I finally joined the current generation and bought an Xbox 360 this past weekend. Now I can sit at the grownups’ table and do stuff like this:

Can a sidebar widget be far behind?

“Going forward,” expect lots of impressions of years old games that are no longer relevant and poorly edited Halo 3 videos. On the Internet! The DORK Club innovates again.

I think I’m finally over World of Warcraft.

As you can see, I scrounged together enough honor to purchase four pieces of the season 2 honor gear. Sure, they’re welfare epics, but at least I finally look cool again. I’m just not motived to log on and play any more, and didn’t even touch the game all weekend. While World of Warcraft is a significantly better game at 70 than it ever was at 60, The Burning Crusade lacks that original magic that infused every tediously repetitive moment of vanilla WoW.

For me, World of Warcraft, and MMOs in general, have always been more about goofing off with friends than playing the actual game; we raid and run PvP trains because it’s an excuse to play together. And at this point, none of my friends are playing. The majority of the characters on my friends list have transfered to other servers, and most of those who remain are banned or inactive. Running around Shattrath, I don’t recognize any of the names I see in any of the chat channels; the players and the guilds on both sides of the Horde-Alliance divide that once made the game so much fun for me on Dark Iron are long gone. Most of the characters standing in my way at the bank or in front of the flight master probably didn’t even exist before the expansion, back when Insane Kitties was neck-deep in Naxxramas.

That was in the Fall of 2006 (18 months already!), which was also the last time I played Diablo 2 with any real seriousness. At the time, the dorkclub.com extended family and I would spend most of our gaming time leveling a handful of oddball Hardcore characters, only venturing back into Naxx at night when the Australians woke up.

The differences between the two games were startling, and we joked in channel ikpriest that you could run a dozen Baal runs in the time it took to get the raid together and inside Naxxramas. Finding new loot in Diablo 2 took hours, not weeks, and you could reach any place in the game world in minutes. Obviously, we were having a lot more fun with Diablo 2 than we were with World of Warcraft.

Though I’ve sunk more hours into Blizzard’s MMORPG, no other game has held my interest as long as Diablo 2. Just yesterday I started up a new raise skeleton/dexterity necromancer (clearly a recipe for success) after a few unsuccessful minutes spent with SamWaterson, the fist of the heavens/holy shock paladin. It’s a game that never gets old. For all its failings – and there are many – Diablo 2 is a game that is infinitely replayable, and always rewards teamwork and cleverness. I can see myself still hoping on Diablo 2 every few years and leveling a character to that “proof of concept” point even after downloading Diablo 3 through Blizzard’s proprietary digital download service in 2011. I can’t imagine myself ever spending much time with World of Warcraft again, except maybe to level a Deathknight to 80.

Look, I’m updating my personal site while on the clock. For the first time ever, I’m finally making proper use of this Internet thing.

My mysterious employer has asked me to work full time for my first two weeks in order to get things rolling. So don’t expect any new content on this site in that time. Man, this week’s round-up is going to be pathetic.

On a more positive note, I now how have an hour-long BART ride each way to get caught up on my Pokemon catching.

I’ve been hired as a part-time member of the community team for a free-to-play MMO publisher. I start tomorrow, so expect this site to be mostly quiet on Monday and Tuesday.

I do, however, fully plan to continue updating this site with something resembling the breakneck pace of the last month once I’ve had a few days to settle into my new responsibilities.

Once again taking inspiration from Geoff Frazier, the name of my employer and the games they publish won’t be mentioned here. Although unlike ol’ Shlonglor, I won’t litter the site with “clever” hints as to the identity of my employer. You’re welcome.

The site was down for a few hours again last night, meaning I had no opportunity to post a nightly update before bedtime. Frankly, I think more nights are going to go without nightly updates in the future. Rather than force myself to drone on and on about some tangentially-related, boring topic, I’ll simply reserve the right to post worthless blog posts whenever the need arises.

We’re a week into The DORK Club’s new direction and I’m still playing with style and format a bit. I’m still not entirely sure how bloggy or newsy individual posts should be, and am trying to find some sort of balance between the two extremes. I don’t exactly want to sink to Kotaku or Joystiq (or The DORK Club circa one week ago) levels of baseless speculation and personal bias, but I don’t want this site to be so painfully dry either. Again, should have totally just let this site sit dormant for a week while I worked all this stuff out.

