Image source: Blizzard
When you hear about the game World of Warcraft, what images come to mind? Maybe you think of the bespectacled slob playing the game mindlessly in the “Make Love, Not Warcraft” episode of South Park. Maybe you think of hopeless Internet addicts hooked on Warcrack. If you’re up on Internet meme lore, maybe you’re even thinking about the infamous Leroy-Jenkins-shouting, chicken-enjoying daredevil who ran fecklessly into a room full of whelpling eggs wiping out his entire group after a bout of careful, but fruitless, planning.
You’re probably not thinking about how epidemiologists studied how gamers reacted to a virtual corrupted-blood epidemic to study how humans would react in a real epidemic or how the game developers have launched one of the biggest worker unions in the gaming industry.
You’re also most-definitely not thinking about a nearly fifty-year-old woman cozying up to her gaming laptop to play a cozy round of World of Warcraft.
I, too, held your preconceptions about the type of person who played a massively online role-playing game (MMORPG) like WoW. Surely, this person was a male nerd who spent copious hours online and out of the sun. When a friend invited my husband and I to just try the game during one of its many free weekends, I thought I was going to be bored out of my mind with endless shooting and wargames.
But the game, for me anyway, was about wild exploration of massive and in-depth digital worlds built over decades. I spent hours wandering around beautiful landscapes and gathering herbs, finding mounts, collecting pets, and fishing.
Yes, I could just spend hours watching a digital bobber in the beautiful Azeroth waters. And for me, that is why I find this to be a cozy game.
Now, there are others, including my husband, who spend just as many hours studying ability stats and raid strategies to get the best (min-max) possible fighting outcome when they engage in multiplayer battles against either other people or the game’s gorgeous dungeons.
What I love about the game is that it is so full of years of narrative and worlds to explore, so full in fact, that one of the game’s many achievements it awards is Loremaster, which rewards you for discovering each expansion’s new lore.
Every year, my WoW game playing peters out, but every year, when Blizzard releases its better-than-reality cinematics announcing a new expansion, I get sucked right back in.
And because it’s so cozy in Azeroth, I don’t mind one bit.
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