WoW: in the beginning...

It’s hard to talk about World of Warcraft to non-WoW people. It’s a little better with other gamers, but non-gamers? Almost a non-starter.

About a year ago, when asked about covering shifts, I said I’d like to avoid Tuesday and Wednesday nights; when pressed, I said it was my Raid Night and I didn’t want to let my guild down. Commence crickets and owl blinks. Later, one of my colleagues, an almost-older adult asked what a “raid” is exactly. I joked whether she had an hour; she very seriously replied that she had 45 minutes, would that do? So, over coffee, I explained it as such:

Warcraft is an MMORPG, massive multiplayer online role playing game. It’s played in real time, it continues playing even when your character is not logged on and it takes place in a fantasy universe. For the most part, you play solo, doing quests for rewards (like weapons, armour or gold). In some instances, you have a hard boss to defeat and you need more than one person. Sometimes you have REALLY hard bosses and you need ten people. These instances are called “raids” and your party must work together. So far, so good.

My party consists of people from my guild. A guild is a group of people who like playing together and help each other out (with bosses or rewards). So, my party has decided that we will raid together on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. People in my guild are from all over the world: Toronto, Texas, Edinburgh, etc. Our party consists of three type of players: tanks, healers and damage-dealers (DPS, further broken into melee and ranged groups). Tanks wear heavy armour so they take a lot of damage and keep the focus of the boss, but they do very little damage themselves. Healers do almost no damage, wear flimsy armour, can take no hits, but heal everyone else. DPS classes wear light armour, do mega damage from far away (ranged) or right up close (melee), but can’t take more than a hit or two. Together, as a team, they work together to taken down bosses that can take and deal a LOT of damage. The rewards are especially good weapons, armour, gems, etc.

I won’t say she understood all of it, but she did understand that it was a little more than just a game, that if I’m late or don’t show, I let a bunch of people down all around the world. I feel like I did my bit for bridging the generational gap.