Tag: WoW

Leroy Jenkins not a credible reference for politicians

Colleen Lachowicz is a democrat running for state senate in Waterville, Maine and she also happens to play a lot of World of Warcraft. As per Maine Republicans, this means that she is more than unfit for office, and as such, the Maine Republican Party has set up an entire website dedicated to digging up old forum posts made by Lachowicz.

“Colleen Lachowicz is a Democrat candidate for Maine State Senate. In Colleen’s online fantasy world, she gets away with crude, vicious and violent comments like the ones below. Maine needs a State Senator that lives in the real world, not in Colleen’s fantasy world.”

Yes, this is an actual website set up by the Maine Republican Party.

This whole situation is hilarious in the “you can’t believe it’s actually real” hilarious, kind of like in the beginning for the replacement refs for the NFL. To use the fact that she plays World of Warcraft as a political dig against her? It’d only be an understandable claim if the woman played Second Life.

Real life has consequences? ZOMG!!!11

We’ll go ahead and get the pun out of the way: Oh WoW!

A World of Warcraft essentially slipped the human race the finger by getting involved in a drunken dispute with his mother, grabbing her hair, choking her, and headbutting a wall. Oh, and he also ended up getting shot in the head by his grandfather. All in one night. Impressive.

27-year-old James Swan, who lives with his mother, had been playing WoW and getting drunk before the fight began. That might mess up his ability to effectively use some of the macros, but hey, who are we to judge? Swan’s mother demanded that the man-child tone down the noise while he played his game at 10pm, a demand that Swan took umbrage with. So very much umbrage. NERD RAGE! Wacky hi-jinx ensued as the MMO player eventually grabbed his mother by the hair and flung her onto a bed. We can only hope there’s nothing Freudian about that action. He also did the same to his little brother, who had arrived to find out what the noise was about.

The mother ran to call the police, but Swan ripped the phone from the wall and proceeded to repeatedly headbutt the the spot where the phone once was, which is a good way to show the phone that it needs to learn its role in life and get back into the kitchen and make me a sammich.

Ahem.

He then began to choke his mother into near-unconsciousness, threatening to kill her, before the grandfather became involved. Swan threatened to kill him too, so the grandfather got his gun. The two men then wrestled over the gun, which went off and shot James Swan in the head. The bullet bounced off his skull and went through a window. Luckily for Swan, he was only wounded, and was arrested after refusing treatment at a hospital.

Words cannot begin to accurately articulate the glee and childish squealing that this story has given me.

Maybe he can face some theoretical jail time?

Let’s be honest here, people: there should probably be some technical terms for multiple levels of stupid. For now I’ll just make some up: if you have to gauge the actions of the guy in this story and your choices are A Little Slow, Stone Cold Stupid, Colossal Moron and Drooling Vegetable, it would fall somewhere between the third and the fourth. What happened here is that an eighteen year old Johnson County, Indiana resident decided to announce he was planning to hijack a plane. While playing World of Warcraft. Remember, geeks do their crimes online.

It’s been reported that the teen was playing the game yesterday morning when he announced that he

“was going to board a plane at 7:30 to Chicago and that (he) was going to try and kill as many Americans as possible”.

Which totally doesn’t imply suicide at all, moron.

A facilitator from an online gaming center reported the kid after hearing him repeat himself a few times. When confronted, the teen at first said that someone hacked into his computer, then backpedaled and said he was just kidding around. How humbling it must be to have your e-penis so swiftly and suddenly confiscated!

A rep from Blizzard who had gone over the chat logs said they seemed very serious and not like a joke at all. In the meantime, the teen’s computer has been seized by the FBI, who are looking further into the case. Charges could possibly be filed with the U.S. Attorney’s office, but it hasn’t gone that far yet. I bet he’s not allowed to play WoW anymore, which could possibly be the end of his world.

WoW is greener than you

Stanford Professor Byron Reeves thinks World of Warcraft can be harnessed as an energy-saving tool by attaching Smart Meter readings to gameplay goals. Sadly, he wants energy-saving, not energy building.

