I never understood the appeal of multiplayer role-playing games. When I played World of Warcraft for free for a month years ago, it seemed slightly redundant. The game involved leveling up skills in order to accomplish unspecified objectives in order to level up skills. It seemed to involve a continuous cycle that, in the end, never really accomplished anything. I was told that raids were what the game was really about. But it seemed like too trouble to get to that level.
At the start of an MMORPG like World of Warcraft, there is often a character selection screen. When I first played WoW, I saw a list of classes to choose from with little instruction on what they actually did. As a result, I obviously wanted the class with the best-sounding name, the death knight, which seemed like the obvious choice. Death knights would clearly be able to kill anything in their way. But apparently there was some crazy requirement for even choosing that class. So after playing a while on a human character, I managed to get myself killed. That’s when I actually looked at a guide on how to play the game.
The guide I looked at literally contained hundreds of pages on World of Warcraft, including a huge number on simply selecting a class. I skimmed over it a bit, and decided that death knights weren’t actually as great as they first sounded. But then there was something on being a mage as opposed to a hunter that was utterly confusing. I gave up on the guide and tried to play the game.
The first thing I noticed about other players in the game was that many were quite unpleasant. Other characters would approach mine and say something to the effect of, “hey n00b let me show you my money$.” I wanted to show them my enormous stash of money in return, but I didn’t have any. I could only shake my fist at my computer screen. There is, as expected, a low number of players who actually are willing to help newcomers. Being the unlucky guy that I am, I didn’t find any of those people who could have saved my MMORPG experience.
After a few days of performing mind-numbing tasks over and over again, I realized it was like homework. Only instead of sitting at my desk writing an essay, I was sitting at my desk clicking a few pixels on the screen over and over. Instead of clicking on the game anymore, I pulled up the menu and hit “uninstall.”
