I used to have a life once
Below is a copy of an article from the Daily Telegraph (link here) which details one man and his WoW addiction. Even my mum got it :)
But that was before Sam Leith joined the monster-killing millions in the online game World of Warcraft
So my gnome rogue, hoping to level up, is grinding his way through some leprous gnome exiles, picking the odd pocket for coppers, and vaguely searching for a dwarf, when he spots an intriguing doorway.
So, here I am, at 3.30am on a working day, red-eyed from bashing up trolls. And, I might add with a twinge of shame, 33 years old
He stealths, and starts waddling down the gently sloping stone corridor. A little way ahead, I can see where the passageway makes a right turn. Then this funny little mob shows up, then adds, and barely do I know I'm in combat before I'm toast. Didn't even get a Sinister Strike in.
A fast-moving L30 night-elf hunter breezes past my corpse, then stops, and turns round. He notices the dead gnome is level 7. "Dude," he tells my corpse. "This is a lvl 25 instance!" "I think I have realised my mistake," I tell him, as I zap back to the graveyard and prepare to go and retrieve my corpse.
If that sounds like gibberish to you, I'm in sympathy. Two weeks ago, I would have read the above anecdote and been defeated by what "grinding", "mobs", "adds", "Sinister Strike" and "instance" meant, still less been able to understand how you use "stealth" as a verb and why gnome exiles have leprosy and why you might be looking for a dwarf.
Yet at the last count there were 7.5 million people worldwide who would know just what I was talking about – and would giggle at the image of a half-witted newbie inadvertently picking a fight with an elite monster and duly getting squished.
This is World Of Warcraft – the world's most popular MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) – and it is, God help me, now a substantial portion of what used to pass for my life.
It started innocuously enough. My geeky friend K and her even geekier husband Stef started bending my ear. Try World of Warcraft, they said. It's like virtual-reality Dungeons & Dragons, they said. You'll love it, they said.
And I explained that, yes, precisely the reason that I was never going to try it was that I knew all of these things, and that I had read reports of Asian teenagers dying – yes, actually dropping dead – in internet cafes after playing WoW for days on end and forgetting to eat, and that I had moved on from the days of being a sebaceously challenged teenager rolling 18-sided dice, and that, dammit, I knew exactly how much I'd like it and that was the very reason I never tried crack cocaine.
So, here I am, at 3.30am on a working day, red-eyed from bashing up trolls. And, I might add with a twinge of shame, 33 years old. In my other life, I'm a three-foot gnome with a ludicrous blue moustache, a waddling gait that reminds my friends of Super Mario, and a talent for eviscerating giant spiders.
The basic premise of WoW will be familiar to anyone who has read Tolkien or played Dungeons & Dragons. It immerses the player in a fully populated 3-D fantasy world of magic, potions, elves, dwarves, warriors, druids and what have you.
Your character arrives in the world in his stockinged feet armed, if he or she is lucky, with a pointed stick. Hours of bashing – sorry, vanquishing – monsters and completing quests earn experience points and goodies that make you tougher, let you learn new skills, and set you on the path to geek godhood.
What makes the game so addictive is that – in addition to providing a staggeringly enormous and gorgeously realised world to explore – it also provides a community. Every player-character in the world of the game is online in real time, and those with different strengths and weaknesses benefit from teaming up.
They share quests, chatter constantly over the message system, swap tips and jokes, trade items. Altruism is frequent. Often, I've found myself unexpectedly outnumbered by baddies and a passing player of higher level has stepped in to save my bacon. "Thanks!" squeaks my feeble gnome. "NP [No problem]. Enjoy the game," replies my saviour before galloping off to kill something really scary.
The game even has a complex virtual economy. Characters trade covetable items through auction houses in the game's big cities such as Ironforge and Stormwind, and the money you accumulate has a real-world value to players who want to get ahead. "Gold farms" in Third World countries employ people to play the game for hours on end, accumulating treasure which is then sold for hard currency to cash-rich, time-poor Western players.
That may sound absurd, but a year or two back a Chinese man was murdered in the real world over the theft of virtual property in WoW.
The overlap of real and virtual worlds is seldom that malign. But it can be disconcerting. One night recently, having cried off evening drinks with K and Stef on the grounds of feeling flu-ey and rotten, I logged on to WoW. Seconds later, the message window flashed up; a person-to-person message called a "whisper". It was from Stef: "So, tucked up in bed with our Ovaltine then, are we?" Busted.
