All the ways that WoW changed me

Syl of Brown & Pink Monkey's has a post up about all the ways that WoW has changed her. I'm not too good for a bandwagon, or anything else, so while you're at it, imagine that you opened this post because you saw a scantily-clad attractive young woman in the post and only clicked to get a bigger picture.


I've not played much outside of WoW, dabbling in a game here and there, so I've seen the AAA titles, but not gotten much into them.  So I can't really comment on what was different about WoW, beside somehow having a different feel, perhaps the graphics or class mechanics just fit me better.  I tend to find myself turned off by attempts at realistic graphics for people, because they're extremely hard to do, and consequently, fall short, or just a little too far into that uncanny valley.  Fonts are another issue, where I often found myself struggling to read those in other games, which would pull me out of the world, leaving me disoriented and not eager to return.



I can't really say what of WoW changed me in terms of MMOs, because again, there was no MMO before or after WoW.  Maybe that's what changed: I might have explored many worlds otherwise, but by having one which was so dominant, with friends and internet resources dedicated to it, I stayed in one place.  This might have been for the worse, since it meant that I was not used to change, so that as WoW transformed itself in mechanics, social aspects, and then the world itself, I was unprepared.  Maybe players who had more variety would have taken it in stride, or seen alternatives and left even sooner.

Superficially, I think WoW has had some impacts on me.  I've inherited its language, not necessarily words that it invented, but that's where I learned them.  Many concepts came from it (again, it was my source, not necessarily the originator), such as dance fights and the absurdity of mechanics that only make sense when explained rather than seen, by which I mean mob mechanics which would not be readily apparent by battle, but require outside guides to understand in any useful manner.  It was a while before Tuesdays stopped being my Sabbath day.


WoW itself wasn't the biggest change.  It was the people I met.  One of my close friends I met on the forums of all places, where I was the troll shaman on the paladin forums (the troll shaman Klepsacovic was the first character I ever made, knowing only that trolls looked cool and shaman sounded like a nice way to start, being able to do a bit of everything).  Two other friends I met in guilds and still talk to.  And even more I met through the blogosphere, such as the previously-mentioned Syl.  As an introvert, WoW was a great thing, a place where I could fit in as a loser of a college student.  Until the community shifted, I had some notion of where people stood, and where if things were perhaps too much srs bns, that was fine, because we were all on the same page with it.  Different people are playing now, and that's fine, but it's not the place for me anymore.  I'm sometimes a bit sad about that, but loss is inevitable.


Stemming from the blogging about WoW was an increased appreciation for writing.  I hated writing in high school.  It was a torturous process of being forced to write about something I didn't care about and consequently, didn't know much about either.  WoW and gaming gave me another chance at it, showing me that I could write about something I knew and understood and that researching a subject could be fun, making the eventual writing even better.  I think my writing has improved, but as importantly, my willingness to write has increased.  Even if I do not particularly care for a subject, I can at least learn about it and write about it, without hating it.


In conclusion, this is the end of the post.