Gaming

It’s nice to know I am not the only one. Here is a nice story about female gamers.
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World of Warcraft

Okay, despite my attempts to dodge I have finally been roped into World of Warcraft by my friend K. (Damn! botched my saving throw!) If you think I doth protest too much, you are correct. I have avoided online gaming knowing that many of my friends call it World of WarCrack for the addictive quality of the game. I can hear the imagined howls of my friends: Noo-ooo-oooo-ooo! Don’t get sucked in!

I don’t think I will find it addictive (well, let’s hope not) but I have to admit I did have fun. In only a couple of hours I had made a character and had gone adventuring with my friend and risen up to fifth level.

Fifth level you say? How lame is the game? It was actually quite well done. We were on a Player Versus Environment (PVE) server and I am assuming they make the first levels fairly easy so newbies can figure out how to play. You won’t get new people paying that lucrative monthly subscription fee if they get killed right away or can’t figure out how to do stuff.

The quests we were given were easy and it helped that there were two of us playing Mages who have nice stand-far-away-and-blast-the-monster abilities. Plus working in pairs certainly speeds up one’s ability to fulfill objectives.

Also, my friend has been playing for years and was able to fight of any monsters while I was trying to figure out how to turn around and aim! Oh, and then having to click to target something. I was used to Doom which was point and shoot but considering how many people are playing at one time it is necessary to be specific. I was pretty happy though that my old computer gaming skills were pretty fast to come back.

I have played regular roleplaying games as well as computer games for years (though not too much recently as I haven’t had the time) and this was similar to the standard fantasy computer games. Find monster, kill it, get points or treasure, keep going.

It was a little funny to hear my friend, a smart, sophisticated woman and devoted mother who held a really interesting government job telling me about the ABKs of WOW. “Always Be Killing”. Most of the roleplaying games I have played focused more on the interactive storytelling aspects with less violence but there were some that were just violent.

But Gamers are violent wackjobs! Not So!

“Not so!” I say. I played Doom in college (nothing but killing) but got bored with it. I played dice based offline games, with lots of mayhem and they can certainly be fun. We tended to go with White Wolf produced games. But I know lots of people assume that gamers are violent or will be the crazies you hear about on the TV. But I am a good mom. I hold down a good job, pay my bills and taxes, play with my daughter, work as an artist and will NEVER be seen on tv with neighbors saying how quiet I was.

Actually, it is because I am a mom, and my friend is also we thought this would be a good time to try the online thing together. It would new to me, old hat to her. We both have young children with early bedtimes and are therefore tied down to place and time. Plus I would never play this where my daughter could see it. She is too young for that kind of thing!

But I can fire up the computer after my daughter goes to bed and with the Ventrilo software (VoIP) chat with my friend while we go slay us some monsters.

I am looking forward to it. Got the Ventrilo downloaded but need to get on her server to chat. WOW here I come.

—MoGo