WOW SO SERIOUS?!

Sorry for the title. I had to do it. It's like when you come up with a really sweet your mom joke and while on one hand you know that they stopped being funny in the seventh grade, you really can't help yourself from letting it burst out.

How seriously do you take WoW?

I come to you today with a question. It's something many-a-player has asked themselves over their time in Azeroth, myself included. Why now? At some point in the last few weeks I came home after a long Sunday at work; I work for an energy company and the weather had caused our storm accounts to overflow, meaning a lot of accounting work needed to be done before the end of the year. I woke up at 5:30, worked for 10-12 hours, took a girl to a movie and came home. I logged on to use my transmute CD and got the proverbial "let's do games" message.

I reluctantly agreed, failing to mention that tiredness is my cryptonite. Drunk? High? I can handle it, and some might say I play even better. But when it comes to mental accuity, and let's face it 10+ hours of straight accounting work will numb anyone's mind, you may as well introduce me with a "bring on the fail banner". And boy, did I fail. I got gibbed against RMP without bubbling, because I felt it prudent to run into LoS and HoJ the Priest. Yes, it's possible to be that bad. And one of my teammates raged like I have never heard rage before.

ARE YOU ******* CLICKING?! HOLY **** YOU'RE TERRIBLE YOU SHOULD KILL YOURSELF I MEAN IF I WAS YOU I WOULD PUT A SCREWDRIVER THROUGH MY HEAD. GOD YOU'RE BAD, DID YOU GO WAKE UP THIS MORNING AND DRINK A GLASS OF "I'M GOING TO PLAY LIKE ****" JUICE?

I'm paraphrasing there, but it's fairly accurate for the tone of his screaming. I mean that literally, I had to take my headphones off and was still listening to him. Rather than yelling back as I would have done if this had been during, say, a soccer game... I laughed. This bothered him even more, but I couldn't help it. The sheer absurdity of someone getting so worked up over a video game... a video game, was laughable to me.

So what causes this vast variation in how seriously we play the game? I'm sure personality plays into it, but as easy-going as I am IRL I've been known to have a short fuse in similar situations. I'd say the level at which we play the game plays in there too, but I've seen plenty of baddies raging and plenty of "pros" taking things in stride. Perhaps the biggest factor is the investment we have in the game.

I'm not talking necessarily about time investment. There are people with an awful lot of people playing this game, but it's still secondary to them when contrasted against their real lives. From what I can tell it's the emotional investment in the game. Is there any question that some of the most infamous nerd-ragers in the game are those that play the most excessively?  Or rather, those that have the least going for them outside of WoW? Naturally if you derive a great deal of your self-worth from WoW, and I have little doubt that many people do, then that would be the choice medium to demean and self-aggrandize.

Or is there no correlation at all between rage and emotional investment? Do you dismiss the "it's just a game" argument in light of the fact that your time is still time, and you don't like havig it wasted? How seriously do you take WoW?

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