So, expect to see nightly updates less often, and not necessarily at night. I’ll most likely only post them when the site is actually updated in some way (ding sound effects, Warcraft 3 replays). I do, however, rather like the idea of a personal game journal, but I play far fewer games than this site may lead you to believe. Still, this might be something you see in the future in place of the mindless nonsense of the past week.

As you can see, my Sisters of Battle army has been busy purging the Kaurava system of heretics, with non-believers now confined to a single planet. It’s been a long, repetitive journey to get to this point, but now only the Necron and Eldar armies stand between me and a bland in-game cinematic. I plan to rip through the Necron territories as quickly as possible before savoring each and every Eldar kill. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s space elves.

In other RTS news, three new Warcraft 3 replays are now online. The extended DORK Club family and I have been working on getting our 25 win icons on these terrible, terrible accounts of ours. If we actually used viable strategies, we might even earn them before this time next year.

In order to ease this site’s transition from sporadically-updated personal site to rapidfire news blog, I’ve installed an RSS reader (specifically, RSS Reader) and subscribed to every gaming site with anything even remotely resembling an RSS feed. Every ten minutes the program chimes annoyingly and informs me of any new headlines. This allows me to spend my days watching news stories slowly crawl their way across the Internet, as every gaming news sites digests and regurgitates the same scrapes of new information. Of course, I’ve subscribed to this site as well, and I like to watch as this obscure corner of the Internet beats many of the larger sites to copy-pasting the news of the day. Take that, Kotaku.

Mostly I’ve just been posting news stories that interest me which, as I’m sure you can imagine, significantly limits the pool of potential posts. As fun as it is to watch Guitar Hero and Rock Band stories worm through my tracked RSS feeds, I’ll refrain from adding to the rhythm game noise. Unless it’s to reiterate how much I suck at them.

Also, I’m still not quite sure what to do with these nightly blog posts, as this meandering, self-indulgent mess clearly shows. Don’t be too surprised should they disappear entirely at any point in the coming weeks. For now, just be thankful I spared you the pretentious analysis of The Decalogue I got halfway through writing for tonight. Next time, you may not be so lucky.

I have a confession to make: Since October I’ve been writing for another gaming site. I won’t be linking to it here. I get paid by the post and the site has a fantastic URL. Unfortunately, the site is also terribly mismanaged, and even though I submit two posts per day as I agreed to do when they hired me, the folks in charge only approve a single story every 24 hours, if at all. In fact, sometimes they seem to forget they’re running a website entirely. Case in point: They just posted two news stories today for the first time in a week. One of them is my weekly release guide for March 11. It’s March 21. At this rate, I’ve already supplied them with enough content to last through the end of the year.

Still, the experience hasn’t been a complete waste of time. Aside from the monetary benefits, I’ve also learned a great deal about search engine optimization, or SEO as the professionals call it. You’ll see the first visual signs of my SEO education tomorrow.

For now, I’m just glad Friday is done and gone. It was an extremely slow news day, as you can no doubt guess from my posting a GamesRadar story. Ultimately, the lack of activity in the RSS feeds allowed me to waste two hours recording and uploading an Axelay video that was relegated to a tiny thumbnail in the final post and finally starting in on the Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War: Soulstorm campaign. One planet and one moon conquered, three planets and two moons to go. Expect to see a review at some point in the not-too-distant future. Spoiler: It’s not living up to my lofty expectations.

There won’t be any updates on the weekend, because there won’t be anything worth updating about. Just one post tomorrow and you won’t hear a peep out of me until Monday. Those Eldar bastards, though, they’re definitely going to get some face time with my Sisters of Battle army.

This morning, Massively linked to that damned ding feature, providing a lovely writeup and increasing the page’s daily traffic by nearly 5000%. As an added bonus, the page also turned up as a subject of discussion on a few guild forums I don’t have access to. Clearly, the Internet loves my stupid sound effect collections and hates everything else I produce.

Speaking of everything else I produce, I think we can consider day two of The DORK Club 2.0 a success, blatant formatting inconsistencies aside. Were I an intelligent person, I would’ve taken a few days off and hashed out all the particulars concerning style and format (and redesign?) before just jumping in and seeing where it takes me. But I’m not an intelligent person, and this is more fun anyway.

One thing I have decided on, however, is to post at least one World of Warcraft-related story a day. I never did get around to making that Blizzard fansite all those years ago, so this will just have to do.

