A look back at World of Warcraft

I was struggling a little bit to find a suitable topic to talk about mid-week. No new significant life events have occurred since last post and there's no real new developments in my personality re-evaluation period. So I guess it's time to hit up a subject which I wanted to write about for a long time now. It has to do with World of Warcraft, my involvement and investment in the game, the lessons learned and my current assessment of the future of MMORPG's.

For the past 12 years or so, I've been an avid computer gamer (if you count console games, you could go back to the mid-80's) just like most other Gen-Y nerdy types. I've had a number of obsessions, none of which I invested more time into than World of Warcraft. From October, 2004 until around August, 2008 I spent almost every single day playing the game in some capacity. I did take some significant breaks -- mostly because other games (DotA) were higher on the priority scale. Yet somehow I managed to pull away without any real ill effect, went back for a couple weeks during Xmas vacation in 2008, then put it away for good.

My motivation, or style of play in WoW was fairly unorthodox. I would start a character, then play him/her until my progress slowed and another class caught my interest. The process continued like that probably 50 times or more. Eventually, I was able to play new characters so efficient that I would reach higher levels before boredom set in, and was finally able to hit Level 60 for the first time in Winter 2006 (more than 2 years after I began playing!) Unlike most others, I didn't play the game as an escape from reality at all. I played because it was a whole lot of fun; a game which I had envisioned since I was a youngster and I was finally living the dream! That, and my temperament allowed me to eat up just about every aspect, from the world geography to the combat math to advanced strategies in efficiency. For me, the game was work, and work is fun. Problem was, it wasn't really work and I wasn't earning a paycheck and squandering away thousands of hours in the prime of my life.

All that said, I'm not sour at all about playing WoW. As I will readily admit, it was definitely an addiction that sucked a lot of my life away. But if it wasn't WoW, it would have been something else. So I'm somewhat relieved it was only WoW and it's completely out of my system now. I still think WoW is a great game. In fact, it's the best game ever created. A fully-functional virtual world, in my eyes, is one of the most significant developments that man has created. We've only seen the beginning, and I'm glad to have been a pioneer in the earliest days of this technology. And I also learned a lot with it as well. Some have to do with logistics and tactics, but also how to lead a group of other virtual "beings" into battle and understand individual elements of economies and such. So maybe in the future I'll be one of these old, creaky sages that everyone comes to for wisdom and guidance in WoW 2050 or something. Who knows.

After quitting WoW almost 2 years ago now, I made a semi-retirement from computer gaming. While LoL is now the "hot stuff", I don't have a drive to play nearly as much as I had with WoW. And I'm happy because of this. I felt that with WoW, I needed play every day to keep my edge. If I wasn't completely up-to-date with the latest strategies, I would be completely lost and wouldn't know what to do. Games like LoL (and even more with Scrabble, Chess and even Magic) require much less constant play to be competent or just have fun playing. With WoW, certain tactics, equipment and alliances were obsolete within a couple months or less.

2004-08 will likely go down in history as my WoW years, although they may more accurately be called my autopilot years (even though the true span was something more like 1991-2008). I've talked about autopilot to great degree in my previous blogs and still find it somewhat appalling that I didn't put in the effort to get to the "next level" in WoW. Well, I sorta did. 5-boxing was a nice little challenge. And it was even more euphoric and immersive than anything else I had experienced. Playing with 5 computers at once was absolutely crazy, and something I will always remember. Unfortunately I turned it into a very anti-social endeavor, and practically shied away from other human contact for weeks at a time.