Looking back
Originally published at Still Xerlic. You can comment here or there.
Despite having quit FFXI and not playing any MMOs, I still read BlueGartr on a daily basis. I mainly hang out in the Gaming and General forums now. Yesterday, a thread popped up to discuss 9/11 since the 10 year anniversary is coming up next week. People were talking about where they were when 9/11 occurred and what memories they had of that day. I thought it was a bit fascinating since a lot of people were stepping into the minds of themselves a decade ago. I never realized the age spread of BG. You had people who were posting their thoughts as an elementary school student all the way through high school, college and beyond. If you read the thread you run through the whole length of reactions that people of all age demographics would have about an event of such a high magnitude from people who were barely old enough to comprehend what the gravity of what 9/11 would mean for years to come all the way to people who were profoundly and possibly even personally affected.
I’m trying to think of a way to segue from 9/11 into FFXI without making me look like an insensitive jackass who thinks that a video game and a national tragedy are comparable, but I’m coming up short. So please forgive me if I come across that way.
Trying to think back to the me of ten years ago made me once again reminisce about FFXI and just how long I ended up playing it. I started playing in December of 2003 and quit in March 2011 which equates to a little over seven years. I began to put it into perspective. When I started playing FFXI -
George W. Bush was still in his first term of office. 9/11 was still fresh in the minds of Americans and the Iraqi War had just started that year. Nowadays it’s become standard daily headlines to read about soldiers in Iraq.
AIM, MSN, Yahoo and ICQ were very widely used to communicate. I remember constantly having a maxed out buddy list on AIM and having to remove someone every time I wanted to add someone new. Now my buddy list sits at less than 40 people. I don’t remember texting being popular, though I could be wrong. I didn’t even have the first inkling of what a smartphone was, though the first BlackBerry was released in 2003 and the only thing I knew about Apple was that my roommate loved their computers for some reason. Myspace and Facebook were unknown to me at least for a few more years.
The Xbox had come out the prior year, and people joked about its size and Microsoft’s attempt to break into the console market. To be honest, I was really skeptical of it and never owned an Xbox, but I will say that my 360 gets the most use out of all of my consoles.
The Harry Potter series was only on Order of the Phoenix which came out in 2003. I remember going to a midnight release during the summer and not being able to get a copy of the book.
Bittorrent was just picking up steam as a file sharing utility. Prior to that, I mainly used a Direct Connect hub that was a network of several colleges.
Kind of surprisingly, a lot of the webcomics that I used to read are still being updated although I don’t keep up with most of them anymore.
Throughout the course of playing XI, I finished my bachelor’s degree, started working, quit my job because I hated my boss, was unemployed for a year and played XI for almost every day, went back to school for a 2 year nursing degree and started my current job almost 3 years ago. Hindsight is a beautiful thing. I’m not usually one of those people who likes to play the should have could have would have game, but I definitely would have played my cards differently now than I did back then. For example, during the first week of my unemployment we had claimed a Nidhogg and it dropped a Dalmatica which I ended up getting. At the time I was pretty happy and I remember telling my linkshell that was I “lucky” that I had quit my job since I wouldn’t have stayed up to camp Nidhogg if I was still working. That thought would never have crossed my mind nowadays since I wouldn’t be camping Nidhogg since I’d be sending out resumes non-stop.
Along this line of thought, I often wonder if it was really worth it. I don’t mean just the one isolated incident above, but moreso the entire FFXI experience. I know I’ve sunk a lot of hours and days into FFXI. A lot of us have. We’ve all met people in game. We’ve all quested together, camped NMs together, done dynamis together, hung out in Jeuno then Whitegate then back to Jeuno together, and more recently done Abyssea and Trials of the Magians together. We’ve clocked the hours levelling our characters, doing genkai, questing AF armor, doing missions to get Sky and then Sea and if you’re really dedicated grinding out a relic or a mythic. But after it’s all said and done, and you hang up the towel. Can you look back and say that it was time well spent?
If you can truthfully say yes, then I applaud you. Honestly, I don’t know how I would answer that question. My time in FFXI had a lot of highs and I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot in game, but now that I’ve quit I can’t really say that I still feel accomplished. One of my fondest memories from FFXI was grinding out AF armor in the summer of 2004. Our linkshell spent many late nights in Eldieme and Garlaige and the beastman cities grinding out coffer keys for all of our members and we had a lot of fun doing it. Not even a year or two later, the linkshell had split and many of us went our separate ways. Several had quit the game and had already fallen out of touch. Should something like this mar the memory?
Often times when I walk down this road of FFXI nostalgia, I liken it to a ghost town. In many cases, the people are long gone but the evidence of their passing remains. I stumbled upon this KI thread and was reminded of many of the linkshells from Titan’s haydays. I spent some time reading over the thread and was kind of amazed at how many people that I knew that I had forgotten.
Even my Livejournal feed has gone down this road. I used to read my friend feed on a weekly basis, but nowdays the only person who updates with any frequency is wiccan who doesn’t even play XI.
In short, I don’t think I regret playing XI but I regret playing it for as long as I did. To invest so much time into something, it’s hard to not feel some sense of attachment even though you no longer are involved.