Filed under: Essay | Tags: Oblivion, philosophy, travel, video games, World of Warcraft, Zelda
So this isn’t intended to be a video game blog. However, a sufficiently large percent of my time (much to my dismay) is spent playing them, so they tend to press upon the mind. And, as a result, I blog about them, for which I apologize. I also apologize for using the word “blog” as a verb. I feel so dirty now.
Recently, in a fit of abject boredom, I downloaded the World of Warcraft trial client. As most frequent computer users know, this is to boredom what cutting is to depression: a silent cry for help. But I was bored enough that I was willing to risk the addiction; I had briefly played before (up to about level twenty or so on a friend’s account) without succumbing to the madness, so I thought I could survive another brush with the infinite. The correctness of this assumption is not the topic at hand, though it may appear in a later post.
Since it has been a while since I played WoW, I was not terribly comfortable with the keyboard. I had to futz a bit with bindings and such before I got something I was comfortable with, but even then I didn’t really know where things were. Sure, I know WASD, but ‘P’ for the spellbook? ‘-’ to drink water? I normally use those characters for typing words, not casting Frost Nova. So in the process of adjusting, I at one point accidentally pressed the Toggle Run/Walk key, which caused my character to walk around very patiently while I madly stabbed keys trying to get away from Rot Hide Gnolls.
(I have now given you enough clues to know what class and race I played. If you already reached the conclusion, without assistance, that it was an Undead Mage, you should probably get out more.)
After barely surviving my near-pretend-death experience, I thought about the implications of the Toggle Run/Walk key. This may seem like a rather idiotic thing to philosophize about, but as I have already mentioned I was pretty damn bored at the time.
