Negativity Kicking me in the Bean Bag

What's the deal with this f-ing game?

I'm debating going back to school to learn deep psychology stuff so I can figure out why I even play in the first place.

Ok, so I know why I play. At times its fun. I've been playing video games most of my life, and they're a big part of recreation and entertainment for me.

Gaming has also been a social thing for me, so WoW isn't new there. Well, WoW has certainly taken the social aspect to a new level, but not an entirely new concept.

In High School, my friends and I would play Sega Genesis until we had blisters on our fingers. EA Sports was king with NHL, Madden, and even FIFA Soccer was pretty cool. When they came out with the Fore Four Play for the Genesis, it was even better because now we could get more people into the Hockey games at a time.

Then college came around and brought with it Killer Instinct on the SNES and Warcraft 2 on the computer. At a time when having your own LAN, or even Internet access, was a pretty rare thing, I wired up four computers on a little coax network and we got four players into the real time strategy action. And Killer Instinct had a sweet built in tournament mode, where you could all type in your names and it would run a giant tourney tree, telling you who's up next and keeping stats and everything. Used to get the entire floor of the dorms into KI tournaments in all-day demonstrations of testosterone and alcoholism.

Granted, there's not too much drama involved with those games. And since we're all sitting in the same room, if somebody keeps exploiting some of the same guaranteed goal scoring moves in NHL 95, you can throw down the controller and pound on him until he says uncle and promises not to do it anymore. But you know he will still keep doing it, but it was fun anyways.

I just don't get it with WoW.

The game is so annoying at times.

Maybe I've just got a cloud over my head in general today, because I can't put my finger on any specific issue with WoW. I think its just a general feeling that the design of the game has too much focus on keeping me addicted, rather than providing me with entertainment.

And, like a good polymorphed sheep, I keep playing. So there's no doubt that they've mastered the addiction part. And at times, they've clearly mastered the entertainment part. Balanced BG's. Boss kills. Booterang. All wonderful things.

But the endless grind. The virtually unattainable dungeons. The lack of giving us effective ways to manage our guilds (pls, blizz, provide easy to use calender, forum, and DKP systems). The p1ss p0or drop rates. The never ending gear progression.

Makes you wonder what single player games are out there that have some of the same joyful parts of the solo game in WoW.

Ahhhh, I figured out where the negativity came from. I lost eleven AV's in a row last night.

Please, kick me in the nuts with a golf shoe and just give me the 4k honor.