ITK 140
Oct. 10, 2007
Computers, the Way to My Future
Computers have been a part of my life for a very long time. Ever since I was nine years old they have influenced my life. Around that time computers were starting to become an appliance in many American homes. Their importance in my life grew daily as more teachers would assign typed papers and I started to find games to play.
When I was 11, I moved from Duluth, Minnesota to Geneva, Illinois and started school there. I was a new kid which meant that I would have to make new friends in a school of kids who already knew each other. I developed a friendship with three of the other students quickly because I had found out that they played the same computer games I did. We all played Blizzard Entertainment’s Starcraft and would connect to each other over the internet to play against each other while we were home. A year later one of them and I started to play Sony Online Entertainment’s Everquest. While I did not really meet anyone in that game that I became friends with, it did open my interest in other games similar to it.
In my high school years I started to play World of Warcraft by Blizzard Entertainment. Massive multiplayer online role playing games(MMORPGs) have a bad reputation for giving the people who play it stereotypes of being anti-social. What actually happens is completely the opposite. Many players of these MMORPGs actually play it for the interaction with other people. These games allow people to play and interact with other players around the globe much like a social networking website, like Facebook or Myspace, would do. One of the major differences is, however, that players in MMORPGs often develop friendships, and sometimes more involved relationships, in the game.
This is all very important to me because unlike people in Myspace who may have two thousand friends and not know a thing about any of them, I actually developed strong relationships with several people I met through World of Warcraft. I was invited to go meet them all in Yellowstone National Park during the summer of 2007 but could not go for financial reasons. I did however meet two of my other friends from in the game over the same summer that live in Southern Michigan. They were in Chicago to see a concert and decided to stop by my town to spend a day with me. Two of my friends met in the game and started dating in the real world. They are actually now going to be married in the spring of 2008 and have invited everyone that we play with on-line to attend along with all their families.
Had I not met my friends through the computer and this game I may have never been able to meet them in my life time. In order for me to meet them all I would have had to travel to Oregon, Washington, Louisiana, Wisconsin, North Caroline, Ohio, Michigan, and even Montana to meet all of them. Also to meet that particular person in each of those states would have been like stumbling over one particular needle in a pile of other needles. I would have never known that that person was the one I currently know. Many of their jobs do not pertain to how I live. One of them works in air condition and heating, another works for an oil company so the chance I would have met these people are very slim.
Computers have also had negative impacts on my life. There is a lot of maintenance that is involved in keeping a computer running. In high school I built my own computer and got it to run. It worked fine with a few bugs that I worked out after a bit. The big problems with it however, was that it was expensive to build and I somehow got a virus that ended up destroying it. The virus started affecting my computer by making it run slower during booting procedures. After awhile it slowed it down so much that it would not even make it to the log in screen before it locked up. All my information, programs, and files that were on it were now trapped and I could not retrieve them. To my dismay I was forced to reformat my sixty gigabyte hard drive that was full and lost all of my information on it. At the time I had been downloading music and to lose all those files was a huge dilemma for me. The money and time spent acquiring all of those was completely wasted.
My current computer has had its own problems as well. I have deleted more viruses off it than I can count, replaced several parts in it, and its printer has been an ever constant struggle. The printer never wants to print correctly and it switches which ink will actually work from time to time. Many times the paper will come out all streaky and faded.
Computers continue to impact my life and I do not see that change in the future at all. Computers continue to evolve every day to become faster, more powerful, and sometimes even smaller. With every passing day computers become more integrated into daily life.
