The concept of the digital native bothers me for some reason. A tiny little bit of it might be “you kids get off my lawn” curmudgeonliness. Mainly it’s a sense that the idea is useless, because pace William Gibson, there have been people living in the unevenly distributed digital future for some time, and because it’s never really clear what the dividing line is between someone who’s a native, and someone who isn’t. My father-in-law worked for IBM on computer systems since the early 1960s. Is he not a digital native? I’ve played video games since I was nine or ten, I’ve used computers since I was in college, and can write HTML tags in my sleep. Am I not one?
More broadly, there’s a loose assumption that someone who’s grown up with… what, specifically? Wifi? Personal computers in the house? Smartphones?… just gets information technology in a way their elders don’t. Which suggests that my son understands the iPad better than, say, Steve Jobs.
So it was nice to see this piece about elders and World of Warcraft, focusing on a 70 year-old player named Marthazon. As she explains,
I joined Spartans at level 15, and I think that our GM at the time was at level 40 and the highest level in the guild at the time. We did every dungeon in the game as a guild, but our first venture in Molten Core hooked me on raiding. I really loved learning the fights, learning to figure out the most efficient and safest way to down each boss. At the time, the guild was using signups to fill the 40-man raids, and many raid nights we struggled and watched the time tick away before either filling our raid or cancelling the raid.
I turned to PvP when raiding slowed down or stopped. The fact that I managed to reach the PvP rank of Marshal prior to the first expansion says a great deal about the difficulties of filling a 40-man raid.
I have no clue what any of that means.