The Wizards of Technology

One of modern life's challenges is obtaining a sane work-life balance, finding time to spend with family, and finding peace. Finding that peace is oftentimes a difficult thing. We live in "just add water" cartoon homes, travel through a maze of traffic in the daily rat race to reach our office cube farm, usually skip meals, but dose up on caffeine, only to perform the same exercise on the way back to home. Once home, you either deal with kids until they are asleep, wished you had some, or are one of the few that breathe in enough oxygen after work to re-energize yourself. We live in an endless cycle of wash, rinse, dry, repeat.

That whole pursuit of happiness thing can be highly overrated...but alas, some brave souls have decided on embarking on balancing their real lives, with their virtual ones. Yes, you can be a corporate grunt during the day, and recharge yourself by being a space pirate, a CEO of a corporation, a miner (mining can be relaxing, strangely), or any number of roles...in a virtual world. Whether your thing is roleplaying or not, you can relax by exchanging your regular life, for a more exciting one, for a charge. World of Warcraft, EVE Online, and Runescape are a few that come to mind, with totally different user experiences in each.

There are a myriad of MMO and MMORPG games, and environments, such as Second Life, that allow for you to lose yourself in a beautifully created universe, leaving the mundane problems of this world behind for a few hours.

In upcoming syndicated articles, we'll be exploring a few of the many roles that a user could choose, and we'll start with EVE Online, a sci-fi, space-based MMO, whose storyline writes itself daily, as users interact in a vast universe.

Marc Asturias