the Rings Online at http://www.lotro.com/
More about the game – Forums for LotRO at http://forums.lotro.com/