Sometimes its hard to keep WoW in a compartment
Contrary to popular belief, I do not Sleep, Eat, Drink and Breathe that utterly lovely and addictive game known as World of Warcraft. I’m not QUITE that much of a fanboy geek. Certainy, I do play it an awful lot and I do also play the card game and have, on occasion, made my friends eyes glaze over by talking about it..but it doesn’t dominate my life and the roleplaying and scheming and plotting hardly ever actually spill over into the rest of my life. I don’t go to bed thinking about what dark machinations im going to be doing when I next log on, and I generaly don’t get all that affected by stuff that happens in the game.
Until last night.
Last night my character was hanging around the pub in Goldshire (its a town, don’t worry about it), when another player started doing the “dancing naked on the table-top then jumping in the fireplace” routine. Now, Goldshire gets about 30 people like that each day, and its really irritating because its meant to be a Roleplaying server, and I personally can’t see much that could be counted as In Character about doing that…so I remonstrated with the person In Character and then Out Of Character I gently explained the whole RP thing. We got to chatting, which was nice because I was expecting to recieve a response along the lines of “LOL U LZR N00B, U SUXOR”. Turns out this was a fairly nice girl, still at school, who’d wandered on to the server to find out what it was like, and so was actually pretty interested in RP. So far so good.
The thing that got me though, was when I suggested she check some of the RP essays that can be found on the server forums, because some of those essays are very well written and could explain things much better than I could. She said she didn’t think she could read a long essay because she wasn’t very clever. I responded with “You needn’t put yourself down like that”. She replied that lots of people at her school tell her she’s stupid. “God gave me a good body” She said, “But not a good brain”.
I was livid. This put me in a seriously bad mood. Because its total bollocks. She’d already shown herself to be articulate and interested in stuff, and yet she was convinced that she was stupid because a bunch of numbnuts had told her so. A 13 year old kid should not have to think like that. Its not right and its not fair.
Apart from anything else, “cleverness” is such a wooly term in any case. Theres so many differant types of cleverness, and stupidity, that labeling someone as stupid is in fact stupidity in itself. I’m not good with numbers. That doesnt make me stupid. I had a chemistry teacher who told me a wouldn’t amount to anything because I was having trouble with my chemistry schoolwork. Yet I have a science degree….
I think im going to keep an eye out for that player, and make sure to say Hi every once in a while.
Interesting. The Dip. has kicked off with multiple intelligences and the question people (especially teachers) should be asking is not “Are you smart?” but “How are you smart?”. It’s a big difference.
Fancy a pint tomorrow night?