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Warcraft Wednesday: Addiction

I’m not addicted to World of Warcraft.  Yeah, I know, denial is a sign of addiction, whatever.  But seriously, I don’t spend more time on the game than I did on other games before.  All told, I don’t spend any more time on all my video games now than before I started playing Warcraft – they are all just distributed differently.  It has certainly taken the place of the other PC games that I used to play – I rarely, if ever, load up Counter-Strike: Source.  And we don’t play Warcraft III or Starcraft anymore, or Star Wars: Battlefront.  (However, now that I’ve thought about some of them, I may have to play them for a little bit to shake some of the rust off.)

I don’t believe admitting that I’ve given up most of my other PC gaming habits is admitting that I have an addiction to World of Warcraft.  It’s the first MMORPG that I’ve played in earnest (my roommate in college played the original Everquest, so I got a tiny bit of that, and I don’t really count Phantasy Star since I’ve never played that online), and I held off on picking it up for a very long time.  I mean, the game was originally launched in 2004 and I didn’t start playing until earlier this year (2008); they had even announced a second expansion before I jumped on.

What keeps me playing now is that I’m actually enjoying myself.  I can’t remember when the last time I had this much consistent fun with a game.  I mean, there have been some that were terrific for a limited time, but I’ve played World of Warcraft for the better part of a year.  There’s also the fact that most of my playtime has been spent with my brother – co-op play is first and foremost the feature I look for in games.

And now the launch of newest expansion brings to mind another reason I like to play World of Warcraft: being a part of something bigger that keeps evolving.  Blizzard will continue to expand and improve the game for a while yet, so the story will keep growing.  As someone who basically devours well-written stories, an interactive one is just pure icing.