Bringing role-playing back into online role-playing games

If you're not a fan of role-playing games, particularly World of Warcraft, you can skip this ...

My new Pandaren Monk, Tenchusatsu

I bought the latest expansion pack for World of Warcraft called Mists of Pandaria. It's like WoW meets Kung Fu Panda, except that WoW came up with that concept long before the Dreamworks movie made it into theaters.

But rather than fill my general gaming blog with tons and tons of WoW posts, I decided to create a new blog where I play the role of my new Pandaren monk character, Tenchusatsu. You can follow the posts here:

New blog: Storm Winds Across Azeroth

Putting the R and the P back into RPG

A quick word about this ever-popular genre of games. If you're a gaming geek like me, have you noticed that role-playing games these days have lost the concept of actual role-playing? Players will just level up as quick as they can, then play on and on doing the same quests and killing the same virtual bad guys ad nauseum so that they can keep winning the same virtual rewards. What fun is being in a whole different world if you just treat it like another j-o-b?

It's all about expanding your imagination, escaping reality and being in a world where the story not only unfolds as you continue playing, but YOU have a real hand in creating the story, even in ways the game developers never imagined.

Now as with all blogs that I do, I'm not really expecting a huge audience. All I'm doing is trying my hand at creative writing just for the sake of it. If no one but my wife and I read this and enjoy it, that's all I need, especially years from now when I look back at what I posted and remember fond memories of having fun.

But hopefully I'll get a small audience to follow me, and that would also be worth the time and energy I put into this. It sure beats just playing the game and getting bored with the same old same old, that's for sure.