I’m feeling extremely silly today: just a few minutes ago I put up erroneous name stickers on empty cubicles to confuse potential visitors. (I.e., if “Tim Fisher” is the name of a person working here I put up stickers saying “Tom Fosher,” “Timmy Fash” and “Tim Flounder” on various non-occupied places.) Why? Because I’m in a silly mood – I already told you. And I’ll get a good laugh if someone really comes looking for “Tim Fisher.” And my outgoing SMTP server is down, so I can’t spam people with inane e-mails.

After that little exposition I’m ready to get to the point. Right now I was reading some stray blogs, and one happened to refer to a Slate article called World of Borecraft. Quity punny title. The article is a good read; it discusses how “newsgames” fail in their main objective: getting gamers more aware of political/social/whatnot issues. By offering the players a dull and boring game filled with educational content, they’re basically preaching to the choir – the persons who plays such games are the ones who are already enlightened and aware of the issues. Normal gamers perfer to play…oh…maybe something like fun games?

Anyway, that was just a footnote. Uncouth barbarian that I am, what really fascinated me and got my imagination spinning was rather the title of the piece itself: World of Borecraft. It paints a very vivid mental image: a WoW gamer slowly becoming disillusioned by the game, realizing that it’s just the same thing over and over again. Eventually he quits playing and starts trolling WoW boards telling everyone how stupid and repetetive WoW is.

Time to get sidetracked again before I continue my thought. I’m currently reading the excellent Gödel, Escher, Bach and in the foreword the author mentions how, after finishing the novel, he became aware of his subconscious sexism (all the book’s characters are male). I don’t agree with all ideas in the book, and I don’t approve of the author’s attempts to apologize for his sexism. There’s no reason for it! Sexism is natural and perfectly fine, in my not-so-humble opinion – I always use he as the neutral pronoun for a generic person. I’m male! It would make no sense for me to talk about a generic female. And I definitely won’t try to avoid mentioning the gender; it just cramps the style. Literally. So screw that.

Now, after I had conjured up this little story about the WoW player, I thought of what other stories might be hidden within other variations of the title.

World of Sorecraft
“Oh no! I sat up all night playing WoW and now I can’t feel my ass anymore! It’s completely numb. And my wrist is sore. And my eyes are sore. And my back is sore. Goddamn World of Sorecraft!”

World of Surecraft
“Honey! I’m going out for a bit. Could you do the dishes?”
“Mm, sure…”
“And don’t forget to pick Danny up from school.”
“Mm, sure…”
“…My hovercraft is full of eels..”
“Mm, sure…”
“Dammit, you’re playing that damn game again!”
“Mm, sure…”

World of Lorecraft
“I know everything about WoW! Ask me anything! I’ve memorized all statistics about spawn points and quests and geography and… What’s that? You want to know if the game is fun? What do I know – I’m too busy gathering data!”

World of Vorecraft
“Mmm… /pizza.”

Alternative World of Vorecraft
“Soooo… Could you tell me once again why you’ve made a mod that allows a dwarf to physically get inside a Tauren?”

(Hint: look up vorarephilia.)

World of Whorecraft
Nope, not going there. Too easy.

Now for some reader excercises. It’s not that I’m too lazy to come up with stuff of my own, but I’ve never played WoW so I have a really hard time coming up with plausible comic situations. Feel free to leave a comment if you think of something funny, and I’ll pop it in here!

World of Gorecraft
…

World of Snorecraft
…

World of Corecraft
…

World of Al Gore-Craft
Nah, just kidding about this one.

World of Storecraft
…

World of Poorcraft
…

And on and on and on…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.