First Loves

I’m tired this morning – raiding too late and getting to bed at one am is making me not a very nice person.  It’s making me an evil cow who made a nice but very slow cashier at a petrol station cry, actually – not to put too fine a point on it.  (Dear lady, I’m sorry that my tapping the nozzle-thing on the pump kept setting off alarms behind the counter so you couldn’t think or wait on customers. But you want to know the honest truth? At the time, I didn’t care. Turn the pumps on. When a customer is standing there looking at you through the window, turn the goddamn pumps on. I don’t care how slow you are or how many customers are waiting for you to give them the wrong change. Just turn it on.)

Meh.  It’s definitely a Monday.

I’m thinking about buying Tabula Rasa, and getting a subscription for a while. I like the idea of main story-driven characters that are actually walking around in game, played by real people.  I’m still addicted to WoW – as I’ve written before, even with the problems involved in juggling work and life and gaming, I still love it. It would be nice to have a change, though.  When I was a kid and teen, and to a certain extent even now, I was a total sci fi nerd.  I loved Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, and so on. A sci fi MMO might be interesting, and I hear that Tabula Rasa has improved since the beta, when I thought that it seemed too drab to be interesting to play.

I think part of the problem is that other games just don’t compare to Warcraft.  I read a good Tobold post this morning about this effect: Spoilt rotten by World of Warcraft?  Someone (I don’t remember where) called LOTRO “the methadone of WoW”.  In other words, you get addicted, but not as much – it’s a way of weaning yourself off MMOs. Nothing else is just as immersive – I don’t connect with those worlds as much as I have to Warcraft.

And yet, like wanting to fall in love again, I want that.  I want that feeling of the first day that I realised that I’d played for four or five hours straight, totally immersed. (A huge step for me, as I’d never really played an MMO before.) I want to fall in love with it…and I just haven’t met the next “One”.

Ah, WoW.  We’re still speaking, even having fun together now and then. But we’re at that point in the relationship where we both know it’s ending. Somewhere out there is the one for me, my new love. I’m waiting, and looking.  Oh, sure, we’ll promise to always keep in touch, and we’ll probably have one night stands now and then, reliving old memories.  But we know it’s over.