World of Warcraft

I hope some of you who read this are South Park fans. One of the most hilarious episodes satirizes what goes on in this computer game and stereotypes of the people who play them. For those of you who don’t know what World of Warcraft is, it is this computer game that you play on the internet with thousands and thousands of other people. YOu create a character in this virtual J.R.R. Tolkien-esque world. The characters can be gnomes, dwarves, elves, orcs, etc. It’s also very Dungeons and Dragons like too. This all sounds pretty nerdy.

Last year, I did a 10 day free trial because I wanted to see what this game was all about. I first thought it was kind of dumb, but I got hooked into it because there was so many people and places to interact with. Thank God it was only a 10 day trial. I wasn’t going to pay $15 a month to have my life sucked away.

Let’s flash forward to this year. A couple of weeks ago, Andrew told me that he started playing World of Warcraft. I groaned to myself.

I asked him, “Did you really sign up for that? You’re paying and everything?”

He said, “No dude, there are free servers to play it on.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

About half an hour later, he installed everything on my computer and I was playing. Andrew was the dealer, and I’m the user. The game is seriously like crack. An hour or two would pass before I even realized. My guitar was neglected for a few days.

I made a few characters. There is the Night-Elf, Delgore. Then there is the Blood-Elf, Serialius. Last of all, there is the Dwarf, Nostramo. I went on quests to kill weird goblins and rats. I ventured with Andrew into some cave where I got slaughtered by these weird ugly creatures. I spent a lot of time wandering around. Why do I have to wait until level 30 to get a damn horse?

Finally, a few nights ago, as I was traveling through the Searing Gorge as my Dwarf, I was killed by this giant monster thing. I decided to go on to this other part of the world. After traveling for about 45 minutes in the world to get to “Elwynn Forest”, I thought to myself, “What the hell am I doing with this game? I just traveled miles in this fantasy game. What a waste! I’m not going to achieve anything meaningful playing this game.”

I logged off and deleted the game from my computer.

I feel much better now.

~ by southclaw on October 19, 2008.