Yesterday I spent the afternoon getting my eyes checked out. I'm nearsighted and have been wearing bifocals for about a decade or more now, so I make a point to have my eyes checked regularly anyway, but ever since my Type 2 diagnosis these visits have taken on a greater amount of importance.
The TL;DR is that my eyes are fine, and no evidence of deterioration due to diabetes. Thanks for asking.
That being said, being "normal" in your mid-50s means your response times aren't what they once were. One of the eye tests involves me looking through an eyehole at a square dot on a screen, and when squiggles become visible around my peripheral vision I'm to use a clicker in my hand. I don't believe I missed any of the squiggles, but I did notice that my response wasn't what it had been in the past. I was assured I was well in the normal range for my age, but if you're a gamer or an athlete you're used to comparing yourself against people who are decidedly NOT normal for their age.
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| From Reddit. |
I came out of the appointment with a serious case of mixed emotions. Yes, it's good to have eyes that aren't showing signs of diabetic deterioration, glaucoma, and anything of that ilk, and my prescription didn't change enough that I didn't have to get a new pair of glasses this year. (Yay!)
But.
It's also depressing to know that what is "normal" for my age is the equivalent of "git gud scrub" in gamer terms.
Remember how I'm not a fan of Heroic or Mythic/Mythic Plus modes of group content in MMOs? The knowledge that I simply no longer have the physical skill to perform at a level necessary to be competent at them is the depressing part. When I read or watch videos online about Mythic+ this and Mythic+ that and the people are all about "this is too easy" or "this needs to be tweaked" or "I got [fill in the blank] achievement" or "we downed XXX on Mythic", all I can think of is that they're talking about a part of MMOs I simply can't play. It's not a matter of choosing not to play that, but that I simply can't do it at all.*
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| This was me at times in progression raiding during TBC Classic. Sometimes, The Simpsons hits the nail on the head. From Pinterest (and The Simpsons). |
It's akin to the time I was attempting to repair my wife's old Kindle and I discovered to my horror that my eyes could no longer focus close in for me to do the job; I had to give up and get a magnifying glass to attempt to complete the repair.** For a guy who prided himself on his ability to tinker with electronics, it was a real blow to have to rely on magnifying glasses to see details properly. What's next, needing one of those light up magnifiers to read a menu?
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| The Light Up Menu Magnifier does exist. "AS SEEN ON TV!" From Amazon. |
Or worse, using The Clapper to play video games?
I guess this is a reality about aging that people have to come to grips with, not just gamers. It's easy to forget this when you're in the middle of something, and you don't notice the long term gradual deterioration of skills. It's only when you go away from something and come back some time later that you realize just what had happened. Or if you're a data nerd and have kept track of details for so long that you can see the gradual deterioration in your own data. (Seriously, that'll take years, and good luck with keeping that data collection going for that long.)
An ex-coworker of mine is the father of a famous League of Legends player, and he once told me that his son realized that he has maybe 4-5 years at best of being in the position he's in, so he was saving all of his salary so that he can do what he wants (such as go to university) when his skills deteriorate. At age thirty at latest, or most likely in the mid-late 20s.
I'll get over this, but it was still a nice kick in the nuts for a Wednesday and I needed to vent a bit.
*This also begs the question just how much of MMO game design is for people both skilled enough and young enough to perform well enough in that high end aspect of the game? If you watch YouTube videos you'd get the impression that this subset of the game is all that's important about World of Warcraft. Those content creators --and the high end guilds-- are the loudest voices in the room, and they undoubtedly have an influence over WoW's game design. It also becomes a feedback loop where the game is tailored toward people who play in that niche so they attract people who only play in that niche and demand more content for that niche, and so on and so forth.
**I did not succeed in repairing said Kindle. That was also a blow to my ego.
I have varifocals in my near future and it's definitely been a bit sad to admit that my eyesight is getting worse, even if it's a normal part of ageing.
ReplyDeleteThe example with struggling with a repair I definitely understand, but I've got to admit I don't quite get the connection to stuff like mythic raids, because I never got the impression that you ever actually wanted to do those things. Am I wrong in that and you've been harbouring secret world first aspirations all along? 😉 If not, why even think about that? I don't worry about never being able to be a race car driver or another hundred things I never wanted to do anyway...
I may not have the reflexes (or physical stature) to be a race car driver, and that has never bothered me. However, my enjoyment of driving a car isn't affected by what is done on the race track, either. Nor do the Federal and State governments tailor the roads to suit the fans of street racing. (In fact, quite the opposite, as I've seen speed bumps appear in locations the past year to deter street racers from zipping through urban areas.)
DeleteThat being said, I've seen directly how the flavor of the month design for PvP, for example, trickles down to regular Battleground matches. I saw that happen a lot in my last year or two of playing Retail, and when you combine that with other problems with BGs it helped to push me out of the game.
In the case of Heroic or Mythic instance/raids, it is about the appearance or perception of things. Where is the focus of the community? What is the face the game has? What does Blizzard focus on? Judging by what shows up in various forms of player driven media and corporate press releases (blue posts), it's cosmetics, pets, mounts, alts, and high end raiding/instances. (Min/Maxing and gold selling is a side effect.) The first four take time and/or money, but the last one requires skill.
Whether or not I wanted to try my hand at it, I felt that progressing up the group content difficulty chain was at least an option if I wanted to do it. But it seems that age has taken that from me, regardless of my opinions on the matter. Can I play LFR raids? Sure. Can I play Normal mode raids in Retail WoW or other modern MMOs? Most likely. Beyond that? No, that ship has now sailed.
I never got to try Heroic raids in Wrath Classic, as our little 10 person team imploded very shortly after we entered Ulduar, but I always felt that if I wanted to do it I could push for it, community toxicity notwithstanding. Now, I have to be skeptical of my ability to do so.
Did I ever harbor a secret desire to push World First? No. Mythic keys? No. Did I want the option available if I ever wanted to do the latter? Yes. I've experienced adrenaline highs before, both in physical sports and in video games, and I know what it's like to push beyond what you think you're capable of and achieve a higher goal. That's what Heroic and Mythic+ represents: that higher goal you push yourself to achieve. It's just that it's a bitter pill to swallow that my "higher goal" on some days is getting out of bed pain free, never mind trying even a Heroic mode on a video game.