Acorn

Issue date: 2/22/08 Section: Opinion

Media Credit: Desiree Hykes

"Because I can" is rarely a sufficient answer. It's the sort of retort one would give only to justify the truly ridiculous?Like, say, climbing Everest without oxygen reserves or going to a Spice Girls reunion concert. It conjures up a sense of juvenile resistance like sticking it to the man, perhaps, or just plain sticking it where it doesn't want to be stuck.

This isn't to say that obstinacy is a particularly negative trait. Wars have started?more importantly, wars have ended?because one group just decided to be more damn stubborn than another. Noncompliance is a beautiful thing, after all?it separates the wheat from the chaff, the revolutionary from the conformist and the dangerously odd from the otherwise sane.

So, I found myself replying "because I can" innumerable times during my latest sojourn to Azeroth.

For the uninitiated, World of Warcraft is an online phenomenon, a pay-to-play video game with a subscriber base hovering somewhere above 10 million. It's a source of myriad procrastinations, untold addictions and unfathomable amounts of internet drama. In a nutshell, WoW, as it is abbreviated, drops you, Player X, in a virtual sandbox with Players Y and Z, expecting you to team up to take down legions of the damned, undead, irradiated, warmongering or otherwise monstrous enemies. Alternatively, you can join forces against those pesky numeric players, 1, 2 and 3. There's action and adventure aplenty, dragons to slay and kingdoms to save, but it's all quite irritatingly predicated around the "might makes right" philosophy. In other words, to solve most problems, you go out and whack them with your sword, stick, fists, claws and/or flashy magical incantations.

Of course, this makes for some pretty epic confrontations and all, but it got me wondering. And a wondering me is never really a safe thing to be around. I'd become so numb to the philosophical ramifications of my digital actions, imaginary or otherwise. What if I were to wander about the World of Warcraft as a non-combatant?

It's not that I don't enjoy the rampant and gratuitous slaughter of my enemies?only in fantasyland, I swear?but it seemed so confrontational after a while that it had turned into senseless competition for equally senseless motives. My stress relief had arbitrarily transformed into the mass-murder of automated gremlins. It was righteous and vindicated mass-murder of clearly defined minions in the traditional good-versus-evil setting, but mass-murder nonetheless. What were other players, so caught up in their make-believe rivalries, likely to think? Could I progress, or could I even enjoy myself, with such a pacifistic handicap?

Continued...

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