posted on Thursday, October 06, 2005 8:31 AM
by
Endie
Stick that Warcraft spike into my vein
Last night, I installed World of Warcraft which - for those of you just back from an extended stay in Amish country - is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO), where thousands of players log in and interact with the environment and each other in a single gamespace. Not counting weird-ass, Korean clamjamphries (which apparently count subscribers using some hideous non-decimal number systems hinted at in the Miskatonic University's copy of the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul al-Hazred himself) the previous front-runner in this genre had about 400,000 users. World of Warcraft has, apparently, just hit four million accounts over the first year or so. This is partially due to its innovative gameplay, partly its immersive environment, but mainly because it is addictive like a one dollar mixed-bag of crack-cocaine, cigarettes and milk chocolate hob-nobs).
Those who read blogs by previous Warcraft inductees will know that the story arc has a certain fixed trajectory: I fall in love with the game, blog about little else, drive all but a tiny and hardy group of readers into exile, gradually grow dissillusioned and finally quit, having invested about the same amount of time in it that one would usually get a degree for in return. Interestingly, G*ry's ceroc blog has reached somewhere around step three right now...
I would say that I'll try not to follow this pattern, but deep down, I know it is my destiny. So the foregoing paragraph was provided, gentle reader, as a roadmap for our relationship.
Last night was a typical MMO install. Four discs, half an hour, creation of an account, eager anticipation and... "a two hundred megabyte fricking patch to download?!?" Start the download and play something else for an hour. Then five levels of advancement in a couple of hours - the usual "get 'em hooked" quick return that Raph Koster and others mockingly give us glimpses of. The missions are pleasant-looking and surprisingly enjoyable spins on the usual: kill six of these, gather ten of those, deliver x to y. But they are well done, and in any case I am sure that by level fifteen the more comlpex missions will kick in: ones where you have to build a one-term lesson-plan suitable for introducing mixed-ability 14-years-olds to the magic of philosophy, or use what you have learned in-game to cast fireballs in the real world. In any case, I was asleep by 2.30am, which is a pretty strong piece of self-control, in MMO terms.