After staring at the ceiling right up until my 10th day, seventh hour, 40-second minute and 21 second of vacation à la Canada, intense boredom led me to try something I wasn't proud of: It's called the World of Warcraft, and it snuck a free-10-day-trial ad in between Tim Hortons commercials.
Many people I know have never heard of this game. A handful heard of it through someone else and have displaced it in the backs of their minds as one of those geek mysteries comparable to the likes of chess tournaments and animé. A small amount admit to having experimented - and only in past tense, whether they still play or not. And the remainder are proud, outspoken and social WoWers.
Well, those proud WoWers had been trying to work me over since fall. And I was doing really well until that moment, honestly!
I had never tried the game because there always appeared to be a very bold line between testing out a new Wii game and logging on to WoW. It's almost like you shouldn't talk about the latter in public, or else you will be scorned for doing something that's supposedly some sort of mutation in one's life cycle.
The common impression was bordering the idea that people who play WoW do it as a full-time job, from within their parents' basement, taking sips of Red Bull between incoherent, self-directed ramblings about Night Elves and spell books.
Perhaps there really is a handful of such people somewhere out there, but I have yet to meet any of them. At any rate, I've actually witnessed people get far more disturbingly obsessed with Facebook. At least WoWers have the dignity to keep much of it to themselves and not stalk others for profile picture shots.
But I read Digg's coverage of the worldwide WoW phenomenon. There are horror stories of people who quit their day jobs to WoW full-time. The Chinese government put time limits on WoW play for minors. Video game addiction is starting to pop up for treatment at rehab centers. Scary, scary stuff.
However, none of that mattered anymore by the second week of vacation. Sitting at least 36 hours away from my closest alibi - not to mention, my lonesome, Ohio-bound vehicle - I exhausted all of my other options and I had nowhere to go but WoW.
The trial file had downloaded. The shortcut was eyeing me off the desktop. Just one click. No turning back.
Moments later, I was online, talking to my friends, running around and actually, for the first time in what felt like a year, feeling fully social - minus long-distance charges, of course.
Stigma gone.
In all fairness, WoW really is a game involved with gnomes and mages and sword-and-shield-wielding warriors and quests to gain artillery, armor, skills, etc. The World consists of old-timey towns, villages, kingdoms, forests ... the works. You can even find look-alikes of dragons, dinosaurs and the Loch Ness monster.
All of that may sound dweeby, but I've yet to find an exciting video game that bears a resemblance to The Office.
And if you have an addictive personality and choose to live vicariously through an online game, then that's an entirely self-contained problem. People who share your weakness can also opt to live through Facebook, MySpace, Xbox Live games and 'Home' for PlayStation 3 - almost all of which get a better rap than WoW, which has more than 11.5 million players already!
So I've stumbled upon the realization that closet WoW players can surely be found among even the trendiest of OU groups, and, in an age in which much scarier vices can be found floating around a college campus, what's there to be ashamed of in a video game? Life is but a game of balance.
Olga Kharitonova is a third-year student studying journalism and a stringer for The Post's campus staff. Send her an e-mail at ok137308@ohiou.edu.
4 Opinion
Olga Kharitonova
