Letter from the Editor

     I’ve been playing Warcraft for eleven years now.  It was a cornerstone of my teenage years and continues to play a massive role in my adult life, and I’m not alone.  Millions of people all over the world have Warcraft accounts, and they all play for their own reasons.  The main feature of this issue will explore some of the reasons people have for sinking so much of their time into just one video game.  We’ll also look at the new dungeon Siege of Boralus, check out some gamer gear, answer questions from fans and more!

-Jeff Deetman, Editor-In-Chief

Warcraft Weekly - Mission Statement

This magazine is written to share my passion for World of Warcraft with fellow players, casual and fanatical.

Article Brainstorming

     It's time to throw words at the blog like proverbial spaghetti to see what sticks.  I think I'd like to write about Warcraft.  After the last blog where I talked about it and Dark Souls, I feel like I'd really enjoy writing about the games I love playing.  Since I've played Warcraft the most, and have already spent many nights reading obscure wiki articles, I already know a somewhat shameful amount about its history and mechanics.

 
     I think I'd like to write an article describing the Old God characters.  Their design is based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft: the creator of characters like Cthulhu and Dagon.  I've always found them interesting because of how ominous and mysterious they are.  Much like Lovecraft's Old Ones, the Old Gods rarely present themselves directly in the story.  Instead, they manipulate and terrorize characters from afar with maddening whispers and cunning plots.  There are four in total: one was killed before the events of the game, two were defeated by players in the base game and the second expansion, and the last one seems to be the focus of the current narrative.  

 
     Another thing I could write about is a description of common game activities.  I could run readers through a hypothetical dungeon or raid, talking about the sort of things they'll see and the types of other players they'd encounter.  I can discuss how forming groups has changed since I started playing eleven years ago with the advent of new features like the dungeon finder and raid finder tools.  I could talk about why I dislike player-versus-player content and prefer to focus on cooperative and solo play elements. 

    

     I could give a rundown of a few different classes in the game.  Originally there were nine classes players could pick from.  The second, fourth and seventh expansions each added a new class to the game.  Discussing all of them would far exceed the length requirement of the assignment, so I should narrow it down to the one or two classes I enjoy the most.  I could talk about their context within the game and why I enjoy them.

     

     Perhaps I could talk about the larger context of the game and how it grew from "they're making that into a roleplaying game?" to an industry titan.  It seems like every year or so whispers of some new game come along and people end up calling it the "WoW-killer."  Despite a dip in subscribers around 2012, no game has come close to dethroning it as the king of online gaming.  I could briefly  run through the history of the genre from tabletop Dungeons and Dragons to the first popular massive multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) like Ultima online and Everquest. Finally I could bring up Warcraft's history as a strategy game and how it morphed into an Everquest clone and eventually an Everquest killer.

    Ever since Activision, the company most well known for publishing the Call of Duty series, purchased Blizzard, the company that owns World of Warcraft, the game has been drastically simplified.  I could talk about how difficult and niche the game used to be and how the new design  decisions made by Activision helped the game appeal to a broader, more casual audience.  As a result, I could address how long-time fans of the game were upset by the changes and how they felt it ruined what made the game great. 

     Somewhat related to the previous idea but comprehensive enough to be its own article, I could write about the upcoming Warcraft Classic that Blizzard announced last year.  The idea is that they re-release World of Warcraft in its base form which thrilled players who were a fan of the game that was, before all of the expansions warped it as to be unrecognizable.  I could speculate on how successful I think the game would really be.  Would it be a hit, drawing people away from the  modern version, or would people finally take their rose-colored glasses off and realize they've been blinded by nostalgia all this time?

     Look at all this proverbial spaghetti on the wall.  What a proverbial mess.

Favorite Genre

     If you've read my first blog post you know I'm a fan of fantasy games. If you read my first blog

post then you know I'm a fan of World of Warcraft.  Another series I love passionately is Dark Souls.  The two series are both fantasy and thus have common themes. All of the tropes are present in both: swords, sorcery, dragons, castles, dying kingdoms and plots of to seize power and take revenge. I love the genre because of the artistic possibilities they give the creators.  When you base your world on magical elements it allows you to design and create spectacular set-pieces involving impossible architecture.

