This summer, my wife and I told our children that they don’t get any “screen time” until after dinner each day. They initially struggled with that, said they were bored (until I started giving them jobs to alleviate that boredom), and wandered around the house aimlessly. Yet after a couple days, we saw their patterns shift so that they were making forts, reading books, digging out old toys, and engaging in projects.
The point is, when we run out of easy entertainment, it’s still quite possible to keep ourselves preoccupied by making our own fun. It’s a lost art that we all used to be masters of in our childhood, and we can rediscover it in our MMOs.
So my question today is a bit open-ended along this line of thought. Do you make your own fun in MMOs when you run out of developer-created content? Do you set your own goals, put together social activities, and come up with different challenges that may not have any achievement points attached to them?