But that was before Sam Leith joined the monster-killing millions in the online game World of Warcraft
So my gnome rogue, hoping to level up, is grinding his way through some leprous gnome exiles, picking the odd pocket for coppers, and vaguely searching for a dwarf, when he spots an intriguing doorway.
So, here I am, at 3.30am on a working day, red-eyed from bashing up trolls. And, I might add with a twinge of shame, 33 years old
He stealths, and starts waddling down the gently sloping stone corridor. A little way ahead, I can see where the passageway makes a right turn. Then this funny little mob shows up, then adds, and barely do I know I'm in combat before I'm toast. Didn't even get a Sinister Strike in.
A fast-moving L30 night-elf hunter breezes past my corpse, then stops, and turns round. He notices the dead gnome is level 7. "Dude," he tells my corpse. "This is a lvl 25 instance!" "I think I have realised my mistake," I tell him, as I zap back to the graveyard and prepare to go and retrieve my corpse.
If that sounds like gibberish to you, I'm in sympathy. Two weeks ago, I would have read the above anecdote and been defeated by what "grinding", "mobs", "adds", "Sinister Strike" and "instance" meant, still less been able to understand how you use "stealth" as a verb and why gnome exiles have leprosy and why you might be looking for a dwarf.
Yet at the last count there were 7.5 million people worldwide who would know just what I was talking about – and would giggle at the image of a half-witted newbie inadvertently picking a fight with an elite monster and duly getting squished.
This is World Of Warcraft – the world's most popular MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) – and it is, God help me, now a substantial portion of what used to pass for my life.
It started innocuously enough. My geeky friend K and her even geekier husband Stef started bending my ear. Try World of Warcraft, they said. It's like virtual-reality Dungeons & Dragons, they said. You'll love it, they said.
And I explained that, yes, precisely the reason that I was never going to try it was that I knew all of these things, and that I had read reports of Asian teenagers dying – yes, actually dropping dead – in internet cafes after playing WoW for days on end and forgetting to eat, and that I had moved on from the days of being a sebaceously challenged teenager rolling 18-sided dice, and that, dammit, I knew exactly how much I'd like it and that was the very reason I never tried crack cocaine.
So, here I am, at 3.30am on a working day, red-eyed from bashing up trolls. And, I might add with a twinge of shame, 33 years old. In my other life, I'm a three-foot gnome with a ludicrous blue moustache, a waddling gait that reminds my friends of Super Mario, and a talent for eviscerating giant spiders.
The basic premise of WoW will be familiar to anyone who has read Tolkien or played Dungeons & Dragons. It immerses the player in a fully populated 3-D fantasy world of magic, potions, elves, dwarves, warriors, druids and what have you.
Your character arrives in the world in his stockinged feet armed, if he or she is lucky, with a pointed stick. Hours of bashing – sorry, vanquishing – monsters and completing quests earn experience points and goodies that make you tougher, let you learn new skills, and set you on the path to geek godhood.
What makes the game so addictive is that – in addition to providing a staggeringly enormous and gorgeously realised world to explore – it also provides a community. Every player-character in the world of the game is online in real time, and those with different strengths and weaknesses benefit from teaming up.
They share quests, chatter constantly over the message system, swap tips and jokes, trade items. Altruism is frequent. Often, I've found myself unexpectedly outnumbered by baddies and a passing player of higher level has stepped in to save my bacon. "Thanks!" squeaks my feeble gnome. "NP [No problem]. Enjoy the game," replies my saviour before galloping off to kill something really scary.
The game even has a complex virtual economy. Characters trade covetable items through auction houses in the game's big cities such as Ironforge and Stormwind, and the money you accumulate has a real-world value to players who want to get ahead. "Gold farms" in Third World countries employ people to play the game for hours on end, accumulating treasure which is then sold for hard currency to cash-rich, time-poor Western players.
That may sound absurd, but a year or two back a Chinese man was murdered in the real world over the theft of virtual property in WoW.
The overlap of real and virtual worlds is seldom that malign. But it can be disconcerting. One night recently, having cried off evening drinks with K and Stef on the grounds of feeling flu-ey and rotten, I logged on to WoW. Seconds later, the message window flashed up; a person-to-person message called a "whisper". It was from Stef: "So, tucked up in bed with our Ovaltine then, are we?" Busted.
Comments