World of WarCraft. A subscription
based massive multiplayer online role playing game released by Blizzard in November
2004. It is currently the largest of its kind in the world with over five million subscribers world wide (over one million in the United States). After level 60, there is very little you can accomplish unless you schedule time to play daily. Many have fallen into the
trap of playing this game, and needing to get that next piece of “
1337” gear to impress “n00bs” in Ironforge.
In order to become powerful enough to dominate everyone in PvP combat without trying, you need to collect the most powerful raiding armor sets. This usually requires large guilds composed of mostly
high school and
college students/dropouts or
fat unemployed people in their 40’s cursing and complaining and making
gay references over Ventrilo or Teamspeak. There is often a point system, and a lot of
drama involved in gaining gear. These guilds are rarely managed by anyone with any
real marketable management skill.
Long term exposure to this game has hazardous side effects to ones life. Before you know it, your friend base starts shrinking. Your wife/
girlfriend leaves. You become bitter, and play the game even more to escape while popping down your Prozac with lukewarm Mountain Dew. You had four jobs with periods of unemployment in the past year, and you live in your parents basement while posting up generalized, uncited, bias, unproven generalized and opinionated rants on some message board bitching about how something is out of balance. The few friends you have left (who all also play WoW) at your community
college (which you have been in for 6 years only to stay on your
parents insurance plan) use terms like DPS in real life conversations.
Most can greatly improve their life situation by quitting the game. It’s not so much of what the game does, but rather what it prevents you from doing while playing. Once liberated from WoW, those extra 30-120 hours a week can be put to productive use.
Yeah, Joe used to be the star quarterback. He also had a
hot girlfriend, and a academic scholarship to Harvard. Now, he is in his
mid 20’s still living at home always playing WoW. Almost never hear from him anymore.
