MMORPG Methadone [video games]

Yesterday, after spending over three hours with my level 12 human paladin “Stackhouse” (after Sookie Stackhouse, the spunky, telepathic heroine from Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire series) trying to kill level 15 goretusks in order to collect enough of their livers for this random NPC peasant woman I met on the side of the road in Westfall, I just about lost my mind.

I have no problem being irredeemably unproductive. Sitting around for as long as you’d like with a graphic novel, vampire novel, or video game is the geek’s version of golf. But World Of Warcraft has ceased to be the fun kind of distracting. It’s whole purpose for me was as an enjoyable escape from the mundane or stressful events of actual life (finances, job, friends, etc.). And yet the game replicates exactly those social forces and constraints it seems to me that players would want to avoid: it has it’s own economy (where I’m dirt poor and can’t buy anything), it’s own social caste system (where I’m near the bottom), and it’s own set of free-loading assholes and con men who will rip you off if you let them. I’m not sure when this happened, but it has slowly become more difficult to enjoy WoW than to enjoy real life (where things are pretty much as hunky dory as they were before Wow entered the picture). In some ways, that’s a great success that the game has managed to create a thriving online society complete with all the hassles of the real world, but why am I bothering to trudge through it?

So, with Not An Addict (the K’s Choice version) and Breaking the Habit blasting from iTunes, I clicked “uninstall” at 4:20 p.m. yesterday. When the trash emptied, I promptly felt a liberating and terrifying rush: what am I going to do with the rest of the day? Or the week for that matter?

At first, this feeling was exhilarating. But almost 24 hours later, I’m now starting to get a little edgy. I’ve hidden the install disks under the couch, but that doesn’t help. I still know where they are. What I need is some kind of WoW patch. Not a patch for the program. A patch for the void left in my psyche that for some reason — despite full knowledge of the reasons stated above — still wants to log back on and go back to gathering goretusk livers. Things will be better at level 13, right?

I’ve ordered some trash lit to facilitate the transition, but I really hope it gets here soon… Until them, I’m scouring the net for a substitute MMORPG that I won’t get addicted to but can use to fill the WoW void until I can relearn how to waste my spare time on things that are actually fun.