Play

For a few years, most of my free time not spent on non-academic and technical topics was used in playing World of Warcraft. My first MMO was Everquest 2. Before a few years ago, being on the network of St. John's College, I was not able to play any network-based games reliably. Once I left a T1 shared among 400 students for a dedicated DSL, and now a FiOS, connection however, this became much easier.

While I loved playing EQ2 for some time, I decided at one point to stop playing. I couldn't bring myself to delete my EQ2 account for quite a while, however. I switched to WoW with much trepidation. Previously, I had looked on it with some scorn as a cartoonish game, overly simple in comparison to EQ2. This may have mostly stemmed from the fact that so many people were playing WoW. How could it be that good? Well, after deciding to try it out, I was quite hooked. It boiled down to the fact that WoW seemed to strike a better balance between fantasy realism and enjoyable playability. It is an immersive world, but also quite fun to play.

All that aside, I got to the point where I was spending far too much time playing WoW. Especially after entering a raiding guild, to which went at least 4 nights a week, and then the other nights filled with catching up on non-raid tasks... well anyone that has played WoW very much will understand the spiral. And while I will always enjoy the game, I had to leave it behind if I wanted to accomplish anything else. I met a lot of fun and interesting people in the game, and I will miss them.

Now the only games I play are on the Xbox 360, mostly Halo with friends, and occasionally a destructive foray into Mercenaries or The Outfit.