Smart Meters monitor the electricity in a household and feed that information to power companies. By uploading it to WoW instead, Reeves thinks the game could become a tool to encourage environmental awareness.

Reeves went on radio show Living on Earth for their Green Gaming segment last Saturday to pitch the idea:

“So imagine that you’re in your home, you’re signed into [the] game… and you make a decision in the game to turn off the lights in an unused bedroom [in real life]. As soon as you do that, the Smart Meter recognizes that, sends the information through the network to your computer and your house [in the game] turns a shade of green that it wasn’t before. And if I’m using less electricity, my team might do well. I get gold pieces and points… whatever the game designers think is fun. You get feedback in an entertainment game about what you’re doing in the real world.”

At his office, Reeves said the point of having Smart Meters as part of gameplay was to get gamers thinking about ways to be more energy efficient while letting them game … because what WoW players need to know is how to become more efficient while playing that game.

You know what would be a much better device for the WoW player? The Cheetometer, used to measure the amount of Cheetos intake by the average WoW player.

…

I’m totally calling trademark dibs on “Cheetometer”.

Vikings punter: ‘It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do’

Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe is prepared to take the ultimate step to becoming the greatest World of Warcraft fan ever by possibly becoming “Chris Warcraft.”

Apparently a ginormous WoW fan, he revealed his gaming perspicacity in a chat with the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune late last week.

“I think more people like to hear me talk about playing video games than football,” claims Kluwe. “I’ve played video-games since I was 4 years old. I play them a lot more than I kick a football. I kick the ball about 45 minutes a day. I play video games about five or six hours a day. But that’s OK. I don’t watch TV …

“Back when [Bengals receiver] Chad Johnson changed his name to Ocho Cinco, I told the guys at [radio station] 93X that I was going to change my name to Chris ‘World of Warcraft.’ They said that’s too long. So they started calling me Chris ‘Warcraft.’ I could make a lot of money if I changed my name to that.”

Let’s back that up for you all.

“I play them a lot more than I kick a football. I kick the ball about 45 minutes a day. I play video games about five or six hours a day. But that’s OK.”

Once again, WoW players, you make it almost too easy sometimes.

Protip: Threatening suicide can get you arrested

Especially if you’re only rocking a Vorpal Blade of +5 constitution.

A teenager in Middletown, Ohio, learned that threatening to commit suicide while in a chat during a session of World of Warcraft can get you arrested. While talking with a Blizzard rep in-game, he made a phony threat, to which the rep quickly phoned in the faux call for help to police. The unnamed teen was promptly arrested on misdemeanor charges.

He was quoted as claiming, “The game is the only thing [I have] to live for.”

Seriously, WoW players? You make it far easier than I’d ever believe most of the time.

Does studying not get a shortcut command?

Oh, WoW. Your players never fail to amaze us.

Federal Communications Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate claims that World of Warcraft and other online games are directly responsible for students dropping out altogether. In a speech to the Practicing Law Institute last week she cited a recent FCC survey,

“With the explosion of educational resources available online, one might think parents would be 100% pleased with the Internet’s role in their children’s lives, but surveys show just the opposite: a late 2006 survey that showed 59% of parents think the Internet has been a totally positive influence in their children’s lives– down from 67% in 2004.You might find it alarming that one of the top reasons for college drop-outs in the U.S. is online gaming addiction – such as World of Warcraft – which is played by 11 million individuals worldwide”

Tate provides no real evidence of her claim, but we’ve also seen what happens to people who let their lives be dominated by an MMO’s wily charms. While it’s hard to believe that huge swathes of people are dropping out purely to play Warcraft, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to think that it had a hand in a few educations getting flushed away. As always, however, this is less Blizzard’s fault and more the fault of whoever made the decision to let a computer game control them.

Though, just to be on the safe side, we’ll make the illogical jump to a conclusion that Blizzard Studios is NOT a real American hero. Because someone has to be the first to do so.