L2P, Noob!

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.
-- L. P. Jacks

If you're here, it's probably because someone, somewhere, thinks you need to learn to play. Now, usually, people who say "L2P" are talking about little mechanical quirks of a given game, or effective use of particular abilities. No, it's not that. This is about learning to play. You know, have fun doing stuff. Like what kids do. I'm mostly framing this in terms of Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs), but really, this applies to everything.

You may not have noticed, but a kid can have more fun with a stack of unmarked wooden blocks than most MMO players can have with multi-million dollar game software. This is because kids know how to play. You probably don't. You can learn.

Playing is not normally taught. In fact, it is anti-taught. You started out built to play; if you are not playing now, it is because someone somewhere taught you not to. There's a lot of reasons for which they might have, most of which involve good intentions and not a lot of insight.

Wanna learn more? You might start out with Why play?, an overview of why you might want to play, as opposed to being all boring and serious.

Now that this site's been up for a while, I can report that either it's helpful to people or there's a fair number of people whose life goals can only be achieved by writing me elaborate prank messages about how it helped them. I'm inclined to assume the former.

The big thing I want to remind you of: This is not all about MMOs. This is about everything. Life. Love. Work. Religion. Everything.

More to come

This is, obviously, just a placeholder. A sort of starting point. I'll be working on this... Wrong!. I'll be playing with this site as ideas come to me. I dunno, maybe set up some kind of self-quiz. Maybe write up some more examples.

Now go have fun. Stop stressing out. It's okay; you are allowed to have fun, and you will be better off for the experience.