     Take for example the Iron Keep in Dark Souls 2. The location is a bit silly, given that you take an elevator ride from a giant windmill in a poison swamp up to a mountain range you would think you could see as you approached the windmill.  Questionable development choices aside, the Iron Keep is made up of an ancient castle made entirely of black iron which was so heavy that it began to sink into a lake of lava. The story in Dark Souls is told passively, so there are few cut-scenes that hammer in "This is exactly what happened here and why." The developers instead choose to tell the story via the environment and descriptions of items you pick up as you travel through the zone.

     This is where video games shine as a story-telling medium compared to books and movies.  With Dark Souls you could choose to ignore the story, focusing entirely on the gripping combat and get through each beautifully designed zone as quickly as possible, but if you slow down and smell the corrupted, dying roses, the game weaves a subtle tale of tragedy and decay for each area. The Iron Keep was not originally built over a lake of lava, a silly design choice even for a fantasy game. The lake was created when the King of that castle sold his soul to an ancient and indescribable evil that lurked in the Earth below, generating a monumental fiery explosion that caused the castle to sink and transformed him into a giant demon not unlike the balrog from Lord of the Rings.

     Other locations in Dark Souls 2 include a haunted forest, a spider infested village, an ancient fort located in the woods, a painfully dark crypt, an underground gutter, and of course, a mountainous dragon lair. Each of these locations has their own tragic story that explores the main themes of the series: the disparity of light and dark and attempts by the powerful to escape the inevitable decay of time.

     Dark Souls would be considered dark fantasy, due to its mature, mostly humorless tone and oppressive, empty, haunting atmosphere. World of Warcraft is quite the opposite. On top of being obscenely massive, it is dripping with humor, both clever and trite. All of the same tropes are present: the swords, the magic, the castles, the dying kingdoms etc. However the approach taken couldn't be more different.

     The story is told explicitly, mainly through dialogue text with non-player characters and the more thematic content being told through cut-scenes with voice acting.  Generally I appreciate subtlety and ambiguity for my narratives, and Warcraft presents its story in bombastic, almost melodramatic tones not unlike Game of Thrones or other blockbuster mainstream fantasy series.  The game has been around much longer than any game has a right to be.  Most games are made as one-and-done features, or perhaps if they're successful enough they'll have a few sequels.  Warcraft has been around for almost fifteen years.  The writing, as a result, has become almost ludicrous as the developers have had to up the ante each expansion.  For context, the original game has received eight expansions so far.  The previous expansion culminated in the players and critical story characters essentially killing the space devil to prevent him destroying the planet.  How could they possibly one-up that?  I don't know where the story is going to go from there, but the absurdity and humor of it all, again made possible by the outlandish high-fantasy concepts, are what I love about the game.  

  

To all the books I've loved before... and the ones I hated.

     I enjoy reading, though I don't read as much as I feel I should. The only complete books I remember reading in high school are To Kill a Mockingbird and The Scarlet Letter. I had had a brief but traumatic experience with Great Expectations my freshman year, but that was during my attempt of AP English after moving to a new state during the Summer. I was given two weeks to read the entire book and do all the assignments that other students had their entire break to do.

     Because I would like to end the post on a positive note, I'll start with the two books I hated. Number one, as you may guess, is Great Expectations. I'm aware that Dickens is a literary icon and I'm sure that if I tried to read it again today I would enjoy it, but the memory has been tainted by the unfair deadline I was given and all the pressure tied to it.  It was also at a reading level beyond anything I had read to that point as in middle school I had mostly read Harry Potter and Gerald Morris' King Arthur-inspired young-adult fantasy novels. I was clueless in classroom discussions, made uneasy by the number of assignments and frustrated by the dated vocabulary.  I was eventually made semi-aware of the plot by a parody episode of South Park so... "Close enough, right?" He said, sarcastically.

