A few minor developments in the World of Warcraft: I’ve become more dedicated to my rogue (perhaps pathologically so… I am beginning to get to the point where I transgress against the time limits I set for myself) and don’t play the other avs as much. Rozalind is level 10 as of today (shortly after my own birthday) and I am told that life, with all the good moves, begins at 10. Dave Sturgis says he will buy me a pony when I get big enough.
Tonight I had my first tour far outside the bounds of Elwynn Forest. Sam escorted me to the night elf island so Roz could go dance with Bill’s elf. To make it there we really had to move too quickly; I would have liked more time to just stop and stare at the trees in the mist of the Dun Morogh plains. Neil describes the game as a labor of love, and at moments like that your awe reminds you of the game’s creators. I wonder at what point the fundies will start calling these games sacreligious for positing other humans as Creator… hell, they still can’t get over Dungeons and Dragons being satanistic, so perhaps they’ll never find out about it.
I was late logging off tonight because I couldn’t find an inn for my av to sleep in. I’ve developed a pattern: I like to move her to an inn and have her fall asleep on an actual bed there, putting my cat safely back in its carrier, before I log off. Something in this dates back to my dollhouse days, as many of the things in this game do. I wandered into an elven bank, then out of it again, complaining to my party that I couldn’t sleep in a bank. Eventually, realizing how ridiculous this was, I piloted her to an island and put her to sleep there. I have this idea that when she wakes up I’ll have to undress her before I have her swim off it. Then she’ll have to get dressed again, probably behind some bushes, on the banks on the other side.
I’m getting too into this.
In other news. I’ve developed a routine pattern of moves I use when fighting: baffle the target, then sneak around behind it and backstab it, then stab a few more times while waiting for backstab to finish up again. Cheap, like most of my patterns (I play Pikachu and Kirby in Smash Brothers, and Eddie Gordo in Tekken). I don’t always notice my patterns, though; actually until I started working with Jess I didn’t think about them much. I don’t know what my patterns were in the Final Fantasy games.
Coming back from the lab after I play late at night is always a little disorienting. Tonight I passed the busts of Russell and Dewey in Main Hall, and wanted to mouse over them to see if I could interact with them in any way. Earlier I found myself with my usual glasses out in the sunlight, pictured a little icon of prescription sunglasses in my head, and considered the amount of silver it would take to buy them, or the raw materials I’d have to gather to make them, and how much armor they would give me.
The latter point actually seems to me to be a useful habit, and I mulled it over for a while. Leatherworkers and tailors in World of Warcraft may not actually know how to sew, but they damned well know how much material it takes to make something, how scarce that material is, and how dearly it is bought in terms of life or limb. What if there was a game about sweatshop labor, or waste management? I think it could easily be done without it even being tedious. If you’ve played Escape from Woomera, you get a sense of how a game with a strong political statement can make you identify as strongly with the characters as a sentimental game like Final Fantasy.
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