Somehow it is hard to believe that I am now more than halfway through the pregnancy! It seems like just yesterday we found out (on Mark’s birthday, nonetheless!) and now here we are, I am starting to get a proper bump and Little Doodle, at 22 weeks, now weighs a whole pound!
We went in for [...]
Last week I canceled my World of Warcraft subscription, burnout strikes again. I couldn’t simply leave it at that, being the massively multiplayer online (MMO) hobbyist that I am, so I went on the interwebs to see how previous games I had played are fairing in the shadow of the unstoppable juggernaut that is WoW. Sadly, I found nothing more than merged servers, dwindling populations, and development teams who had all but quit every which way I turned. That’s when it hit me: WoW has killed the genre.
Don’t get me wrong, I like WoW as a game; my current burnout is sure to last a few months and, barring I don’t find something that captures my imagination, I’m sure to renew my account down the line. But as far as MMOs are concerned, it really is the only popular MMO. Looking back over the dozen or so titles I’ve played over the last ten years, I find myself adorning the rose colored spectacles of nostalgia for games-gone-by and “how it used to be.” And these are my thoughts.
Can you pinpoint the exact moment in time where you grew to like something? Where you knew you’d develop a desire for something? A singular moment in an infinite stream of experiences and passing seconds we take for granted, moving faster than life itsself. For MMORPG gaming (massively multiplayer online roleplaying games) I can. The obsession began nearly ten years ago, in Best Buy, with the exact same artwork shown in the banner above. I had watched my cousin play Asheron’s Call for no more than a lazy half hour one afternoon, and I can remember being stunned by the concept: an online world in which many players worldwide played and interacted in. Gaming for me up to this point had been a solitary activity, or one done on a simple multiplayer mode with one’s siblings. This was new.
