I don't play WoW, I leave that to people like Greg who can't get enough, Joi Ito who uses it as a social networking exercise, and Tom Coates, who recently reached the pinnacle of WoW experience - achieving Level 60. Tom has written an extraordinarily evocative post about his relationship with the game now that he has ascended into WoW heaven which offers some explanation as to why I don't partake in this particular kind of activity:
I honestly don't know how I feel about the whole thing. It was - frankly - sort of an anti-climax. Nothing happened, I just remained being level sixty. There was no sense of a threshold being reached. My character - the same character I've been playing on and off since November - was just slightly more powerful than he was before. And a whole range of long extended new quests wandered off before him. There would be no new spells, no new pets, no real development - except in sets of armour and property. Each quest, each raid will now be longer and more involved than they were before - a dungeon taking two or three evenings to explore properly and requiring a group of people to play with that I've struggled to collect along the way. The whole game now feels very laborious and slow - the simple pleasures of earlier in the game, where you were picking up new abilities and developing quickly have just disappeared, to be replaced with something more drudgelike, robotic and ... as the people in game describe it ... grinding.
Even more so:
while I feel no massive compromise to my life is occurring now, while my relationship with the game is merely grudging at the moment, I can imagine coming to hate the game and yet still wanting to play it. Is that an extraordinary statement? Is that a piece of self-insight there, or is it something about the game? I can't tell where the fault lies if there is a fault?
An interesting sentiment the same week as a clinical psychologist suggested that 40% of WoW players are addicted.
Some deep thoughts. Via Alice.
