Mentalechoes

I’ve been spending a lot more time just recently in virtual worlds, mainly World of Warcraft, and Lord of the Rings Online, with the occassional jaunt in City of Heroes for a bit of light entertainment. I was quite addicted to WoW at one stage of my life, but seeing as I have an obsessive personality (disorder), this isn’t really surprising, and so I did actually lose a fair chunk of real life. These days it’s not so much giving up on real life, as it is a place to hang out with mates having a laugh, while killing - virtually - whatever you can lay a weapon on (so to speak). I often wonder if these games are training the next generation of psychopath because you pretty much just kill anything that looks at you funny, all for the fun of it. [Disclaimer - I am totally joking, and aware that there is no link between being a psychopathic killer and computer games... except for GTA3, because I saw an episode of CSI Miami where these kids were killing people because they thought they were in a computer game. Because it's an American TV drama, it must be true!]

With this in mind, I thought I would take it upon myself to help out those reality challenged individuals who didn’t know if they living in a virtual or real world, by compiling a guideline I thought I would call… drum roll…

10 things to help you work out if you’re living in a virtual world.

-1- When you die you don’t go to heaven, but just go transparent for a while, and everybody ignores you when you walk past.

-2- It only takes 15 seconds to make anything, regardless of how complicated it is, or how many parts go into it.

-3- You can run forever without getting tired.

-4- For no good reason, complete strangers will ask you to go get them 30 hides of some creature you’ve never heard of… and you don’t laugh in their face.

-5- You will make friends with people who look decomposing corpses, and you’ll think they’re really cool.

-6- The expression “catching a flight” means getting into the saddle of some animal rather than being seated in airplane.

-7- Friends have a green circle around them, enemies have red. There is no in-between, or grey area, and nobody is just “okay”.

-8- You hardly ever change your clothes, and noone will mind, in fact it will be seen as quite normal.

-9- You willingly put yourself in mortal danger because it’s “fun”.

And lucky number…

-10- It only takes 10 minutes to travel from one side of the world to the other, and that’s considered to be a really long time!

So next time you’re confused which reality you’re in, just use this as a checklist and you’ll be fine.

Padwanna!