My life as a metaphor for WoW

Or should it be the other way around?

Here's the picture: across the street from my home is a park. Down the block is a school. They are linked by more park and a playground, dominating the area. A couple years ago there were four houses on our side of the alley. Then two of them emptied, the park district bought them, and now there is a field of grass next to our house. And a tall fence that they were kind enough to install. The couple next door are past the point of tip-toeing around it: they are old. We don't know how long they'll be there, but I doubt more than a few years.

That would leave my parents' house in the middle of the block, surrounded on three sides by the grass of the park. Someday, that house will be sold and torn down.

This leaves the children of the area with a large park to play in, bigger than before, with more room for soccer and baseball, with no windows nearby to worry about. For them, it is absolutely better.

But for me, it's my childhood home vanishing. I don't need to live there anymore and in many ways do not want to. That doesn't make it feel much better to imagine it gone, forever. No more ability to go back and see it. Instead I'll be left trying to remember exactly where the sidewalk was and when the stairs started, with nothing but memories left, and left with a ridiculous desire to see it again, just to know what it was, to point out the windows my brother broke, the low roof I slept under, the red curtains that left the light filtering into the basement looking like a submarine movie.

It is, of course, progress, but that doesn't mean there isn't loss.

Cataclysm makes me sad. I hope the children are happy.

P.S. My use of children is not meant to be a literal "kids are taking over WoW", but instead "the next generation." If anything, I'd bet that the audience is older, no longer being so skewed by college students with way too much time.