I’ve just read blog posts from Tom Coates and Rafe Colburn talking about time spent playing World of Warcraft that might have been better spent on more worthwhile pursuits - such as writing, hacking, reading, getting outside, etc.
Well, the first thing I have to say is that there’s nothing inherently wrong with WoW. One of my best friends spends most nights in the world, along with his sweetie and the occasional get together with nephews and friends. It seems to me that he doesn’t feel the compulsion to do anything in particular after work, beyond enjoying his time - and this is something he enjoys and provides something quite a bit more like a social life than television.
Imagine not being a workaholic - I find it difficult, how about you?
I tend to tell people that I’m lucky not to have a machine decent enough to run WoW. I’ve got plenty of hardware capable of doing all manner of web development and tinkering tasks, but none with the muscle to run a modern 3-D game. I have played WoW, however, on a friend’s computer and a borrowed account. It’s certainly fun, and I’d play it again, but I didn’t really feel an irresistible gravity of addiction. No, what was starting to draw my interest is that the game client has an API and is scriptable in Lua.
That’s when I return to a notion that occurred to me a few years ago: That is, hacking is my EverQuest. I swear I blogged about it, but I can’t find the post. So, to refresh the idea - Hacking is my WoW. My friend’s got a gnome with a monocle; I’ve got a Linksys WRT54G router that runs Netrek. The gnome’s nicer to look at, though.
On one hand, my compulsion to hack and learn has rewarded me professionally and around the internets. But, on the other hand, WoW is a heck of a lot easier to /quit.
2 Comments
I’m always attracted to the idea of “The Zen Art of Programming”. Development is my meditation. Desigining an architecture or writing a piece of code is like solving a koan.
I think this happens to more people that one may realize. It’s why mods like Counter-Strike for Half-Life showed up. There were people more interested in programming for a game than playing the game itself. The game merely a new problem to be solved or played with.
So get the best of both worlds… hack World of Warcraft.
It uses Lua for add-ons, and you can write your own. I’m working on that now for a grad school project. It’s a blast and a very fun application of your programming talents. :)
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[...] Att lära sig programmera tar lång tid, att spela Wow tar minst lika mycket tid av vardagen; frågan är bara vilket som är bäst lämpat som fritidshobby. 0xDECAFBAD har en suverän slutkläm på sitt inlägg Hacking is my World of Warcraft. On one hand, my compulsion to hack and learn has rewarded me professionally and around the internets. But, on the other hand, WoW is a heck of a lot easier to /quit. [...]
[...] world of warcraft is my world of warcraft Remember when I wrote that hacking is my World of Warcraft? Well, lately, World of Warcraft has been my World of Warcraft. Yes, that’s right: I’m on that slippery slope now. My best friend and Best Man back in Michigan handed me a copy of the game as a going-away present, ostensibly to help keep in touch. So, to recouperate from the book writing, the marrying, the moving, and the new jobtaking - I’ve been maintaining laziness on the extracurricular hacking front, and WoW has appeared in the vacuum. I can only hope that I don’t next progress into a stage of “Hacking WoW is my Hacking”. Smack me if my name starts appearing on this site. [...]
[...] An interesting aside is that some Free Software hackers actually call F/OSS hacking their own kind of MMORPG, and many of the same traits are present: Online sociality, common goals, fun and learning. One hacker even wrote an applet for GNOME so that he could see his GNOME Bugzilla level directly from the desktop panel: [...]
[...] though, I’ve gone habitually quiet in the past few years. I’ve gone from claiming that hacking is my World of Warcraft to just getting sucked into WoW proper. It’s gotten to the point that I’ve wondered [...]