Tron: Legacy and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Escape Reality

Tron: Legacy and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm are two of the biggest names you may see in the 2010 holiday season. These two entertainment giants have one theme in common, they both hinge on the concept of escapism, and how this is becoming a norm in today's society.

Jeff Bridges reprises his role in the movie, Tron: Legacy, 28 years after Tron debuted in (1982). To get some idea of how long ago that was, I wasn't even born yet. Nevertheless, the idea behind the movie, Tron, is not very far from today's video games. Microsoft's XBOX 360's latest video game device, is called the Kinect. It essentially captures your image, likeness, and movements, and inserts you - the player - into the video games. The movie, Tron (1982), was about a hacker and arcade owner, played by Jeff Bridges, who is captured digitally in a data stream and transferred into a 3-D world in cyberspace.

World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), was first released in November 2004, and since has had three expansions to add continuous gameplay and additional storylines. In World of Warcraft, a new user must create a character and add details to personalize the features of your character. And humans are a playable race in World of Warcraft, which is a 3-D world, stored on servers owned by Blizzard, and accessible via cyberspace. Seeing any correllations, yet?

According to Wikipedia.org, there are currently 12 million subscribers of World of Warcraft, as of October 2010. This also happens to hold the Guinness World Record for the most popular MMORPG of all time, and estimated to have 62% of the MMORPG market share.

While the Tron movies tell the tale of humans being sucked into a world of 3-D cyberspace and having to take on computer programs in gladitorial challenges, World of Warcraft users are comprised of humans choosing to enter into a 3-D world and take on quests, as well as fighting large monsters, which are essentially computer programs. And did I mention that World of Warcraft subscribers pay $15 a month to escape reality and fight computer-driven mosters and embark on other-worldy quests? Sounds eerily familiar to the Tron movies - except for the fact that in Tron, the humans are held there against their will and must fight to regain their freedom to come back to reality. Back to our non-fictional present day, we find people who are willing to pay $15 a month to log into a 3-D world to willingly occupy our minds with unending fictional storylines. Not only are people paying to have their "reality freedom" taken away from them, but they are addicted to this form of escapism.

A Classic Story of an Attempt to Escape Reality
In the Book of Jonah, God calls Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh and to preach against it, because of its wickedness. However, Jonah attempted to flee by boat in the wrong direction, to a town of his choosing. As the story goes, a storm came and the crew believed that Jonah was the problem. So they threw him overboard, where he was swallowed by a huge fish. After 3 days and nights in the fish, Jonah prayed to God for help and turned back to God, asking for forgiveness from his behavior of trying to escape reality.

The story of Jonah rings true to the fact that many people lives dull, boring lives. They want action, adventure, and excitement to be part of mundane lives of normalcy. Just remember that we were created to have fulfilling lives, worshiping the God that created us, and it doesn't have to be boring.

Release Dates:
Tron: Legacy was released to was released on December 17, 2010 at your local movie theater. Rated PG.
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm was released on December 7, 2010, at a suggested retail price of $39.99.

Sources:
World of Warcraft Official Website
Tron (1982). IMDB.
Tron: Legacy (2010). IMDB.
World of Warcraft. Wikipedia.