Guild Wars 2 is the new Prozac

Well, here I am... posting after way too long of a break. As excited as I was to start this blog, I thought I'd keep up with it better. But life can suck you into a whirlpool sometimes and I find myself wondering how I got in the water in the first place.

By no means have I lost interest in Guild Wars 2 or this blog. In fact, I'm still following the game obsessively and although I missed most of the last beta, I'm keeping up to date by watching the various youtube videos and reading all the interviews, blogs, etc. My heart is still in it, my mind is a whole other ordeal.

It's been a crazy year for me; I got married, lost my job of 4 ½ years, took a trip to Southern California, had a few medical emergencies for our dog, and I am still desperately searching for a job. That's just the gist of my life currently, but what really makes it hard is my depression.

Now it may seem odd for me to talk about my depression in a blog about gaming, but lets be honest, depression has a deep impact on the lives of people it affects. I've had to deal with it my whole life, and games have served as a distraction from the pain and the darkness that can occur from depression. For this reason, gaming has always been very important to me.

Anyone dealing with depression knows it can be hard to function at a normal level. Once more, it's a fairly taboo topic and many people shy away from talking about it for fear of appearing whiny or being a “downer.” This fear only adds to the loneliness that is a symptom of depression. For me, makes it hard to post a blog entry while this deep pressure of emotion is weighing on me and I'm trying not to show it.

Now that the cats out of the bag, I'm gonna give it a toy to play with. The toy is called Guild Wars 2. As I said before, gaming has helped me with my depression throughout my life. It's not just that you're in a fantasy world that distracts you from reality, but that you have goals to reach and reaching them gives you a feeling of accomplishment which helps you feel better about yourself. Moreover, an MMO, especially one like Guild Wars 2, allows you to have social interactions with people, and diminishes the loneliness you may feel.

What I wanted from this blog was to portray a more personal perspective of a gamer and I can't do that while hiding an major aspect of my life. Truth is, I'm an introverted, empathetic person who feels things deeply, but tries to hide it so I can fit in better with society (I owe a lot of that to my many customer service jobs). But from here on, I'll do my best to embrace it. After all, you cannot spread awareness, you cannot unit others like you, if you hide what you are.

Guild Wars 2 beta, smells like home cookin'

There was a time when I said I couldn't cook and I'd hear from all kinds of people “Oh cooking's easy, anybody can cook!” It's true, anybody can boil water, preheat an oven, and add various meat & vegetables to make something edible. But is it wonderful? I suppose what I meant when I said I couldn't cook was that my heart wasn't in it, therefore the food I made was nothing to write home about.

Guild Wars 2 is soul food. Every character, landscape, interface page, piece of dialog and sea creature that is found within the game, bears with it the love & passion of it's creators. The game is beaming with the type of innovation that can only come from free minds. Minds driven to give birth to a reflection of everything that's made them who they are, blessed in the opportunity to do so.

My praise may seem like a little much to some, but I believe anything that inspires good will deserves such praise. ArenaNet is not simply making a game, they're creating a healthy community. Such directive was evident in the company's blogs and Twitter post, but became a natural state of being when playing the game. People helped people, we fought together, we overcame obstacles and we lost some battles. Looking back I realize I wasn't playing the game, but experiencing it.

Like in the way that frozen food will never compare to Mom's lasagna, ArenaNet has given us a taste of something you can't get anywhere else.

-InstaBayne

A special thanks goes out to ArenaNet for making such an amazing game, their community team for their resilience, and my wife for putting up with my 3 day “absence” during beta. :)