2/14/17, hour long session at home. This assignment to play World of Warcraft is one that I am approaching hesitantly. I played it for a six month period in high school, and it devoured my life, such that I have no memories of that time other than playing this game. I want to reactivate my old account for this project and continue with my level sixty-something human paladin. I don’t think that would be a good idea, however, so I made a dummy gmail account and made a free trial version. During this session I didn’t make much progress, other than struggling over what class and race to play. Some significant changes had been made since i last played (7 years ago), such as the depth of the character customization. It used to be that everyone looked more or less the same with different hair and races, but now its possible to get the details down to the type of mouth modified. I decided to worry about that last, and after some struggle and lots of reading up on classes (its been long enough that i have forgotten a lot of my old knowledge), I decided to create an Undead male warlock. In my old profile I had an undead mage, and I thought it would be interesting to see how the Undead’s standing in the World had changed after the 3-4 expansions that have been released since I stopped playing. I also wanted to experience a new type of class, more specifically, a spell caster that relies on the summoning of minions and powerful demons to soak up damage and protect me, as opposed to just laying waste with a barrage of spells. I also settled on an undead with it’s jaw missing, letting the tongue hang out, because I like the idea of a “main character” who cannot speak properly. It seems appropriate for an MMO, where there are thousands of “main characters” and the narrative plot really doesn’t matter. I am most interested to make it to the levels that let me join the dungeon raiding system. If “grinding” through levels is the work of an MMO, the dungeon raiding is the recreation. Upon my entry into the World I completed a couple of simple quests before the game saddled me with an annoying NPC that followed me around speaking in text boxes. I had never encountered this before while playing, so i thought it was some other player being overly friendly. So (me thinking this was a real person) I decided to spite him, and not give him help with his quests, so I logged out, waited for ten minutes then logged back in. I was shocked to find the NPC still standing there and following me. It was only after ignoring the character and turning in the quest that it ran off and I realized that I had been an idiot, playing chicken with an NPC. Having discovered this, my shame in myself couldn’t let me keep playing for the day. Just that little taste of the old MMO grind has made me start thinking about playing more though. This assignment might be the rekindling of an old obsession.