This post isn’t about WoW.

My life basically consists of playing WoW, going to work, and hanging out on weekends. Except, on weekends where I don’t see much of Carly due to her own commitments, I tend to also do a lot of WoW playing on those occasions.

Seriously, I do play a lot of WoW, and I think I would say that I am highly interested in WoW, but not quite to the point of addiction. I play it mainly because I’ve finished all my exams, forever, and now I’m just being rebellious and doing ‘irresponsible’ things in my spare time for a change of pace from the work-study-work-study-work … et cetera rigmorole that has been my life for the last three or four years.

So last night I stayed up until about 4AM playing WoW; though that’s because I was helping others. You see, in WoW, unlike other online games, there is more of a real sense of community and so much more “niceness” between players. Unlike other, more openly competitive games, where the mixture of high-speed violence and young teens makes for a complete lack of intelligent conversation at any point during the game. At best, it’s people trashtalking. At worst, it’s people trashtalking with added racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, and grossly inappropriate sexual content.

In WoW, players help each other because that’s what the game environment encourages people to do. Through the length of the game experience, the co-operative nature of many of the quests, raids and dungeons, and the fact that, like real life, players of different skill-sets rely on each other in order to get ahead, the community behind WoW is generally a lot more friendly than the highly-strung, trigger-finger aggro children that hang out playing shooters.

That’s not to say that all shooter-players are morons (I still play occassionaly, and I’m definitely not :D) or that all WoW players are saints (sometimes high-level characters will draw high-level enemies onto low-level characters just for laughs), but generally speaking the communities are vastly in contrast to one another in terms of their attitudes towards others playing the same game.

So if you’re sick of being called a fucking dickhead bitch slut hacker poof in CS over the microphone by a 13-year-old boy whose voice hasn’t dropped and can count the number of pubes he has on one hand, and would like to see some nice things coming from the players you game with, then give WoW a try, and see if I’m wrong.