World of Warcraft

Since a couple of weeks I’ve been trying to dig my good friend Gyou out of his self-inflicted social isolation, brought on by the online RPG World of Warcraft. I do this by calling him on friday night, right before I leave Kung Fu, telling him that I’ll be over for an evening of junkfood, Top Gear and talking. He then proceeds to shout threats of violence at me, and I hang up the phone. Ten minutes later, I ring his doorbell. He doesn’t open. Nor does he answer his phone. I ring his doorbell again, this time continuously until he disconnects the doorbell, at which time I know he’s in the hallway leading to the front door, so I talk at him through the door. He then tells me that I don’t understand him, and don’t realise how he needs to reach 54th level, or how he’s the saviour of Teldrassil, or whatever and then he opens the door and we have a cool evening together. :)

So while we were talking this friday, he was telling me a bit about World of Warcraft. Now, I have traditionally disliked online RPGs because they’re not really RPGs. They’re more like hack-and-slash games that you can play online. The stories are usually appalling, the graphics even more so, and, well, the quality was not what I wanted them to be. I’ve long since come to accept that they’ll never really be an RPG since the setting and circumstances of play simply don’t lend themselves for it. True roleplaying is an intimate thing, and with 1.5 million others running around, intimacy is few and far between. So, I promised myself that I would give it a shot when the graphics and gameplay would be better than it had been.

World of Warcraft is beautiful. It’s also set in the familiar world of…*gasp*…Warcraft. On monday, while I had the day off because of some obscure national holiday, I installed the game and continued to play for several hours. I was mightily entertained. I might actually like this game. :)