Mists Of Pandaria went live. Hoo… rah…

I will tell you this much right off the bat, in case you have not already noticed it or this is your first visit here (in which case, welcome): I am not a fan of Blizzard Entertainment or the stories they put into their products. I have found that the Horde’s leaders mainly consist of dickheads with whom Blizzard play a game of seeing how much obnoxious, arrogant shit they can get away with whilst maintaining slavish devotion from fanboys. I am finding the current implementations of the game so irritating in so many ways that I am starting to feel that Dave Kosak should be fired. So with that frame of reference, let us explore my opinions of the latest World Of Warcraft expansion, Mists Of Pandaria.

Hobbling, a reflection about feeling dragged backward.

As I have said in this and other places, I play World Of Warcraft a fair bit. Not as much as I did at one point, but enough that it has an impact on what little ability I do have to carry out other tasks in my life. Not that I give a rat’s bottom about that part, but there is a point to this that I have started to reflect on recently.

The games we play… and what they say about us. E.T. as an example.

In modern culture, a lot of things have a tendency to descend to descend into a pissing competition. Nowhere is this more true than in videogames, an art from that, in spite of what many would like us to believe, seems to be regressing in spite of how much technology we throw at it. (To be fair, the same is proving to be true of cinema, music, and literature.) In order to understand what I mean, it is necessary to go back in time somewhat to the early to mid 1980s, when a little boy had his head so firmly buried in the television that people began to wonder if something was wrong (aww, really?) and if so, how to correct it (you know how it goes). If you did not live in this era, it is pointless for me to try and explain how different things like television and communication were then. The combination of mass networking, highly-affordable (especially by the standards of those days) desktop computing, and portable telephony has changed the world so radically that unless you have lived at least five to ten years of your life in a time before those things, you cannot begin to imagine how different the world was prior to then. And by a time before those things, I mean before more than one out of ten twelve to fifty year olds per street knew what a modem was, leave alone had one. (The street I lived on through most of my boyhood was an irregular oval forming an outer ring around two blocks that was only interrupted by the fenced-off grounds of a community hall. When I was six years old, I was the only one I knew of who had access to a Commodore 64. By the time I was 13, that number had expanded to include four families.)

Internet designers nowadays: eat me. Sincerely…

When I think back to the mid-to-late 1990s, when I first started taking my tentative steps onto this whole new, “exciting” medium called the Internet, I think of all the promises that were made and the promise the medium was reputed to hold. And in those days, it did promise a lot that was exciting to a technology-dreaming boy like myself. But promises are like wishes. Put one in one hand, then shit in the other hand. See which one fills up first. And never has there been a better example of this truism than the Internet after the commercialists realised that it was not just some “geek” trend, that it was not going to just go away whilst they ignored it, and that it posed a real, credible threat to them. And since then, they have been working overtime to try and negate what made, and to a degree still makes, the Internet a far better medium for all concerned.

Now, you have probably noticed that I inserted a capture of what I see when I load this journal in one of the web browsers on my computer. It is not for vanity reasons. For one thing, I am not that vain. For another, I do not like to use graphics in these things unless it is for an actual purpose. And if you have even the slightest interest in design, one glance at the image I have placed near this paragraph should be able to tell you what that purpose is.

My name is… and I play WOW *far* too much

They say that when you are doing something so much that it interferes with your other activities in life, the relationship you have with that activity may well be unhealthy. It might even be an addiction. In that spirit, I would like to talk about the videogame known as World Of Warcraft.