in-person
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Breakfast Topic: Local guilds
A few weeks ago while I was browsing the official forums, I noticed an interesting guild recruitment post. Someone was recruiting for people not based on class, skill level, or preferred play style, but rather on geographic location. He was hoping to create a guild of people from Portland, Oregon. It's an interesting idea, and one I've sort of kept in the back of my mind since I saw the post. I like to think that most of us, these days, have started to realize that there really are other, living, breathing, flesh and blood people on the other side of the keyboard. In fact, many of us have met some of these people at conventions and guild gatherings. There's also many families and friends who have decided to play WoW together. However, building a guild from the group up to be a "local guild" seems to be a different beast altogether. You're not meeting up with each other after having been in the guild for a while, or playing for family ties. Instead, you're looking to get actual benefits, game-related or otherwise, of being in a guild of other residents of your city, state, province, or what have you.
Study finds teens still like to hang out behind the Gas N' Sip
According to a recently released report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a telephone study of US youths aged 12-17 found that -- get this -- kids actually put value on "non-online" meetings, such as "talking on the phone" or "hanging out." If you believe these so-called findings, 40-percent of teens say they use that archaic and confusing system of wired telephones, while 31-percent claim to spend time "in person" with friends every day, as though they're not frittering away their time on PCs, DS Lites, and cellphones -- interacting virtually, like the rest of us. Our take? Obvious youth-driven cover-up. Hear us out here. If the 'rents found out kids were growing up so socially disenfranchised, they might just take all those beautiful gadgets away. On the other hand (or OTOH, as the youngsters say on their picture calculators), we don't exactly take a telephone poll of 935 teens as empirical knowledge, so maybe it's possible that kids are pretty much the same as they've always been -- if slightly more distracted. One thing's for sure -- they'll never experience the pain of not knowing the lyrics to Rock Me Amadeus like we did.
