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You know, once, at my last apartment, my fire alarm malfunctioned. I suppose the battery was low.
The fire alarm was attached to the ceiling of the room, which was formerly an attic, a good 10 feet over my head. I had no means to get up there. The landlord was a total douchebag and refused to help out. So I called the fire department, intending to pass the bill on to the landlord if the call was ruled frivolous. I really didn't have any other options available to me.
The firefighters came. They made a human ladder, went up the full 10 feet without instruments clambering on each other's backs, deactivated the alarm, and left. They were enormously gracious and polite, and the entire operation took no more than five minutes.
That, to me, is true badassery. Going from inert at the station, coming out here, and with supreme efficiency executing a strategy with profound skill, then going back to the station again, all with a highly positive attitude, not being patronizing about the smallness of what is being asked or the status of the caller. Fwiw, the best MT/RL I ever knew in WoW was also a firefighter.
I don't particularly respect them for "putting their lives on the line"; people accept danger in many parts of their life, and I am of the attitude that the moral worth of life is incomparably more significant than the quality of being alive in the absolute.
I respect them for just being, in my experience, incredibly skilled, disciplined, efficient, and by and large very moral.
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People who say they have lives in WoW really have no lives at all. After all, what's the last time you saw someone use the IRL excuse when they fail at something in real life? Therefore, the only reason anyone would use such an excuse is that in reality they are so totally divorced from life that they are suffering from cognitive dissonance due to their partial awareness as such.
Besides, it's a game. Logically, only people with no lives - i.e., no sense of purpose or self-respect or perspective - would feel the need to make an apologia for failing at a game.
Finally, as I alluded to in the above, in my experience, the best players are the ones who have lives, because they have superior powers of meta-analysis, they play to win, and they tend not to take the game personally, so correcting errors and ignorance comes more easily to them. Of course this equation is different in games based purely on repetition or reflexes like Halo or SC2, but in a game with a low skillcap like WoW, based largely on empirical learning, people who have lives will usually be superior players.
Aestu of Bleeding Hollow... Nihilism is a copout.
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