An old friend
World of Warcraft is what's known as an MMORPG, which stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. The "role playing" part refers to the way you can create different characters with different abilities and play through the game multiple times; each time will be slightly different.
Since WoW is online, you're constantly surrounded by the hundreds of other players in your small corner of your server. You can chat with them, fight alongside them, fight against them, help them, harass them, or ignore them at your pleasure. A small population of the players, though, focuses on the role playing aspect of the game. They create intricately detailed characters and interact with other players as if they were their character, and not themselves. Blizzard has, in fact, reserved specific servers for role players to find and communicate with one another.
After reading about this online last week, I decided to give it a try. An unintended and welcome side effect of this has been that I'm doing some creative writing for the first time since college. To be honest, I'd forgotten how much I enjoy it. It's been like an old friend I haven't seen in more than a decade, and catching up has been a blast.
If you'd like to read what I've written so far, I've created a separate creative writing weblog to put it all in one place.