The End of the World (of warcraft)

This is going to seem a little off topic but bare with me for a moment it comes back to China. I've been playing the game World of Warcraft for a long time. I've always played various computer and video games back to Zork on that old green screen computer we had in the basement. But I'm pretty sure I've never played a game as much or for as long a time as WoW. WoW is something of an international phenomenon to boot. It has 11 million or so subscribers, a significant chunk of whom live in China. I love the game, it easily one of the best most engrossing games ever made. For those who don't know much about it it's what's called a MMORPG, a massively multiplayer online roll playing game. Basically thousands of players get together as various Orcs and Trolls and what not and smash things. Oddly though these sort of games have always thrived on their social nature. The creator of one of the founding MMORP said he felt he had created a chat room with some nice graphics. I love the game for all the interesting things you can do in it from explore to simply fish. It also has a sense of accomplishment that goes along with achieving things in the game since you're not just measured against a game everyone beats but against millions around the world.

I play a lot, the game can display exactly how much I've played and frankly it's a little disturbing, but it's never been a problem until now. It's not that I have too little time it's that I have to much. Before I'd have other things to do which would limit how much I could play but this semester especially I just have way too much free time. I can play other games fine, but WoW has an amazing ability to suck huge amounts of time in. These sort of games inherently take a longer time since they are designed to be played over years instead of weeks. So I gave away all my in game stuff, which was surprisingly fun sort of like being an out of season Santa, and canceled my account. It's an odd life when my problem is too much free time. There's actually another odd China connection here since starting a few years ago WoW created a new sort of job in China. The currency in the game is called gold and for some things you need quite a lot of it which can take a lot of time to get and not be the most fun part of the game. So companies sprung up that payed people in China to get this gold in the game and then sold it to lazy people, this is people to lazy to even play most of a computer game, in America. The people who ran WoW never liked this but so far they've been unable to totally stamp it out. Even more interesting is that people with English skills can get upper level jobs in these companies not getting the gold, people refer to it as farming the gold, but talking in English to the people who want to buy it. So that's it, I'm all done, goodbye world (of warcraft).