WoW, Life and Everything

The View From the Top is an article from a former WoW player who quit WoW because of the negative impact it had on his life. The comments on that blog, and on the follow-up articles - The View From the Top: Redux and Warcraft: Another Point of View could fill a small book and are interesting in their own right. I won't talk about the article, except to say I found both the original and the "Another Point of View" insightful.

One thing I found interesting, were some comments that talk about what people do in WoW as if it "has no meaning", that the rewards are just "pixels on a screen" and therefore a waste of time. For me, those people just don't get it. They know the answer is 42, but they don't get the question :)

Life isn't always about tangible things. Examples are too numerous to list, think up of some yourselves :) WoW is just another intangible - perhaps once removed compared to some of the examples you could think of, but no less intangible for it, if you follow me.

Certainly, it's hard to compare the friends I've made on WoW with my RL friends, but while different, they are no less real and certainly no less friends. As for the items from the game, the satisfaction I get from them is no less real then the satisfaction I get from buying a new music CD - and the "utility" is about the same.

For different people, life has different meanings. WoW is about pure fun (or should be). So if you think something that has little tangible benefits is not for you, doesn't fit your view of what life is about, then playing WoW makes little sense to you. But don't make the mistake of thinking your view of life holds for all of us. I know, this wasn't what the original article was about (it was about taking things to excess), but I'm just talking about a few of the comments.

Keep having fun :)
Solid