Please be forewarned that I am channeling my inner geek for this post. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that I'm letting it run wild.
As some of you may know, I was a pretty avid World of Warcraft (Wow) player for over two years. I took some breaks along the way, but the game consumed a large portion of my leisure time. In October of 2007, I called it quits. The game was just consuming too much of my time, and there were other things that I wanted to do besides slaying digital dragons.
My decision was also heavily influenced by the fact that since I was no longer working, I had the luxury of free time. It would just be too easy to spend many more hours than I planned playing the game. There were so many times when "just five more minutes" turned into hours.
So I deleted my characters, uninstalled the game and canceled my account. I really didn't miss the game a whole lot. Sure, I did miss playing with my friends, some of whom I knew before I started playing, and others who I met along the way. Still, I never really thought much about playing until recently.
Over the last six or so weeks, I started playing the Facebook game Mafia Wars. As the name implies, its a crime family themed game, where you play the role of a mobster doing "jobs" for money and experience, and fight other mobsters. You also recruit other mobsters to be part of your family. The larger your family, the better. Its a pretty simple game, but was fun for a while. Its not really a game requiring a lot of skill. Actually, the most important thing is to recruit a lot of people in your Mafia. I created a second Facebook account for my Mafia Wars toon so I could recruit a bigger family.
Eventually, I got bored with Mafia Wars. I thought about playing Wow again. My thought was to play a few hours a day, three or four days a week. I would just play with some friends and have some fun. I didn't see any problem replacing the Mafia Wars time with Wow.
I had some of my old disks, so I began installing Wow. After I finished my disk installation, I had to downloaded many patches. I probably downloaded 5 gb or so of updated game content. I contacted Blizzard (makers of Wow), who reinstated my deleted characters. After renewing my monthly subscription, I upgraded my account so that I could play the latest content (Wrath of the Lich King).
I logged on in the evening here, and within five minutes ran into a few people that I used to raid with in the past. Both were rogues in group that I raided with for quite a while. Its a small virtual world after all.
After that quick jaunt down memory lane, I played my rogue Spurlock a bit. After about an hour or so, I had to quit because I was feeling a bit sick. I felt a bit nauseous.
This morning I played for about an hour and started to feel the same way. I think that in part it was straining my eyes. I laid down for a while and felt better. Later in the day, I made some adjustments to my monitor and tried to see if it happened again. It wasn't as bad, but only a little uncomfortable is not exactly a good reason to play the game.
Before I logged off, I wanted to do something quickly in the game. The problem was that I needed my character to go from one place to another, and to do so required me to literally wait for five minutes to start the journey (catch a zeplin). Then I had to wait for another five minutes (zeplin ride).
At that point I made up my mind that, as Sawyer (from Lost) aptly put, "what's done is done", and I was done playing Wow. So, I uninstalled and canceled again.