WoW FEATURE - Lather, rinse, repeat...

Shampoo is great for people. It makes their hair smell nice and keeps it shiny and clean. Dwarfhead, however, dislikes shampoo for precisely those reasons. It breaks down his dwarfish musk and general air of unkemptness and... I'm sure this analogy was going somewhere... Oh yes: when shampoo gets in your eyes it stings to buggery. No, that wasn't it...

Right.

Imagine yourself moving into a house constructed entirely of Pink Panther wafers. Well, just like that house, World of Warcraft is appealing to live in at first, but the pleasure that you receive from making it your home (and snacking on the walls) is blown when the whole thing collapses under its own weight after a week of miserably persistent rainfall. And all you're left with is a pile of pink sludge.

The point I'm so appallingly trying to make here is that taking part in World of Warcraft has been a consistently dreary existence. I feel like I've wasted my time and, although I do waste many hours playing games, most of them are entertaining enough for me not to realise this in such sharp relief.

I've been doing the same quest for ten days. I've been in the same environment for ten days. I've been having no fun for ten days.

I have several major issues with WoW, the first of which is the emptiness of the game. And I'm not talking about the lack of people. It's an MMO. There are loads of people bustling about, being friendly and being complete dicks, the same as any online game. It's the soulessness of the whole experience that gets to me, the feeling that surrounded by the cute and colourful shapes is something so ultimately repulsive that its not worth your time having a bash at it. Like a pinata filled with blood.

After a stint in WoW you never find yourself thinking back on what you've achieved or experienced, because the only thought in your mind is trudging through the next quest or winning the next piece of loot. The focus is entirely on what your next fix will be and I despise that feeling.

Most depressingly, I don't seem to have advanced anywhere. I've been at this game for hours and I'm still indiscriminately murdering wild animals for coppers. If a game can't grab me within the first ten hours of play then there is something fundamentally wrong with the way it's been constructed.

And I know I'm making these points as a single player in a massively multiplayer world that is best played as a co-op experience, but I really can't see how it can make the game much more rewarding. It's like roping in a friend to help you clean up some cat sick; it's far better than doing it all by yourself and a lot easier to get done, but at the end of the day you're still picking up bits of vomit.

Okay, that's about enough lazy analogies for one day and that's certainly more than enough Warcraft for one lifetime. This isn't quite how I intended to finish the feature, but when a game perturbs me this much, I need to wipe it entirely from my memory as quickly as possible.

My previous instincts were proven to be correct. World of Warcraft is not the game for me and I am still none the wiser as to how it's so popular with such a large audience. The addiction element is there, but I'm baffled as to how people get over the ever-increasing annoyance of playing it. There's just no give in the cyclical mechanic of leveling up to kill things to level up to kill things.

Oh well, mission failed. Dwarfhead was rubbish anyway. I've almost stopped caring, but there is one positive I can draw from this: at least the game is boosting PC sales.

WoW FEATURE - Enter Dwarfhead

Who's got a Scottish accent, a large axe and a low boredom threshold?

Dwarfhead of course!

On August 18th 2008 a big bundle of beard and gruffness sprang into existence on the WoW realm of Alonsus and I've been nurturing him for a good ten hours since. After deciding to take the plunge, I quickly set up my character on a surprisingly basic creation screen and set to work immersing myself. Nice and easy.

There followed a cutscene that I didn't really pay attention to, mainly because it mentioned something about a war and the word 'lands' a lot in a rather wizened, old voice.

So far, so fantasy.

When I did break free from the generic intro, I found myself in a dark, snowy forest, next to some dwarves gathered around an open fire.

Dwarfhead had arrived! I quietly rejoiced.

I set to work finding my first quest, entirely expecting it to be something along the lines of meat-fetching and, to my un-surprise, it was. Not to be deterred though and not wanting to let Dwarfhead down on his first day, I headed into the woods to bag me some flesh, making for the first wolf I saw and not knowing anything of the combat mechanics. At that moment I wasn't even sure I had the skillset to fight off anything larger than a squirrel. Fortunately, I discovered that combat in WoW simply consists of right-clicking on an enemy once and waiting until either you or they are dead. There are other special attacks to use intermittently, but nevertheless, the most important skill to have here is patience. I endeavored to be patient.

It was a few minutes after embarking on my first kill-the-thing quest that I encountered a young something-or-other that began fighting alongside me. We chatted briefly over a wolf's warm corpse and he told me he was from Slovenia.

"Cool," I said. "I'm from England".

There was a pause as it typed something.

"How do you know about Slovenia?" he asked.

Now, I'm not an ignorant person, but anyone who knows me well enough will tell you that my grasp of geography is beyond terrible. This response was not what I had expected.

"How do you know about Slovenia?" it repeated and there followed an uncomfortable silence in which I wondered what kind of answer it was fishing for. Was I not supposed to know about Slovenia? Was it some sort of code word in this game? How do you satisfactorily explain the knowledge of something that just happens to be laying about somewhere inside your brain?

"I don't know. I just do." I eventually replied. There was another uncomfortable silence before the the thing turned and ran off. Whatever answer he was after was not the one I gave.

I sighed in relief and was struck by the realisation that I had learned my first MMO lesson: that my own social awkardness transcends video games.

WoW FEATURE - The Diary of a MMORPG Virgin

For a game that, in it's fourth year, shifted almost a million copies in the US, there has to be something very special about World of Warcraft. I have done incredibly well to avoid playing it considering its overwhelming popularity worldwide, but the truth is, it failed to grab my interest on release and I've neglected it ever since. I never felt the need to see what all the fuss was about, cursing whenever the gaming press forced some over-excited news of subsequent expansions or praise of its brilliance upon me. Dont get me wrong, I love RPGs, but I do find the Tolkien-inspired fantasy world to be wearing a little thin these days and the frequent mention of grinding and addiction was enough to keep me away.

Now, on the back of all the success Blizzard have had with the franchise, I'm finally willing to take the big dive and immerse myself for ten days of free trial play.

To be honest, I'm slightly unsure as to what I'll find here. Any other game genre and I'd know what sort of thing to expect, but I'm new to the MMO scene and there's something almost sinister about World of Warcraft. Like a puppy dog with a pound of TNT sewn into its stomach, it seems that hidden beneath it's cute exterior is something not entirely pleasant.

Aside from the Grand Theft Auto series, it is probably the game that gets most coverage in the news. Media vultures have been quick to latch onto several deaths in the community that occurred after long stints of playing the game. Gold-farming is also a common activity in MMOs, ID theft another... not particularly wholesome associations. I'm sure you could say that it's a veritable minefield of deceit, death and dependence if you weren't willing to lift the cover on the game and give it a go yourself.

As such I go, with an open mind and thirst for fun.

Logically, WoW's sales figures must speak for themselves. There must be a reason as to why people love to play this game and that's exactly what I intend to find out. How far will I be able to get in ten days? I don't know. Is it really a player-murdering, identity-stealing bitch of a game, or do I just need to remember to eat regularly and avoid any player characters whose eyebrows are too close together? I also don't know, but it's a worthy experiment in the name of geek science.

More to come in the next few days...