I can appreciate fully the fact that most people who play
World of Warcraft are seen as being nerds. But first, let us take a look at what a nerd is:
1. a stupid, irritating, ineffectual, or unattractive person.
2. an intelligent but single-minded person obsessed with a nonsocial hobby or pursuit: a computer nerd.
1. A foolish, inept, or unattractive person.
2. A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept.
Those are of course both taken from my one-stop shop for all dictionary definitions on the 'net; the most esteemed and highly accessible
www.dictionary.reference.com (although of course it can be a lot more easily reached by leaving out the '.reference' part).
There, see? I have not even
begun talking about
WoW directly, and already I am referencing websites. *sigh* There really is no hope for me. I even say
'LOL' in the course of everyday conversation.
Alright, let's get down to basics: I do not go out very often. For me, grounding would be no punishment. In fact, a punishment for me would be being
forced to go out, but there you are.
However, I do not consider myself 'socially inept', and neither do many of my friends. I have a circle of friends in Pembrokeshire College. I also have one or two enemies, but then that is the way of things.
In fact, I have a set of social skills that could be considered from many angles to be quite replete:
- I am very friendly.
- I smile a lot, if the maintenance of a facial expression counts.
- I can carry a conversation on just about anything. This is principally because of how I have an opinion on absolutely every topic, even if I do not necessarily know anything about it.
- I am generally very accepting and tolerant of other people's quirks, principally because I am extremely quirky myself.
- I like to help people whenever I possibly can without impinging on moral codes.
- I can listen very well. This is actually a lot harder to do than most might think: mostly people just use the time that other people are speaking to come up with whatever it is they are going to say next.
- I can even make a list of why I am nice.
- I can make reasonably (but not amazingly) risible jokes, like how you've probably completely failed to notice how I have missed out point 5 (which, in case you were wondering, was a point telling you about how I can miss out points in a list without anyone noticing, but then of course you never read it).
- As you have no doubt just realised by looking back up the page, I am also an exceptionally good liar (I study Drama), which is actually a vital weapon in any socialite's armoury. ('Does my bum look big in these jeans?' 'Uh...')
In fact, the only thing I can say is missing from my list of social skills is the ability to go out. If you take me to a social gathering of just about any kind, then you will probably find that I am quite pleasant, not to mention anything
but stupid or ineffectual... except where there are large collections of thuggish people.
Do not get me wrong. Most of the people where I live (Haverfordwest, yes I gave away where I live, OMG you're gonna rape me argh argh argh) probably as pleasant as me, if not more so, but they have a sense of humour and an interest in 'baser' topics which, frankly, makes me want to turn and run.
Yes, I am a wimp. I admit it quite freely. If you asked me whether I would rather have my wallet stolen or get punched in the face, you wouldn't receive any answer because I'd already be disappearing into the distance. True, I am perhaps not quite as fleet of foot as I wish I was (
Dawn of War and the Eldar forever!), but fear gives you wings -
not Red Bull, no matter how funny the latest
Looking For Group webcomic may be.
Anyway, I've been doding the topic for long enough now. Back to
World of Warcraft. I have just bought
The Burning Crusade expansion pack, and even as I type this it is installing. Or, more correctly, it is downloading
all the patches released since
TBC was first released itself, which takes
infinitely longer than actually installing the game and the expansion pack put together. I could make a new character and get it to Level 70 in the time it takes for all the patches to download, but that's beside the point.
What is it that endears
WoW to me so? Let me count the ways...
- The Market System
Such a highly-developed market system is seldom seen in a game. Of course the fact that WoW is an Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game and that people are perpetually contributing to it means that it will therefore be intrinsically superior to that of any fixed market system of a non-MMORPG, it is still a superior simulation of the commercial process (except without the corruption, although the fee the Auctioneers take seems oddly like a backhand...).