I’ve been downloading every MMORPG I can get my hands on for a top secret project that’ll hopefully go live some time this week. These days, “PC gaming” is more or less synonymous with “publishers drooling over World of Warcraft’s profits,” as every major company pushes to get their WoW-killer out the door, stretching the limited MMORPG playerbase over more and more virtual worlds. And why not? MMORPGs are licenses to print money, even the bad ones—and let’s be honest here, 94.34% of them are insufferable garbage. MMORPGs are virtually piracy-proof, require monthly fees to play, and their server and bandwidth costs aren’t nearly as high as publishers hope you believe. If you can make a living selling virtual currency, or even farming that virtual currency, you can make a God’s honest killing on even a barely successful MMO.

Yet, despite the genre’s transition to the mainstream of gaming and its position as the poster child for PC gaming, little has changed since EverQuest, Ultima Online, and the MUDs before that. These are games designed to feature a lot of content that takes a lot of time. It’s funny, then, that the free MMORPG trial, the frayed end of the rope publishers use to string new customers through several thousand hours of life-destroying addiction, matches the content of their games so perfectly. Funny in that “how and why do people stand for this” sort of way.

My hard drive is no doubt a fragmented mess at this point, having been on the receiving end of over a dozen MMORPG installations and uninstallations over the last several days. Every MMORPG follows that same installation process: (1) download 2 GB file, in either .exe or .zip flavors; (2) extract 3 GB of install files from initial download; (3) install 4 GB game; (4) spend upwards of an hour downloading years of patches. It seems to me like there’s more than a few ways to optimize this procedure, like oh, I don’t know, including those 500 MBs of patches with the original client for starters. But MMORPG players are gluttons for punishment. This is a genre that until recently featured interfaces so unusably terrible, players defended the acrobatic keystrokes and developer-mind-reading telepathy required to use them for baring those unable to decipher them at the virtual gates. The only MMORPG that offers a free trial experience that functions as something other than a metaphor for rape is, unsurprisingly, World of Warcraft, whose small client streams content as you need it, and doesn’t require a single patch. It’s no wonder they have ten times the subscribers as their closest competition.

However, not all MMORPGs offer free trials. Typically, when you buy a PC game you own it now and forever; if you really want to play SimCity Societies a decade from now, you’re more than welcome to. But when you purchase an MMORPG, you’re merely paying for the right to log on and pay your monthly dues. If you don’t like the game, you’re left with a very expensive (and very ineffectual) coaster. Surprisingly, many of the MMORPGs that don’t offer free trials are the ones that need them most: City of Heroes with its unique, comic book setting; The Matrix Online with its love of tradition and its upholding of the crappy Matrix video game legacy; and Vanguard, if only to prove that it’s not quite as unplayable as everyone claims. Truthfully, there’s a lot of sense in not offering a free trial in the first few months of an MMO’s life, as the influx of tourists degrade the experience for early adopters. Still, when your entire business model is built around trapping unknowing players in a deep pit of addiction and then extorting a regular fee from them so they can continue to enjoy their drug of choice, it only makes sense to give them the chance to get hooked in the first place.

Basically, what I’m saying is this: Spending four hours just to extract a single sound file from an MMORPG is unnecessarily painful. If I was actually interested in playing any of these, I’d have lost whatever whim inspired me to download them in the first place between the time I finished extracting install files for twenty minutes to save someone a few bucks on their bandwidth bill and confirming my e-mail address.

Oh, well. At least my trek through the poo-colored hills of MMORPGland allowed me to rediscover Guild Wars, which, it turns out, is excellent. Shame I was too busy wishing it was World of Warcraft back in 2005.

This last weekend I logged on Ventrilo for the first time since August. Last night, then, I spent several bittersweet hours reminiscing about World of Warcraft with both real life friends and people who I know only as their WoW avatars. In recounting our fondest memories of the game, we never discussed boss strategies, PvP victories, or anything related to the actual game itself. Instead, all of our memories revolved around the people who played the game and the community they formed. We discussed guild politics and our relationships with people we have no way of ever contacting again. And we were thankful we no longer felt the urge to enter Azeroth every day, junkies hungry for our next fix, but were also deeply saddened by the fact that the game had changed, and in changing, forced us from it forever. It’s interesting how this game allowed us – people from wildly different backgrounds and places of origin – to build collective memories that we could share and laugh over just as easily as if they had really happened.

