Do you Warcraft?
A few days ago, I was trawling the Internet in a mindless stupor, when a wave of loss and confusion swept over me. I was perplexed by this sudden onslaught, and locked myself in a closet to work through the pain and anguish.
I was about 3 hours into my exile, and chasing hallucinatory rabbits down the gullet of a whale-bird to save the Princess from disk brakes when a light broke through the gloom and the land was bathed in clarity: I hadn’t watched Zero Punctuation in a while!
Immediately my mood brightened, I broke out of the closet, and raced to my computer. This could not wait!
And so, for the next hour or so, I gorged myself on reviews of games I will never play, just because the geometrically clean heads of the e-people in the videos gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling. But even in this state of bliss, I took special note of Yahtzee’s review of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm because—well, it was completely, and utterly true to life.
Now this isn’t a review of a review. And it definitely isn’t a point-by-point rebuttal because—well, as I said before, I agree with just about everything in the video. But there were some cues that just seemed to call to me, demanding that I give them some kind of attention. This is the result.
Free Bird: I had to look this up on YouTube for, while I’d heard it mentioned in the past, I’d never actually heard the song. I’m not sure I can truly put into words the way it made me feel, but in brief, I managed to get through 3.5 of its 9 minutes before I had to shut it off or be overcome by a visceral urge to commit terrible acts of violence against all things cute and cuddly.
I kid not. There is some aspect of that song that reaches into the deepest part of my brain and starts wailing on the button marked: Go Crazy!
Entertainment Value: As a solo game, I don’t really find World of Warcraft all that entertaining. If it were a straight up adventure game where you split you time exploring for treasure and going from one boss fight to another, with each being successively more awesome and gory, then yes, it would be glorious fun. But most of the time, it’s about gathering, or mining, or looting, or escorting (and not the fun, sexy kind, but rather the boring, walk-beside-some-moron-until-he-gets-attacked kind). And while looting’s fun when you first get into the game, it’s lost a lot of its appeal by the time you’ve done it the 10 000th time.
WoW vs Hanging: It is so true. At least there’s escape with hanging. With WoW, the grind just continues.
Horde vs Alliance: Alliance sucks.
Productivity: How productive can a dead dog be? The answer: not at all. WoW certainly gives the illusion that something has been achieved. You spend an evening trying to finish some irritating quest that you swore would only take 15 minutes. But after all the e-suffering and e-struggle you went through, you feel like you’ve gained something tangible, it’s just a matter of nailing down precisely what…
Meanwhile, all the things you could have achieved, and gained a tangible object in the process, remain unfinished. In fact, they’re starting to pile up; become overwhelming. Just thinking about them is sapping the life from you. Better fire up WoW to get a little relief from all this ‘reality’…
And so on.
Warcompulsion Loopcraft: A few months ago, I read an article about Zynga games and how they were nothing but giant compulsion loops designed to suck money from the impatient and easily suckered, and the same basic idea can be applied to World of Warcraft.
You start by buying the game, and they give you the first month free. After that month you sign up for more months because you’ve developed a raging hard-on for Lady Sylvanis and you can’t stand the idea of not seeing her, or hearing her dulcet tones; and because you’ve already thrown money away on the actual game (which is probably why they don’t give the client away for free). You may have even developed a fondness for you character(s), and want to see them grow, and succeed, and find love and happiness, and retire to a sunny villa in Stranglethorn.
There’s just no easy escape. You have to force your way out, or risk becoming one of the unwashed, unmoving, spheroids that have forgotten what the world beyond the cold, dead glow of the computer screen looks like.
Clashing items, or super numbers: It’s definitely about the numbers. I’ve not payed any mind to what my characters look like. They strip the corpses of the best gear, and swap it for their existing crap, like an Athenian host coming upon the remains of a German panzer division.
Fashion is not high on the order sheet.
A Non-Conclusion Conclusion: I started playing WoW because my fiancée plays it. She’s got a couple of high level characters (one of them being just shy of 85), while mine hang about in the 10 to 50 range at the time being.
I’ll keep playing solo until one of this lot manages to reach 85 (time to pick one of these buggers, and stick with them), and has done the Indiana Jones parody quests, but after that, I think I’ll switch to playing in a group. I don’t really find the game all that enjoyable when there’s no one else around. And I don’t just mean online.
There can be a whole host of people online to chat with, by I have a rare genetic condition that prevents me from seeing the chat box unless I stare directly at it. I’m the kind of person that needs to have other people in the same room with me, playing the game at the same time, and preferably on the same server. Otherwise, it just seems lonely and pointless.
Well, unless it involves killing Alliance players. There’s always 5 minutes for that.