World of Warcraft, Level 61

Hey look I...what in the world...I leveled like a million times???

Rather than berate myself for my failure, we'll allow this to serve as an object lesson. Just as some people are allergic to alcohol, some of us are prone to what we can politely call "compulsion" when it comes to certain sorts of games. World of Warcraft seems especially dangerous in this regard, as long as the player doesn't mind the relatively low complexity threshold.

There are definitely those who enjoy leveling who aren't ensnared by WoW - maybe the game design pokes through the world design to a disconcerting degree, like a bone through skin, and they require immersion. Or maybe they've become accustomed to a certain level of difficulty, and can't get the sense of game-accomplishment from weaker stuff. I am not one of these people. I am vulnerable.

It's been a strange couple of weeks. I've allowed myself to fall far enough into an internet game, for a brief period of time at least, that part of me no longer felt part of the actual world. Or if it acknowledged the fact of being such a part, resented it.

That's the Fel Reaver in the background. He's really big, and he'll step on you if you don't run away, and you'll die. Edward is on another planet now. A planet where fel stuff happens. Fel means bad.

World of Warcraft, Level 16

Hey look I HOLY SHIT IS THAT A GHOST WOLF?

Basically the reason World of Warcraft is a million times more popular than every other game is that when you become a level 16 Shaman you get to become a Ghost Wolf. And Shaman are the least popular class.

World of Warcraft, Level 8

When you're starting a new character in World of Warcraft, you're playing a game that was designed five years ago. You can tell. Especially with classes that cast spells - Edward here, or a Druid, for instance, you feel distinctly un-powerful, which decision almost no game that came out today would make. It's a measure of how much influence WoW has had on the design of the genre, I guess, that many of its mainstreaming sort of gestures no longer feel quite mainstream enough.

World of Warcraft, Level 7

Oh look, I leveled. Several times actually. I cheated and skipped a few.

World of Warcraft is a big thing to confront, as a player or commenter. It's become a significant part of our culture, though that part is diminished somewhat by the tendency of players who go deep into it to disengage.

One interesting thing is just how good it is, as a game. I'm not necessarily talking about big design decisions, here, as they're similar to MMOs that came before and after, and many are questionable. Rather the timing of the dings (slang for leveling, used here to refer to any positive reinforcment that encourages a behavior), the sheer responsiveness of the controls, no one else seems to have gotten just right. There are a lot of timing and luck factors to the games massive success, but I think an underrated source of it is how good and natural Blizzard made it feel to push buttons on a keyboard.

World of Warcraft, Level 2

Meet the new Troll Shaman, Edwardsaid. His name is a dumb joke about contemporary fantasy's relative immunity to post-colonialist thought.

Oh look. He leveled.