     The second book I did not enjoy is The Scarlet Letter. Much like with Great Expectations, I had little patience for the unfamiliar vocabulary and challenging writing style. Math was more my thing at the time, as I felt it allowed me a more active role in learning.  It was an objective problem to be solved with a concrete process that was on me to discover and implement.  Reading is so subjective and books feel so monstrously large and analysis leaves so many open ends that I don't always feel the closure of a definitively-solved math problem.  All that is fine when reading for leisure or for interest but academically I found it frustrating.  I like to think I'm better about all that today.

     And now it is time for the books I loved.  Though we didn't read the entirety of Homer's Odyssey, I did enjoy reading about Greek mythology.  This doesn't surprise me as it really isn't all that far removed from the fantasy settings I immerse myself in today.  Many elements of the movies I enjoy and the video games I play were inspired by Greek mythology, or in the case of God of War, entirely based on it.  I enjoyed the grand adventure of it all and especially the fantastic monsters and characters Odysseus came across. I am to this day disappointed by the lack of art depicting Scylla and Charybdis readily available online.  Sea monsters add a layer of alien mystery to the already interesting world of mythical creatures.

     Another book I enjoyed was Macbeth.  I know it seems contradictory to despise Great Expectations and The Scarlet Letter for their prose and enjoy Shakespeare, but I feel the main difference is how poetically Shakespeare wrote.  The rhythmic flow of the words drastically affected how I perceived them.  I am tempted to keep reading even if I don't fully process the content because of how well the syllables tie together.  As for the actual content, who doesn't enjoy some tragic, self-destructive vengeance?

     When I think about it, I spend a considerable amount of time scrolling up and down my computer's video game library brainstorming reasons not to play every single game I own. That time could be spent much more productively reading, or even writing, god-forbid. If I could motivate myself to start reading more maybe I'd have more ideas for my own writing.

Discourse Communities

     Of the many topics about which I am an expert, Air Force life is the one I have the most intimate experience with.  Those six years were the foundation of my adult life and brought me to where I am today.  I could discuss my experiences through the training pipeline, what life was like at my various duty stations, how I grew professionally, about the people I've met and how they've affected me, and my direct job experience working on aircraft.  I could also discuss the less fun side of things like disciplinary experiences and the long grueling shifts I occasionally suffered through.  As a narrative I could describe my personal growth from a wide-eyed high school graduate suffering the now-fondly-remembered shock of basic training through my separation experience and my eight month unemployment break. 

     The World... of Warcraft.  Admittedly not as important or as interesting to most as the real one, the World of Warcraft is another aspect of my life I've held dearly since before the Air Force.  Much to the chagrin of my classmates I could discuss the vibrant lore and history of the game and its strategy-based predecessors.  I could discuss historical elements more relevant to reality like the relatively infamous corrupted blood plague that I understand was studied by real-world disease control experts for how people reacted to a simulated epidemic.  I could bring up social elements such as how many people make friends for life or even get married to people they've met in the game... or discuss the other side of the community such as those who crashed and massacred an in-game funeral event a group held for a fallen member.  Moreover, I could talk about how important the game was for me to keep in touch with my middle school friends after I moved to North Carolina, and then with my high school friends as well once I joined the Air Force.  I could compare and contrast the many pre-expansion events I participated in as some were incredibly fun and notable and others were bare-bones and comparatively dull. 

https://www.pestwiki.com/shrew-facts-get-rid/

     The southwestern desert shrew and its profound effects on its environment.  Shrews are adorable, look at that snoot!  Need I say more?  Yes.  But this is a joke so moving on!

     Guitar.  While my interest has fallen off a bit since I joined the military, guitar and World of Warcraft were the two things that brought my high school best friend and I together.  I could talk about different brands of guitars and their reputations, or the different genres of music I enjoy playing and why.  Most dramatically I could discuss the struggles of needing to replace my strings but not wanting to do so because it's a pain but when I play the rust on the strings rubs off and makes everything smell weird and my laziness is at war with my otherwise clean nature and the cognitive dissonance threatens to tear my brain apart like a badly written run-on sentence.