Yes, Megan's posts on social media had started popping up in my YouTube feed, and the "Life of an English Teacher in Japan" shorts were incredibly quirky and fun to watch. That Megan was another member of Team Red ("Go Team Red!") also endeared me to her.
Well, today she dropped the video you see above, and it's a ~21 minute video about why she left what seemed to be her dream job.
The TL;DR is that yes, it was her dream job, but it wasn't what she hoped it would be.
From housing issues --and issues left by her predecessor-- to dealing with the loneliness and the bureaucracy (not to mention the language barrier), there was a lot to work through.
I always had a lot of respect for people who left what they'd known to come to a foreign land and make a new life for themselves, but for every success story there are a lot more stories that are like Megan and Ben's. When you couple that to the knowledge that no matter what you do and how much you succeed you are still considered "the other"... Yeah, that is something that can be hard to accept.
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To bring this around to gaming, these are themes that can be explored in any rich game world. Now that I think about it, they have been explored in the Dragon's Age and Mass Effect games, but in MMOs not quite so much.
The thing is, I'm not quite sure whether it would be better to be explored in fiction or in an MMO itself. If you put in quest chains in an MMO, you run the risk of simply telling rather than showing the problems that are faced by people who are The Other. And MMOs aren't typically well known for showing rather than telling, because they do often seem to subscribe to "The School of Massive Info Dumps" when presenting quests.
I honestly don't know the answer to this conundrum.
#Blaugust2024
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