Of course, they did really happen. Not here in the flesh and blood world of reality or in the bits and bytes of a server farm in Irvine, California, but in the space between, where the real world and the virtual one met in our imaginations. Here, we built an honest-to-God community on the backbone of a game that wasn’t nearly as complex as it ensured us it was. There were haves and have-nots, celebrities famous and infamous, and a real sense of history on the Dark Iron server. Yes, for us, everything that happened there between orcs and elves was no less real than the bathroom breaks we took between raid bosses.

Perhaps you can understand, then, why the book My Tiny Life by Julian Dibbell is so close to my heart. Released in 1999, the book recounts Dibbell’s virtual life spent in LambdaMOO – think a MUD without those distracting game bits – as he lived through the MOO’s transformation from simple distraction to genuine community in late 1993 and early 1994. Back then, the Internet was frighteningly new territory still being mapped out by its most enterprising pioneers. Despite the medium’s infancy and rough edges, however, Dibbell found in LambdaMOO the very essence of the online experience, and wrote with such clarity, poise, and an honest sense of curiosity about topics we take for granted today – gender issues in a genderless world, the power of text in a world forged entirely from it, the differences between community and society – that anyone with even a passing interest in virtual worlds owes it to themselves to read this book.

Thankfully, you can do so entirely free of charge. Just last month, Dibbell released the book as a free PDF. And while spending hours hunched over a computer screen reading the book’s 300+ pages is far from comfortable, it just feels right. The book deserves to exist in the murky waters between real world object and its virtual representation. At its core, My Tiny Life explores the distinction between real and virtual spaces. Events in real life are written in the style of LambdaMOO’s scrolling text while the happenings of virtual reality are recorded in traditional prose, and as the book progresses, Dibbell’s real and virtual lives continue to overlap, becoming increasingly inseparable.

The book opens with the virtual rape of exu, a longtime player who would eventually rise to be one of LambdaMOO’s most influential political figures. In the aftermath of this violent act against her, the community of LambdaMOO rallies against her attacker, and in doing so places the destiny of the MOO firmly in their hands. Mr. Bungle, the cum-stained clown that publicly raped exu is toaded – the MOO equivalent of execution – and his death marks the beginning of LambdaMOO’s evolution from virtual playground to virtual reality. Dibbell becomes good friends with exu and a handful of other MOOers, spending upwards of twenty-five hours a week logged in LambdaMOO in the name of “research,” but mostly because he wants to. Exu confides in Dibbell that her virtual rape caused her to shed real world tears, and Dibbell comes to realize that LambdaMOO is just as real as his New York apartment.

Throughout the book, Dibbell provides his insight on the issues facing the digital age, waxing philosophical on virtual sex, economics, and politics. Feeling he’s at a watershed moment in history – virtual or otherwise – Dibbell sets about leaving his mark on this virtual space, even if it may not survive to see the next millennium. He begins construction on the Garden of Forking Paths, a virtually physical representation of the I Ching, an ancient Chinese book of wisdom and fate. He goes to great lengths to decipher LambdaMOO’s tangled history, tracing the existence of virtual worlds back to the first maps and board games and detailing the events of LambdaMOO’s Schmoo War, but also places the MOO and the sort of text-based online spaces it represents in the context of history itself. As one former player describes it to him, the MOOers of the early ‘90s were not unlike the first explorers of the New World, blazing the trails that the journalists and documenters like Dibbell would later follow.

Throughout My Tiny Life, Dibbell provides valuable commentary on lives both virtual and real, and the struggle in leading one of each. His insight hits particularly close to home, but he writes with such clarity that even someone unaware of exactly what the Internet is – as many readers undoubtedly were at the time of the book’s first publishing – will understand the complex issues at stake in building a virtual world out of thin air. This is a book that should be required reading for anyone using the Internet today. Though many of its questions have been asked many times over since its publishing, I’ve never found better answers than the ones Dibbell provides.

LambdaMOO is still online and operational, though not nearly as many people call it home today as in 1993. Connecting to the MOO is as simple as opening TELNET and inputting the address. No new laws have been proposed since 2005, and during my time online this morning I could only find a couple of AFK users, though admittedly, the interface is too archaic for my GUI-indoctrinated mind to fully grasp. Stepping foot in the virtual living room of LambdaMOO described at so many points throughout the book for myself, I could almost sense the power the place must have held over a decade ago, as college students and corporate researchers found themselves face-to-face with a fully-realized virtual world. I’m reminded of the first time I stepped foot into Azeroth, an orc green in skin and sensibility, unaware of the real power a virtual place could hold over me and forty or so of my closest friends.