Warcraft

I played. Last night I broke down and agreed to help Butterfinger achieve some of his virtual goals by playing one of his characters, while he sat on the computer beside me, healing with another. I got to be “The Tank”, an obtuse monster with dreadlocks that gallivants around the countryside slaying people with his lion head-shaped sword. Butterfinger played a corpse-like creature that spends its days drinking various potions, making biscuits and casting spells on other players to heal them.

At first there were way too many buttons for me to press at one time, not to mention the multitude of words/phrases/taunts/kill points/whatever flashing up on the screen whenever I was actually trying to destroy something. Butterfinger worked with me on this and eventually we came up with a 3-4 key sequence that I would press whenever we got near an enemy. This still did not take care of the problem of not being able to see what I was doing. Unlike Sonic the Hedgehog (really the only game with which I have accrued over 1000 hours of play time) you have to navigate your character through a 3-D environment, which means I had to hold down the right button on the mouse, while pushing the ‘w’ key to walk, all while trying to move the mouse to get the camera angle just right.

I quickly got over my fear of being made fun of by other 14 year old players when I realized the “team” we were on (it was a scenario similar to capture the flag) was constantly getting pummeled at the hands of the opposing faction. There was way too much stuff going on in this battle for people to bother to take notice that I was unable to chase down enemies or was standing and jumping in place when I should have been slicing and dicing. I became more and more comfortable with the fact that I was getting killed every 5 minutes and took comfort in the fact that never once did I place last; although it was very frustrating to watch people I was trying to kill escape my fatal blows by simply running circles around me, literally.

I had no idea what time it was when I realized I could not continue any longer. My eyes were dry and ready to pop from my skull, and my right hand was so tense and strained I was afraid I would be unable to write. I really felt as if I had been to battle, and in a way I was, finally surrendering to this evil game that steals Butterfinger away for extended periods of time. The clock read 2:30 am when I finally got into bed, at which point I drifted off into sleep only to find visions of pixelated priests and blood elves dancing through my head. World of Warcraft, you win again.