A New, Buding Universe of Control

It is with great geeky pride that I immediately pronounce to being a gamer. Video games are something that I’ve grown up with, something that’s very much apart of me and apparently to many other people as well. The names Luigi and Mario will be printed in my memory till the day I die. I’ll never be able to forget the happy music of Zelda or the experience of playing Shadows of the Colossus for 48 hours straight without sleeping. Some of these games are so brilliant they are without a doubt a new form of art. Aesthetic and engaging, challenging and thought provoking. Perhaps, exactly what some art tries to achieve. Why, in fuck’s name, is the modern medium still undervalued and sneered upon? To some, gaming culture is almost something they refuse to talk about or accept into culture. It has always been forced into the underground. The “elite” wouldn’t be too pleased to know that, whether they like it or not, video games are finally getting some sadly overdue acknowledgement.
Anyway, on without warning to World of Warcraft, Blizzard’s online “game sensation” that’s been going for a few years now. Simply printing the title sends every mind racing. Normally the category is split two ways: those who think the game is possibly the most well designed, enjoyable, sociable games ever created and those who think it’s mindless, dangerously addictive and a waste of precious time better spent outdoors looking at the orb in the sky which you used to understand as “The Sun”. After playing the game for over a year now, getting a Tauren Druid up to level 62, a Bloodelf mage up to 31 on a friends account, my ultimate opinion is still very much undecided. This is partly due to the games ever changing nature. WOW’s alternate reality supporting its own economy, society, language and slang (lol, ffs etc) will forever fascinate me. Unfortunately, the more I progress in the game the more unsatisfied with it I become. Weird, due to the obsessive steps Blizzard has made to make damn sure this doesn’t happen to everyone. Their financial future clings on to this. It seemed that the further I dived into it the less free it all felt. As I imbibed the social aspect and learned the fine art of choosing talent points and specific gear, I was in fact loosing my own personal nature to the game and becoming an unquestioning civilian. I fucking hate rules, especially in a video game that you have to pay a considerable amount for. For me video games allow me to escape the real world for a few moments, to let my imagination wander around lawless plains miles away from money and government, social conduct and common prejudice. It was as though my initial route into the game and the customisation available had all been in vain. It began to feel like I was loosing my gamer/explorer identity behind a wall of player courtesy and set paths that my character had to take. Once society is introduced to a game, where many people are playing together and at once, laws and control must be obtained to prevent chaos and anarchy. Scarily, this is not at all dissimilar to how western civilisation is structured. The solitude element is gone, destroyed underfoot by a million other players and their politics. WOW yearns for a misanthrope or a revolutionary. For the shear hell of it, I plan to create a new character completely bent on screwing over the game step by step. Stretch limits and test the waters. I will loot chests when I fucking want to, lie about where I actually come from, fish on a sunset lit dock while my guild is off raiding. Push it all as far as it will go. And why? Because none of it, despite what it feels, is real... yet.