January 2, 2005

This Christmas break, I had just come off a semester so full of stress and work that I did what any sane person would do the first significant break he got: made about twenty time-consuming commitments. You might have mistaken me for a Youth & Family Ministry major, making so many promises I couldn't really keep! "Will you help out with the church website?" "Sure!" "Will you work on a project or two for the office?" "Sure!" "Will you rewrite the entire worldwide HTML standard to get my website to do this?" "Sure!" And so on, and so on, until quickly, the incredible break I was looking forward to was looking more like the results of a court order than a holiday.

But fortunately for me, I am a computer science major, and if there's anything we know, it's how to goof off aggressively. So I purchased an MMORG, a video game to play during my off hours, meaning all of them. MMORG stands for "Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game," and is in no way pronounced "mmm-morgue," as if you had just finished enjoying a dinner of cadaver containers, although it should be. This is exactly the kind of game a person who has things to do should not buy.

The particular game I bought is called "World of Warcraft," a lush 3D world full of amazing features like (these are my personal favorites):

• No graduate school applications!
• No desperately trying to convince HTML that an image aligned to the "bottom" should go to the "bottom" instead of the "top!"
• And no taking down the Christmas tree lights, of which there were over 7.2 gazillion on the tree at last count, necessitating the actual rewiring of the house to prevent the spontaneous combustion of the dining room!

I don't mind obligations, really. They just need to be reasonably parceled out and completable on a daily basis, like "make sure to breathe regularly" or "eat a packaged snack food every so often." These I can handle, provided they meet an immediate and obvious need. "Slice your gums to ribbons with a saliva-beaded white thread on a regular basis" is less likely to happen, as is anything that has a deadline sometime off in the indefinite future, defined as tomorrow or later. It's not so much that I can't keep up with them or remember them. It's just that each deadline that gets "pushed onto the stack" so to speak (forgive the computer science nerd reference) weighs me down just a little bit more, so I become more grouchy. In fact, by about two or three tasks, I'm already as pleasant to be around as a cat in a washing machine.

Speaking of cats, have I ever mentioned how I am not a "cat person," meaning a person who is insane enough to find cats "cuddly" rather than "tornadic claw-flailing demonic imps?" One of the people on the Boston team with me owns a cat that, as best as I can tell, is the most evil creature in the entire world, including Nancy Pelosi. It would stand on top of a cabinet as we would walk by in the dark, its eyes glowing like a creature from "Doom 2," arching its back and hissing violently, until his owner poked him with a stick, causing him to whirl around on the kitchen floor in the manner of a Tasmanian devil, screeching and moaning until finally it fled into the other room. At this, the cat's owner smiled and chuckled a light, easy chuckle, as if he were thinking, "So cuddly." You see?! Cat people are insane!

When a dog wants to be petted, it may hop onto the chair beside you or lick you, whereas a cat will dig into your flesh with its claws. "Oh, she's just playing with you," the owners of the cat will say as the thing attempts to playfully gouge your eyeballs out. The owners themselves may be covered in bandages and casts from previous "playful" experiences with the cat, but all they can say to the cat is "I don't know what's gotten into you!" rather than what I would say, that is, "To the Korean restaurant with you!"

Anyway, I love playing "World of Warcraft," and there are many features contained therein that I think God would do well to install for the next upgrade of "Earth." For example, in WoW, you are able to logout and log back in whenever you please, causing your little dwarf or troll to vanish conveniently from the world and pop back in whenever you want to keep playing. There are all kinds of times when this ability would come in handy. Like, when those certain people (sometimes called "adults") come up to you who can't start a conversation with you without reminding you of your obligations and duties ("Ho ho, there, young man, how's your schoolwork coming along? Been cutting your gums with a saliva-beaded piece of white thread lately? Ho ho!"), you could type "/logout" and that would be that. Or, if you didn't want to hurt the person's feelings, you could always just type "/afk" (away from keyboard), hop up and go get a Sprite or maybe an Oreo undetected, and then come back when it's all over. Or, even better, you could just go to your chat box and turn off that person's chat channel. The possibilities are endless.

Also in WoW, learning whole new skills, like blacksmithing and smelting, takes all of 5 nanoseconds. This is how college would go if our lives were more like that: you would wander into a building where a character labeled "Professor" would be standing in the classroom 24/7, not moving, eating, or blinking, just staring ahead at the wall, and you would right click on him, and he would say (after some canned small talk*), "What skills would you like to learn today, Chris Guin?" and present you with a list: "HTML Encoding $4500 . Game Programming $5500 . Aggressive Goofing Off $7500." You would just make your selection, a brilliant flash of light would go off, and that would be that. Knowledge imparted! More time to go slay minotaurs!

It would also improve the tasks and obligation side of life, too. If your mother wanted you to take out the trash, for example, she would appear, standing in the laundry room, with a golden exclamation point hovering over her head until you clicked on it. Then, she would explain, in dramatic Tolkein-esque dialogue, her present dilemma** and offer you an Exciting Quest should you choose to accept it, in exchange for any number of wonderful treasures, such as a TiVo Remote of +4 Channel Changing or a sizeable quantity of chore completion points. Or, you could push Ignore Quest and continue on, no hurt feelings.

Anyway, I still have a whole week to get all the things done I've been meaning to do. Once I've got my World of Warcraft playing out of the way, that should leave several whole minutes to get that stuff done! There's hope yet.

* "Whoo boy, what a day it has been, standing here staring at the wall and saying the same thing to every random avatar that barges in here uninvited!"

** "For the children of Lord Master Guin did not remove their filthy plates from the high living room, and greatly shalt thou be rewarded should thee return with them before nightfall! Go forth, brave and noble warrior!"