Now presenting Lieutenant Laquifa Jaran, the Betazoid Lady-Captain of the U.S.S. Stiletto. After her exemplary performance fighting against the Borg attack (and her ability to take command in unexpected situations), Starfleet decided to let a mere Ensign become the Commanding Officer of a vessel. Now that she has sufficiently proven her abillity in defending Vulcan from Species 8472, fighting off Klingon raiding parties in the Orion sector, and defending helpless mining stations and colonies from Nausican, Orion, and Gron raiders, she is on the verge of a promotion and is about to be able to buy a new starship.

Laquifa represents a very large part of my nerdiness. I will admit that I am a trekkie. After having grown up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my father (and watching Star Trek: Voyager on my own), my integration into the world of Star Trek Lore is almost complete. Combine my already obsessive watching of the television shows with my two-summers spent at the Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center (a space camp that consists of one part astronomy and one part Star Trek LARPing), my obsession with Star Trek is almost all encompassing.

It is no wonder that I am incredibly obsessed with Star Trek Online after a mere 10 hours of gameplay.

Throughout the rest of this blog, there are a multitude of projects and perspectives that I hope to undertake and adequately explore. (Being a blog, however, these projects and perspectives might fade into the background or might provide a basis for further auto-ethnographic exploration of my habits as a gamer).

• I hope to compare and contrast my experiences as a semi-avid World of Warcraft (WoW) gamer and an invested Star Trek Online (STO) gamer.
• I hope to explore the ways in which each game experience has socialized the player into the gameworld (and the meta-gameworld), both in how each game is similar and how each game is different
• I hope to explore the ways in which massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are constructing their own societies, nations, and economies through the medium of Internet gaming
• I hope to explore the affective qualities that are involved in the gaming experience through the lens of socialization: why am I more commited to one game than another? Why am I socially, emotionally, spiritually, and physically invested in a virtual world? What causes me to value my experiences in the virtual world over my experiences in the non-virtual world (at the points in time when I am experiencing internal conflict over them)?

There are many more issues that will come up in this blog (and in my exploration of my individual gaming experience); as such, view these positions solely as a reading guideline.

In the posts to come, I will be exploring and comparing my experiences as a gamer in both WoW and STO; I will be using both experiences to re-write and re-explore previous papers I have written about online gaming, and I will (hopefully) help to expand all of our perceptions of the importance of gaming in the present world.

So, I now embark upon my mission into cyberspace and gaming. And no one has ever expressed what I hope to get out of this research better than Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation:

"Space... the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before."