Broken!

"The Boy" had the opportunity to watch me play WoW the other day. He couldn't stop shaking his head in abject disapproval. Not of my new hobby. The Boy disapproves of the features that Blizzard has built into World of Warcraft over the many revisions that have occurred since he last played.

"It's totally broken."

I was unfamiliar with the phrase. The best example he could come up with came from Magic:The Gathering, a game I had passing familiarity with back when he was buying up cards with his allowance over a decade ago. I played a few games with him, enough to gain a vague notion of how gameplay worked. Occasionally, there would be a card released that proved to be substantially too powerful. Its powers "broke" the game and a gentleman's agreement would be made not to play with those cards.

The Boy thought that Blizzard's new features made the whole Wow experience broken. (I *think* I'm using that lingo correctly.) Except when I probed deeper, every single feature that the Boy could point out as being broken, well, he had ways of getting those features back in the day. He had to use third party plugins and external websites and probably some techniques that violated his EULA but nothing he could find was substantially er, to use his word "broken" from my perspective once we looked at it.

But having all those features built into the game "nerfed" it - or so his claim became. ("Nerf" was a word I knew and should be self-evident. Def: To make something squishy soft with no hard edges while cutting out any real interest or integrity, as in "The Twilight series totally nerfs the concept of vampires.") I countered that having all that stuff built in to the game contributes to a more immersive sense of game play. He always had a browser open and had to flip in and out of the game. At least that was my response.

I surely find it MUCH easier to play WoW this time around. And to some degree, that's fun. What's your experience?

More Judgment!

More judgment from the younguns, this time from the high school student that DW (Dear Wife) tutors. He was initially interested that we had given each other World of Warcraft for Christmas. It seemed kind of novel. So he asked the DW what level her character was. I don't know what level she was at that point, 24 I think. The kid guffawed. "Only 24?" Then he asked what level my character was. DW replied that mine was about the same. His derisive laughter was even louder. The student knows that I am a computer tech by profession and must assume that we all are convention-going, pointy-ear-wearing nerds. DW snapped defensively "He's got a full-time job, you know."

So some folks think it's crazy (if not actually mentally sick) for grown ups to play video games. If you didn't think so then I'd direct you to some of the backlash about that woman from Texas who cyber-stalked a teenaged boy from Toronto using WOW as the means. The general pronouncement from the televised media was that any grown up who played video games should be locked up, though I suspect you'd rarely hear someone on television saying anything good about something done on a computer. Deadly rivals, you know.

And then other folks think we're crazy because we're not already level 80's with epic mounts. I talked to a guy at work who was very interested that DW and I were playing. He's been trying to interest his wife in World of Warcraft but absolutely everyone he knows who plays WOW is nearly addicted to it. There don't seem to be many boring middle class middle aged couples who log a few hours a week. The examples of WOW players we knew at work definitely fit into the "every waking second" mode of engagement. My friend's wife, sanely, wasn't interested in that kind of involvement.

About 15 years ago, actually even longer, a friend of mine, Amy, got a brand new computer as part of a grant. Bundled with it was a copy of Myst, arguably the coolest game at the time. I had played it and thought it was quite fun but Amy didn't think she'd even bother to load it. Why? Because its tag line was "It will become your world." And Amy was pretty happy with the world she already had.

Is it so crazy to just want to play a little bit, now and then?

(By the way, my night-elf hunter just made level 29 tonight.)

"Drinker!"

Silly epithet we've developed, the DW (dear wife) and I. Whenever we loot a creature that seems to have only the barest of pocket change, we figure the guy must have been a drinker, spending his money on booze instead of on shiny goods for us to pry off his cold, dead corpse. Or on weapons that, perhaps could have left US on a long chilly corpse run.

WOW is a much different game than when I played it even a couple years ago. A brief list: the utter drudgery of running and running and running has been greatly alleviated by giving mounts at level 20 AND by making them so affordable. The DW and I used to call the game "Running through the Forest" and honestly, that's what it mostly felt like we were doing.

The whole phasing of different parts of the world is nice. It makes the whole milieu feel a bit more believable, like something that actually happened as a result of the player's actions.

And I can't underestimate how much different it is trying to play according to my wife's more social mode of play than by my reclusive style. We usually play together and tonight we joined a guild. I must mention that the whole guild thing is WAY outside of my comfort zone. Time will tell.

No Judgement Here

Yesterday my night-elf-of-choice and I trekked over to the mall to make a stop at the Apple Store. It's easy enough to find since it's the BRIGHTEST store in the whole place. It attracts moths from other galaxies.

We were greeted by some youth whose hair had been cut with a gardening implement and who wore a significant chunk of someone's chandelier in the lobes of his ears. I told him that I needed a mini-DVI-to-VGA adapter. Blank look. I pointed to the laptop. (We actually brought the laptop in with us to insure that we got the correct adapter.) "We want to hook this laptop up to a larger monitor for when we play Worlds of Warcraft."

A light went on behind his eyes, perhaps as if a light bulb from the ear-chandelier rattled into its socket.

"My Dad plays that game. He's got like two level 80 characters, so you're not going to get any judgment here."

N00bs and Christmas Memories of Ironforge

Some grumbling reached my ears about yesterday's post especially in my reference to all the "n00bs" in the beginning Night Elf area. These comments noted that if The Loving Wife (TLW) and I had just begun playing WOW on Christmas that we too would qualify as n00bs. Actually, both TLW and I have played previously. Our son got WOW the year it came out and when he would come home for Christmas he'd bring his computer with him. During those precious yuletime weeks as well as during the summer, TLW and I became quite enamored with the game. My main was a Night Elf Druid named Ydrassil and TLW's main was a tough Human fighter named Kerata, in case you're curious. The son has graduated, gotten married and apparently outgrown WOW. I mentioned to TLW early this December how much I missed the decorations of Ironforge. She laughed and then, reluctantly agreed that she too missed the special holiday quests.

I'm not specifically talking about the strings of old-fashioned xmas tree lights - In fact, they seem chillingly out of place in the undead areas for some reason, a token of grim pathos. The Night Elf Mohawk was amusing but... dumb. And totally corrosive to role-playing.

So we decided to start TWO accounts, so that we could play simultaneously. Our playing styles are remarkably different. I confess I hardly played WOW like it was a MMORPG at all, just a really extensive stand-alone game. I rarely joined parties, never did instances. While TLW was a member of an active raiding guild. She even used those weirdo head phones to chat with the parties she was teaming up with.

The other remarkable advantage to playing with a partner is that it doesn't take weeks to level up. We've been playing for a week now and already we both have mounts.

What's With The Title?

There's a quest, in Dark Shore I think, where the adventurer must gather 8 corrupted brain stems from some creature or another. My wife and I were playing, WOW of course, her on the laptop, me on the G5 tower and when I looted one of these monsters, I shouted out "I've got a corrupted brain stem." The Loving Wife (TLW) quipped "I don't think you should be advertising that."

And it struck me as profound in a quirky, weird way. I suspect I *do* have a corrupted brain stem. TLW does too on some level. One symptom is that we gave each other a subscription to WOW for Christmas this year. That's not too strange in itself. There were probably thousands of such gifts this year if the number of n00bs in Teldrassil were any indication. What's strange is that TLW and I are in our mid-40's and we are just discovering our inner geek natures. We created this blog as a record of this self-discovery.