Wow, what just happened?

"Onward, my stalwary compatriots, to social apathy and shunting of all adult responsibilities!"

As evidenced from ny last posting date, I have not been keeping up with my blog. What happened, you ask? WoW happened. Go figure.

Okay, so maybe it's not completely WoW's fault. I'm also making preparations to head over to the Motherland in a few weeks, so there's been preparations on that front as well.

Because this blog is ostensibly a video game blog (ugh, I am mental garbage), I will tie both aforementioned subjects together, which are China and WoW. For those of you who don't know, this will not be my first stint in the great People's Republic, as I spent all of 2006 living on the outskirts of the city teaching English to Chinese students, which was more or less one of the most awesome experiences of my short life.

However, not everything was peachy. Amongst academic laziness and failing to concentrate on what was important, ie. speaking and listening comprehension over the decidedly difficult and morale-crushing mechanics of English grammar, a slipshod system comprised of "ifs, buts, and hows" and near impossible for even native English speakers to follow on a subconscious basis, another problem that plagued some of my students was their frequent forays into the realm of Azeroth.



Console gaming is predominantly a middle-class phenomenon, especially now. As the cost of producing a triple-A title for a console nears Hollywood-like figures, civilian upkeep is expected to keep up with the times as well. This calls for a decent sized television set, preferrably HD in order to play HD-optimized games, and well, lots of money to buy each individual game. With that in mind, console gaming is even more a phenomenon in China, especially because China doesn't have a pronounced middle-class, at least not like how we have it out here.

So, while there may be kids in China synching Devil May Cry cutscenes to Linkin Park's "In The End," I can offer a guess that there are probably twenty times that amount of kids on Baidu.com looking for WoW PvP videos, given the accessibility and prevalance of cyber-cafes throughout Asia. Make no mistake about it, WoW is freaking huge out there. Coke cans that one would be accustomed to seeing high-profile athletic or movie endorsements instead feature Night Elf Rogues in all the supermarkets in Beijing. Although I'm not sure if the number of Chinese WoW players has reached the point of Starcraft-like figures in Korea, it's a safe bet that the game has already done its job in permeating the fabric of Chinese youth culture.

I don't even know what the point of this entry was. Most likely, just to establish the fact that WoW is fucking huge over there. Pretty soon, I'm going to start referring to China as "over here" which is both exciting and scary, exciting in that I will soon be lent numerous possibilities to make WoW cracks since it's just damn prevalent, and scary in how little else I might end up blogging about. We'll see.