WoW The Unstoppable Force!
Is WoW the Star Trek of MMOs? And there is no Star Wars equivalent to challenge them and it’ll take years and years for that to even happen and even when it does it will take a long time to have any real effect on WoW. But then years later after Star Warses and Battlestar Galacticas and Xenas and Stargates (these are metaphors for games…in fandom terms) thrust themselves upon the gaming scene the market will be pleasantly saturated with so many fulfilling MMOs that the upstart mega-profit machine WoW will be nothing but a warm and familiar hug from the past? Delegated to be forever comfort gaming like Tetris is today?
I wonder.
What is it about WoW that makes it so very powerful? People are adventuring all the time, in so many varied ways, giving days, weeks, even months of their lives to the pursuit of unreal treasures and illusionary triumphs.
Or are they?
Does WoW take every shred of Ren Faire love a person may hide inside them and fancy it up with sexy elf ears and griffins and say “Hey, hey there lil’ fella, come on, I won’t hurt you. Taste the magic, go on, just try it, everything you dream…I can give you. I can make it real.”
Is WoW the David Bowie of the gaming Labyrinth?
I mean really, if I fought against a dragon with D and Toku in some game, my mind, or brain, or whatever would feel in some way that we had battled a dragon’s furious might. When I’ve played D&D my memories of those events are in my mind as images and voices, supplied by my imagination yes, but to me they are still real in a sense. If I can imagine myself as a half-orc warrior who was swarming with giant centipedes before busting out into hyper rage and chopping them into a fine mist with my huge axe and have that imagery in my mind almost as fully as a real memory, why cannot I do the same for some sweet ass animated fury on a computer screen?
And if WoW provides this effect for so many, how the holy hell will anyone else come close to replicating that in any efficient way in the near future?
Thought, meet Food For.