Why World of Warcraft Worries Me

I'll start this off by saying I've never played a minute of the new incarnation of World of Warcraft, a game I'll refer to in this post as WoW. I did play an entirely different, similar in-name-only version called Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, which had some cutting edge graphics for 1994.

So anyway, I'm afraid of WoW because I just know I'd get hooked. It would be all over for me. But I'm not hooked, and I like to keep it that way. I view it the same view I view heroin. I hate the hell outta needles, and I would essentially have to be a heroin addict already to perform the necessary ritual.

I give up enough of my time in single-player RPGs; I tend to bask in the side quests and I rarely ever finish them, even after investing something like 80 hours on them. Frankly, the funnest part of any RPG is the first ten hours where you're just stumbling onto new weapons and items and your experience level just goes up more quickly.

Plus, the fact that I'm a complete idiot when it comes to finding things. It took me an hour to find the sword in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and that was a small village area. I'm always the victim of staring the puzzle right in the face and deciding to go through the castle, room by room, until it's two hours later and I just google the damn thing.

I suppose if I was a hermit, WoW would be an okay game, but I can't pull any gaming all-nighters anymore either. I can kill 5,000 ogres like the next guy to rise 2 levels; I can get a little OCD about finishing a game even though I don't have any kind of time limit on it. But just the idea makes me think I'd develop the full-blown carpal tunnel I should already have by now. Where is that dastardly carpal tunnel anyway?

It's crazy too that in China, companies have slaves farming virtual gold to sell to people for real money. All I really know about WoW I get from that one South Park episode, but I hear it's pretty true. Every once in awhile, you hear the story of how somebody lost their job to WoW or somebody got married on WoW, and I suppose it is easy for some people to get lost in another world.

One year around Christmas, I just said screw it and joined the Sims Online, but I cancelled my subscription after 2 days because I kinda realized that everybody had a better house than me, the jobs I was getting were boring, and people didn't like it when I would get bored, break into their houses, and start taking swings at their houseguests. But I'm the type of guy who likes to play "Let's have a 6-star police pursuit" on Grand Theft Auto. Maybe I'm just a jerk.

Anyway, remember when movies of the 90s were all about virtual reality, and their vision of the future would be virtual reality games? Well, commercial virtual reality kinda dried up and online realities like WoW and Second Life got really popular. These interfaces kinda swallowed everything virtual reality had going for it, minus a clunky ass helmet.

In a way, the online community thing is better than virtual reality because the characters make up the story, not the pre-programmed virtual reality interface, plus the virtual reality designers never even dreamt up a scenario where Mr. T or Ozzy would be involved. Plus it's fun to gang up on a band of bloodthirsty orcs in your Cheeto-dust-covered boxers.

It all sounds so very fun... and life-wasting.