So I started playing World of Warcraft again. Surprise! The excitement of Cataclysm was too much for me to resist. Christina is playing again too! We’re doing a pretty good job balancing that and other games, I think. BUT. That’s not what this post is about.

I don’t really know what makes me do it, but when I play MMOs I like to make up a backstory and personality for my character. Now, I don’t roleplay or anything. I don’t write it up or post it anywhere (except for right now). It’s really just for me, just stuff I come up with as I explore the world that my character inhabits. When there are games with existing worlds and I create a character that lives in that world, I really like to think about where they fit in. I guess it’s the writer in me.

I’m not going to lie to you, the reason I haven’t updated much this past week is because of World of Warcraft. I make no excuse for it, but I would like to talk about it a bit more.

I got sucked into it pretty bad recently, and I’m taking a break for a while so I can get back into other things and try to re-balance my free time again. With Cataclysm, the next expansion, coming out soon, I was just in a mad rush to do too many things all at once so whenever I had free time and as a result everything else started to suffer. I have a bit of an obsessive personality as it is, so it was all really just a recipe for disaster.

I’m a World of Warcraft player. I’m not one of those super-hardcore, “Leave me alone because I have a raid” no-life players. I enjoy the game, and I play it quite often, but I mostly play because I enjoy exploring the world and becoming involved in the lore.

One thing that a lot of people don’t know about me, and something I consider one of my more charming character quirks, is that I am completely incapable of playing a bad guy in a video game. When I play BioWare games, I’ve literally reloaded a previous save when I accidentally get Dark Side or Renegade points. I play all games with a morality system as the super-ultra nice guy, because I get really uncomfortable even PRETENDING to be a jerk.

Aside from Super Mario Galaxy 2, which I can’t play until we get our Wii back from Nintendo, there’s really only two games I’ve had any interest in playing lately: Pokémon and World of Warcraft. I’ve been trying to think of WHY these are the only two games to keep my attention, and in the process I’ve come to realize what my motivations are for playing video games at this point.

Right now, I don’t have a lot of free time. I’m an adult with a full-time job, I live with my fiancé, I’m trying to run a blog and I have obligations and errands and things. When I sit down to play a video game, I want to make sure I get something out of it and I’m not just wasting my precious free time. What I’m really looking for now when I sit down to play is a sense of accomplishment.