Not enough rage

(apparently this was saved as a draft, from june!)

Okay, okay. I play World of Warcraft. It's not that bad, right? Millions of people do it! It started about month and a half ago, when one of my friends brought it up in conversation. Nothing explicit, just some offhand comment about WoW. Sometime that week I went to Best Buy and saw that the 14 day trial disk was going for 2 bucks. Hey, i thought, I have 2 bucks, I like to slay shit, let's do this. It took around 2 and a half hours, split over two evenings to install the game. At this point I had a life, I probably went to a bar, saw some friends, maybe caught some Zs, who knows what I did during those two evenings before I was ushered into the Horde.

My first character was... I forgot, but it was a goblin rouge. I played for half an hour and then and went to do something else. The same friend that I mentioned earlier said, "Hey go to Earthern Ring" so I did because I didn't want to quest all lonely and sad. Since you have to pay to move your character from server to server I opted to make a new character. This time I decided on playing as an orc warrior. Yes, an orc warrior, the cannon fodder of every other fantasy world ever created. The Rodney Dangerfield of fantasy worlds, they get no respect. Thus Irajog appeared on the land. I logged on and started stabbing things, mostly pigs. At this point my friend showed up ingame, dude was riding on a skeleton horse, that was on fire. So we went of to kill things and dude would just look at something and it would die a painful writhing death. Seriously, dude has a half mile radius of destruction around him. Eventually dude left and I went back to wandering around and it was then that I realized the scope of the game.

At this point I got lost and looked at the map and kept zooming out until I could see all the various lands, but the scale of the game didn't seem that impressive until I walked into the Orgrimmar, one of the cities in the game. As I approached Ogrimmar it loomed over me it like a stone tsunami. As I walked into the city some epic music that would be a perfect fit for a Conan movie came on. All the towns, caves, and various buildings that I had visited earlier in the game paled in comparison to this place. It was like if I was some hillbilly coming to the big city, well, a hillbilly with a big axe, fangs, and green skin; I immediately got lost. So there I was, with not idea where to go, with all these buttons on my HUD, totally overwhelmed; various.... things congregated in loose groups, chat windows popping up above their head, but too far to read; a mammoth thundered down a path; several people watched a duel that involved 4th of July level pyrotechnics; a motorcycle driven by a zombie drove by me, I mean my character, yeah.

I'm not sure what it is about WoW, but it's there. Maybe it's the loot. My mom asked me why I kept killing things, "Because I need to get the stuff they drop." "Drop?" "Yeah, when monsters die they drop items, weapons, some drop money." "Why do you want it?" "So I can sell or use that stuff to buy better gear. That way I can kill bigger monsters that drop better stuff." Perhaps it's the leveling up. As you gain more experience you can unlock new abilities that can help you obliterate whatever stands in your way. Sometimes I think it's the camaraderie that comes with playing the game. A few weeks ago I was wandering around killing raptors in the Barrens, a game zone when some random person asked if I wanted to get in on a quest and I said sure. So around 8 people met up at a designated place and walked into a cave where we killed a million things. Eventually we got to the end of the cave and we had to fight a gargantuan dragon thing that looked like King Gidrah, multiple heads, two tails, breathing fire and stomping on people. It was badass. It could be just the sheer ridiculousness of it all: a monster, well what else would you call an undead warlock, tells you to go kill a monster in order to harvest its organs and to bring said organs back in order to receive a fabulous prize.