If you’re doing a report on somebody who’s just killed a bunch of prostitutes, or has been found a serial child molestor, or has contracted some kind of rare but incredibly scary disease, and you find yourself putting pen to paper or facing the TV camera and using any of these phrases:
“described as a quiet man…”
“kept himself to himself…”
“never had a bad word to say…”
then not only are you indulging in an unforgivable cliche, but you’ve also interviewed the wrong people.
If you ask me about any of my neighbours, none of whom I know from an early male australopithecene, there’s a reasonable chance I will describe them as “quiet”.
Because whenever I see them, they don’t say anything to me.
They could be beating up their entire families every night, for all I know. They could be indulging in gay Nazi swinger orgies with minor Royals. They could have legions of disabled incest children locked in their cellars. I don’t know.
A child performs the 80s classic “Machadaynu”, the first time anyone’s felt moved to reply to something I put on Youtube. (the original is not my work, obviously)
Something’s clearly missing in my life, I thought.
So I started playing World Of Warcraft.
If you’re going to be so very tragic, you may as well go the whole nine yards.
Complete the cliché.
World Of Warcraft, you’re far too cool and hip to know, is a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. Orcs and stuff.
You start off by creating an unfeasibly physically endowed character, then run around hitting things with unfeasibly large swords and collecting coins and various pieces of digital detritus on the understanding that, given enough man hours, you may be able to one day win a Sword Of +500 Stamina or something.
And because it’s massively multiplayer, you do all this while 15-foot-tall Conan types controlled by 15-year-old Dutch kids run circles around you, pointing, laughing and calling you a “fuckin noob”.
It’s terribly realistic.
For example, within my first few hours in WoW I wandered into my first major city and attempted to buy some cheese from a cheese shop. Just like in real life.
I was given the option of buying some “Swiss” cheese.
You see, those crafty dimension-hopping Swiss cheesemakers have somehow managed to infiltrate Azeroth.
That, or the ignorant yanks responsible for coding WoW all think “Swiss” just means “it’s got holes in it”.
But the cheesemaker refused to sell me the Swiss cheese, on the tenuous grounds that you have to be Level 25 or higher to eat Swiss cheese, and I was a mere Level 4.
In order to eat the good cheese, I was going to have to “level up” some more, which would entail gaining “experience” over the course of a couple of weeks by killing about twenty thousand assorted beasts, demons and members of other sentient humanoid species.
If Kraft were to bring in such a policy, it would certainly not be pleasant but it would arguably offer a solution to the world’s overpopulation problem.
None of the aforementioned Dutch 15-year-olds seem to be bothered by the cheese problem, so I won’t dwell on it, lest I look like an oldie.
While the average age of a WoW player is apparently 28.3, trying to not look like an oldie is still a recurring problem for me on WoW.
When an elf druid asked me the other day who was my favourite out of “Twilight”, it took a few minutes to establish that he/she was referring to a film about vampires or something, and not, as I had thought, some elf city I had yet to visit.
ME: Oh, right, I’ve heard of that
ME: It was parodied on South Park the other week
ELF: lol
ME: It’s like The Lost Boys, right?
ELF: wahts the lost boys>
ME: Vampire movie from the 80s
ELF: the 80s?????
ME: Ever heard of Corey Haim?
I wouldn’t mind, but I deliberately chose a “roleplaying” server on which to deploy my toon in order to avoid precisely this kind of situation.
On roleplaying servers you’re not allowed to call your troll warlock Cheesedick69, for example. And you’re supposed to talk in character for the most part.
I thought this would be the perfect way to avoid txt, a language with which I am still sadly utterly bewildered.
It didn’t quite work out that way.
Within minutes of logging in for the first time, my toon was wandering around looking at stuff, trying to figure out what to do first and what was safe to hit with my sword, when it had its first encounter with another real human being.
A man resembling Hulk Hogan in a loin cloth approached and enquired: “Will you strip for me?”
I should point out at this point that my toon is the spitting image of Halle Berry but with a far nicer rack.
Not only because of the whole-nine-yards philosophy outlined above. But also because, when it comes to creating virtual characters for third-person video games, I’m of the school that believes it’s much nicer to stare at a make-believe woman’s arse for hours on end.
Anybody who thinks it’s gay is fooling themselves.
I hadn’t figured out how to twat other players with my big sword yet, so I felt duty-bound to respond to this creep in character, with an outburst of pseudo-medieval filth.
It turns out I needn’t have bothered. There doesn’t appear to be much roleplaying going on here.
Which is why I find myself socialising, for want of a better term, mainly with Dutch and Scandinavian players. Regardless of age, it turns out that their written English skills are far superior to those of their British counterparts.
There’s something seriously wrong when I find it easier to interact virtually with foreigners than my own people.
(if you’re wondering whether WoW may be the reason this blog has not been updated in two weeks, you’d be hitting the nail rather precisely on the head)
, obviously)