Two Things That Give Ali a Boner

My friend Ali has a very short list of things that make him immediately, visibly excited: attractive women and World of Warcraft. When the first beta keys for The Burning Crusade went out, he got one of them, which left him in a state I can only describe as religiously euphoric.

For most people—including the guy in that South Park episode who looks at Randy’s son and asks, completely genuinely, "Is that a computer game?"—WoW is just a game. For the others, it’s an existence. A world with geography, social hierarchies, reputations earned over hundreds of hours. The line between playing it and living it is genuinely thin for some people, and Cartman’s arc in that episode isn’t really satire so much as documentary. I’d always kept my distance from WoW specifically because I could feel the pull of it and knew exactly what it would do to my sleep schedule.

But The Burning Crusade changed something. New races, new zones, a redesigned interface—and the idea of rolling a blood elf and grinding through it alongside Ali and the rest of the guild felt, for the first time, less like a trap and more like something I actually wanted. The Wii was already sitting there waiting. I was double-booked by my own appetite for something to do with my hands.