YouAreRaven.com

I’m Caleb. I’m 18. And I play World of Warcraft.

I used to play another MMO, and I kept hearing about WoW, and then eventually I migrated over and met a lot of cool people and just kinda stuck with it.

MMO is short for MMORPG which is a massively multi-player online role-playing game.

It’s very silly. A lot of MMOs get really dark and you have to kill all these people and everybody’s dead; WoW is just, it’s more fun. It’s not as dark and terrible, but it can still be dramatic.

Some of the people. Because they act like a bunch of asshats.

He is a level 85 orc shaman. I picked a different race, but he was in another faction, so I decided to switch to horde, which is what I’m playing now, and it just appealed to me. I was playing on a different character and I saw one run up to something and he hit it and a huge tornado erupted from it and I was like “that was really cool.” And I stuck with it because I like the totems. A totem is these things a shaman can make appear and each one does something different, like there’s a water totem, a manna totem that restores your manna. I’ve got a whole bunch of different totems. You’ve got one for every element.

I have 11. This one’s named Choup, thinner than chowder, thicker than soup – this one because I decided to make a funny character.

Medeas. No, a lot of these names I did make up, but not this one. The game picked a name for me. I was just starting and he was one of my first, so, I wasn’t that creative yet.

They’re all like a different aspect of myself. He’s really funny and nice, like me, and he can be a jerk. He’s helpful, but a jerk, at times.

Here’s a level 1 character I have. You start the game and there’s an opening cinematic thing that introduces you to the race you’re playing, and their little backstory. Then you get an opening quest, you complete that quest, and a completed quest gets you rewards, like money, armor, and weapons. It also gives you experience. Once you get a certain amount of experience, you’re the next level. It takes more and more quests to level up the higher and higher you get.

I’d say so. I wouldn’t say I had that last year, and by last year I mean 2009, but before that I was playing too obsessively. Then I kind of burnt out and didn’t play at all. Then I came back, and you have to have other things to occupy your time.

There’s just so much you can do. And you make lots of good friends and you only know them through the game, so maybe you’ll log in just to chat, not to actually play, just to have good conversations.

You know, it’s for nerds and people who have no life. But that’s not true, because there’s such a wide variety of people who do play WoW. It’s not just people living in their mother’s basement. People seem to see it in a negative light. Like, “people get too obsessed and spend too much time on it; they need to go out and live life”, and all that. You just have to keep one part from the other.

They’re stupid. If anything, it would probably deter violence, because if you’re taking out all of your aggression on a video game, you’re probably not going to be as angry in real life. I’ve read really good arguments, and lots of people seem to think that “it’s like a murder simulator,” not Wow but other video games, because WoW’s not that violent. “I’m shooting lightning bolts at someone; I’m going to go shoot lightning bolts at someone in real life.” It doesn’t translate. It’s ignorant people who don’t play video games in the first place who think video games equal real life when it’s not like that at all. But then there are people who get arrested and they’ll say “Grand Theft Auto made me do it.” No, they’re just looking for an excuse, a way to get out of what they’ve gotten themselves into. I can almost guarantee that those people would have committed those crimes whether they played Grand Theft Auto or not.

Well, people aren’t allowed to own guns in England, but criminals still have guns. It doesn’t take the guns out of the hands of the people who shouldn’t have them, it just makes the people who might need them to protect themselves makes it illegal for them to have them. Bad guys are going to have weapons no matter what the law says, because they don’t follow the law anyway. Even the cops don’t have guns, in England, and I think that really puts more lives in danger than it needs to. I think that would be a mistake here in the states.

Being Human, Castle, Doctor Who, Dexter, Eureka. I’m not big on vampires. Firefly, Stargate.

Most video games are escapes, because life can suck sometimes, and you might want to go ride on a dragon. Or steal a car from an old lady.

I’ve made some really good friends in WoW.

Read, play other video games. Little Big Planet 2, Gran Turismo 5, Halo.

I’d like to have my own house, family and junk: average. I’d like to not have a job, but have lots of money.

I like lots of animals. I like penguins, wolves, lions, bears. Not a fan of tigers. Everybody likes tigers. Narwhales, I love narwhales. They’re the unicorns of the sea.

“The only sovereign you can allow to rule you is reason.” That’s from the book Faith of the Fallen by Terry Goodkind. It makes me think, don’t always believe what people tell you. Because another one is, “Given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it’s true, or because they’re afraid it might be true.” That’s also Terry Goodkind.

Probably 4-5. I spend most of my day on the Internet.

I think the future will be pretty much the same, but with better graphics.

People who use the word virtually when they mean literally. And literally when they mean virtually, too. Like, “you literally have to become one with the plane.” No, you don’t.