I’m going to take “Don’t feed the geeks” to a whole new level.

I can see it now. Pasty guys minimize their World of Warcraft game, rub their wrists and let their ill-dilated eyes focus on a different screen for the first time in hours. The A, W, and D buttons on their keyboard have a distinct fingerprint ring on each.

They swipe the pop-tart crumbs from the divot where their stomach meets their chest and call up to their mom for more pepperoni Hot Pockets and Capri Sun drinks. Then they read my post on them. On the people that play World of Warcraft.

So! I’ve bravely decided to wade into the dark chasms of topics to tell you my take on WOW, as henceforth it shall be named. There will be some WOW jargin; it’s like the geeks’ secret language ever since Klingon fell somewhat out of fashion. They are fluent. If you’re feeling scared, it’s ok. I’m a little scared, too. The research on this post was a 29,300 DPS hit to my social life.

World of Warcraft

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, WOW is a huge online game that people play because life, honestly, is boring. We all have our escape. Theirs is by roleplaying a druid night elf specializing in epic raid restoration healing. Yeah. Pretty much.

So, people walk around and quasi-interact, although most of the social aspect is telling each other how their DPS sucks, how early their pull was, how slow their heals were, and how their armor is so old, it must have come from vanilla WOW. Very supportive group.

Sure, you can go solo, where you pick up real-life skills like skinning, smelting, making elixirs, tailoring, engineering, etc. Although, as a girl, I pretty much just walked around, leveling up on baking, cooking, horseback riding, hugging small critters for that one quest, and asking everyone about their love life. Yeah, that’s what girls do on WOW. That’s why there aren’t any on there.

There’s a new thing where people go to Goldshire and talk about *ahem* unmentionably sultry things. They pay $15 a month to talk about dipping your staff into her mana pool. Come on. You can do that for free, but without the elf stuff. Besides, the gnome-worgen budding relationship probably isn’t a good match.

There’s a public chat in WOW, but that’s mainly filled with people lecturing on how WOW is dead, how vanilla WOW was sooo much better back in the day, aggressive political beliefs, how there’s nothing to do despite not doing any of the new content, or that one guy who desperately wants to cut all your gems.

You don’t have to participate in any of that, if you don’t wish to. It’s an open world. You can just explore if you want, rather than doing the quests, social aspects, dungeons, raids, or leveling. But then you’re about as useful as the tank who quits after the first wipe of the dungeon. Goddam Leeroy Jenkins.

Image courtesy of Cavin via Flickr, Creative Commons.