In fact it is exactly this ever-changing aspect of WoW's market system that makes it so amazingly interesting. There are ever so many items that can be discovered, that can be bought, and, in the finest tradition of all MMORPGs, can be made. In this way, there is a never-ending supply of things to be bought, sold and bargained, and one can never have all the best equipment - unlike in any non-MMORPG, where it is always depressingly easy to acquire all the best gear after which dispensing with the ranks upon ranks of enemies becomes a cinch.
I have always absolutely loved any game with a complex market system. I don't mean to sound overly girly, but there's something inexplicably fun about using the Ctrl + click function which allows you to see how your character would look wearing/wielding a certain item - the dressing room, as t'were.
As a final note on the market system, even when I have bought all that can be bought with the money I have at my immediate disposal, even when I see that all my fellow players are vastly richer than I am, I can always comfort myself by looking at the Auction House lists and seeing what exorbitant prices people will pay for items which could probably be bought for a vastly reduced price a few days later. Such rubes, I swear...
- The Combat System
Many people say that WoW's combat system is extremely mundane, for the understandable reason that it operates almost entirely on the simple 'point and click' function which has become so popular throughout the Role-Playing Game-genre. However, I feel this complaint is invalid because of all the different spells that can be accumulated by a character as they progress through the levels.
Until WoW programmers can think up a way to make it so that the macros they have so thoughtfully provided in the game can take commands which only activate as soon as the Universal Recharge has completed, then I will be happily mashing away at the number keys which act as Hotkeys for the spells until I can't mash no more.
In fact, the sheer simplicity of the game's Combat System allows the player to focus on its many other merits, some of which I will go into now. You don't want a Combat System so amazingly elegant and over-elaborate that it takes all your time to learn it, which is why I appreciate all the work the WoW programmers have put into creating the many alogrithms which make the computer do all the calculating of the various factors which modulate the outcome of every single attack.
Besides, if you had to consciously control every single last move your character executed, it would make the gameplay unbearably frenetic as you would have to perform some little kind of minigame for every single spell you used. Since we WoWers use so many spells with such dizzying frequency, this would be quite clearly a completely effort- and time-wasting feature. In this case, apply the old axiom: 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'
- The Mythos
As anyone who has had even a casual brush with the many complexities of Warcraft will understand, be they in the form of the Warcraft Real-Time Strategy games or the MMORPG form of which I speak, they will soon realise that there is a truly vast mythos which has been constructed for the world of Warcraft (now you know where the name comes from - me).
Although of course it is constructed out of many already-existent fantasy conventions and thus could be accused of lack of originality, I would counter this argument by asking this simple question: 'Is anything truly original?' Like I said before: 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it', and the way things seem with the existing fantasy genre core quad of races, i.e.: elves, dwarves, humans, and, to give them something to fight, orcs, which seems to be a winning formula. Just take a look at The Lord of the Rings - one of the most phenomenally successful mythoi (plural learned from www.dictionary.reference.com, as you may have guessed) ever created, and it sticks very close to this racial canon.
But WoW takes this core triad and goes even further. Next there are what I like to think of as the 'second tier' of fantasy-conventional races, i.e.: Blood Elves (read: evil twins of Night Elves), Undead (read: zombies) and gnomes (read: hobbits). Although these classes are (as you have seen in the brackets) derivative, they have been spun in a completely new way.
Then comes the exceptional third tier, which is decidedly more original. First, the Trolls: an odd race which, frankly, I don't understand and don't much appreciate, but is definitely new in some capacity. Then there are the Tauren, whose distinctive American-Indian culture and ironic similarity to the buffalo they hunted I find particularly risible. Finally, perhaps the most creatively-inspired race of all those playable, is the Draenei: in appearance an odd but interesting spin on centaurs, in attitude more like a racial religion very similar to the virtuous Tau of DoW fame, and thus incredibly well-suited to the comparably light-worshipping class of Paladin.
And, before you dismiss these races as mere names, understand this: every single last one of them has an entire mythos made for them alone, including genesis, development, relations with other races and all sorts of minutiae that are canon only within the world of Warcraft.
I'd very much like to continue, but I'm afraid it is now 2:22 in the morning and I have spent all my time since midnight composing this. Nerds, eh?
