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The Daily Grind: How well do you know your game buddies?
While it's increasingly possible to play an MMO without being forced to interact with others, it's a bit like renting a tuxedo for a trip to McDonald's. Connections get formed (however mercenary they may be at the start) and you find yourself with a circle of friends you play with. Of course, while it's helpful to know who these people are, it's not absolutely necessary to know much aside from their character names and their roles in a group. Some people are content to leave their knowledge of cohorts there; others prefer to go the extra mile and find out the players and personalities behind the avatars. And it can help the play experience to know that Swizzle the Thief is actually a CPA in Gary, Indiana who's thinking about marrying his girlfriend. It's not going to help the group in the strictest sense, though, and getting too attached can lead to some major drama. What about you? Do you tend to know a lot about the people you game with, or would you generally prefer not to know?
The Daily Grind: Do you invite your friends?
Not every game has one, but several do -- the opportunity to invite a friend who hasn't played the game before, or try and entire someone back to the game again after a prolonged absence. After all, we have friends we know outside of our games that still enjoy flying around and smashing orcs (or alien horrors, or gang members, or anyone unlucky enough to wander into your space), and it's fun to bring people you interact with anyway into your favorite virtual world. You've got automatic leveling partners and people who know how you like to work, what could go wrong? Well, they could not like it. Actually, they could get annoyed at you bugging them about the game and decide not to play based solely upon that. Or they could wind up going in a completely different field of the game than you enjoy, or they might bring a whole bunch of real-world drama into a world you had been using to avoid that drama. So there might be good reasons to let your friends just keep enjoying whatever they like and keep your MMO friends separate. What do you do? Do you invite your old buddies, or do you stick with the fresh start?
