Level up!

So after months of intermittent lobbying by my friend Badpie, and then a solid weekend of nagging by her husband M@, (no doubt on her behalf,) I am almost convinced to get a World of Warcraft account.* I might split the difference and get an Xbox Live gold account so I can play Halo or something with them before I dive into full Massively Multiplayer mode.

Sigh. I am a solitary gamer, people. It's in my blood. I play games to get away from people. But I'll admit, the prospect of getting to play with people I actually know is kinda tempting.

But I'm not quite convinced. However, a week or so ago Maggie from Kotaku divulged that she is in the same boat. In this article, she writes about her first foray into MMO territory, which doesn't sound too bad. And there's also this article from Only a Game, which gets into the differences between solitary and social gamers. Central to the difference is the experience of "fiero", which is the feeling of having triumphed over adversity. Apparently MMO's stimluate fiero in people more than solitary games.

Okay, so I'm just realizing that I have just quoted a statistical study on the emotional response caused by different kinds of VIDEO GAMES.

I think that means I just went up a nerd level. Yay?


*This is fair. I am actively feeding her Oblivion addiction.