« Lights, Camera, Metal Gear | Home | Confessions of a Justified Camper »
World of Second Life
By Uzi | June 19, 2008
That’s what World of Warcraft should be called.
The actual Second Life is a sham. It may act as an alternate reality for some, but the fact is that it’s a 3D chat client with the ability to have a blank canvas to make whatever the hell you want on it, complete with slow rendering graphics and rubbish animations. Second Life doesn’t pretend to be a game but it shouldn’t pretend it is deep enough to provide a true second form of reality.
World of Warcraft on the other hand spanks you into another being and form. Hard. I played the free 10 day trial expecting to get really bored fast of fighting mobs (WoW lingo for monsters) and spending hours of samey gameplay to reach a constantly changing but pointless goal but my cynicism was pounded aside with addiction.
First, as a MMO noob, I realised how much depth there was in this rather innocent looking game. It has a lovely exaggerated style to it running on an effective engine to still manages to look pretty and at 60 FPS with little lag. It looks like a light RPG you can play with friends, but upon playing it for about 5 hours I realised it was so much more.
There are guilds, factions, raids, instances, PvP, PvE, duels, roleplay, a non static economy, professions, auctions, banks and that was just stuff I witnessed by the time I was level 10.
I spent as much time online reading about these things as I did in the gameworld itself. And considering I was playing the game all night at times, you can appreciate that was a lot of time.
If someone had told me before that they played WoW all night I would have silently laughed inside at them thinking “How can you go around killing virtual creatures with people online all night in an RPG? Wouldn’t it be more fun in an action game?”- but that’s not what happens.
I would spend a good hour or two in the auction house treating it like ebay and as a good source of income. I like buying and selling things for profit ocassionally in real life (a good skill when you’ve been a student for ages) and practising it in game was a lot of fun. I would look at trends and what was selling hot at the time and keep an eye on auctions about to end soon if they hadn’t been bid on. A couple of times I bought things and sold them on for as much as 500% profit.
This became a game in itself. Not a rubbish minigame like we get in some console games, but an actual in depth distraction which could save you slaving away getting cash the normal way.
But what’s the normal way? Some people would mine for materials, others would collect plants. Some would construct things via engineering. I would go around skinning a lot of the things I killed to go on and sell the leather I got in the auction house for much monies in addition to the cash I was making from buying and selling.
I became aware of how much a time sink it became so I forced myself to become disillusioned with it just so I could get away from the dangerous “second life” pit I was falling into. If only for the sake of the show which demands that I not spend all my time on a single game!
So while I have been very impressed I managed to get away from becoming obsessed with it for one reason. I didn’t build up any strong social ties. I’m not part of a guild, and while a kind veteran decided to help me out at the start of the game, I’ve pretty much played it as an independent Warlock. I have no family, no friends and ultimately no ties in WoW and thus can go to and fro to this second very minimal life as much as I please….
…until I cave in and play EVE or Age of Conan that is.
Topics: Blog |
June 19th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Play EvE!! Play EvE!!
June 19th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
pve is alot better than pvp in my opinion
June 20th, 2008 at 8:08 am
Wow is quite compelling until you hit the level cap, and then all desire to play it drops away.
June 20th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
My little brother was horribly addicted to WoW for a while there. He would ramble on with in-game stories almost as often as I did with GTA IV. He finally reached a high enough level that further progression would require more time than he was willing to devote. Then came Age of Conan. It has started all over again. Except I’m hearing stories of bare virtual breasts and gory finishing animations instead of mounts and raids. Luckily I don’t have enough free time to get hooked by the social aspect of MMOs.
June 20th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
For me it’s my older brother who is obsessed with this game. He’s been playing it for three years now, although he’s starting to come out of it. What I always found funny was that he said he didn’t have much time for games in recent years, but he was playing WOW for at least two hours a night. It seems once it’s got it’s hooks in far enough, WOW doesn’t count as a game!