Warcrack Diaries

Well, this blog’s off to a limping start and my excuse is a poor one: Virtual reality intrudes. NPCs are on my ass throughout Azeroth about various assassinations, harvests of body parts and other assorted errands. One does tire of the passivity of the NPC. Do these people ever do anything for themselves?

After perhaps two years clean, I’m back on the World of Warcraft, and it’s as devious a time trap as ever.

I don’t like to use the word addiction when it comes to games. I think it’s sloppy thinking, and often, it’s just a way for people to pathologize pleasure. Merely liking something a lot and spending copious time and money on it isn’t de facto addiction. The word gets thrown around by laypeople with pop-psych abandon. I’ll have a little more to say on the topic next month when a sad anniversary rolls around.

That said, there is more than a little of the lever and food pellet reward cycle built into the game, watching that experience meter creep across the screen.

This stuff is poison for a guy who works at home. The game is always lurking inside my computer, ready in a couple of clicks, though the load time can feel like an eternity, like twitchily heating the spoon.

The first night, I played until about 11:00 with Fazz, and then, when he begged off, I switched to one of my old characters (clever bastards at Blizzard keep them forever) and walked places, stabbed and looted until 1:00. The next morning, I got right back at it, intending to kill the rest of an hour. I stopped two hours later. I blew most of this morning playing. One afternoon, I noticed it was raining in the game, but not until later that it was raining outside.

Erkonlin joined the Saturday Players in part to kick the MMORPG hard stuff. We’ve got three fathers in the group, and so schedules typically permit a session only every four to six weeks. One of the great things about D&D is that it’s inconvenient.