It might be time to re-examine my WoW habit

When the people at MIT design a “pod” from which to play World of Warcraft, which includes a toilet stowed into the gamer’s seat, it is definitely time to give some thought to the time I spend playing the game.

An entire culture could emerge in these games around the mediation between the virtual and real culinary world. You already see this in the game. “Raid food” is synonymous with Hot Pockets because the current raiding environment doesn’t afford the opportunity to cook anything significant.

Time to shift from participant to participant-observer, and get down to business focusing on exactly what my cyber-anthropology thesis will examine. Clearly the MMO gaming environment is a rich and bizarre place, more so than I realized while blinded by immersion in it.

5 Things that are surprisingly awesome

1. Sweet potato fries.
   Unless there’s something pathologically wrong with you, you already recognize the deliciousness of normal fries. Sweet potatoes just take it to the next level, adding an actual flavour to the heady mix of grease and salt. Added bonus: you can lie to yourself about them being healthy.
2. Slippers.
   Previously the domain of old men and mental patients, slippers are now a staple in my lounging around the house attire. Part of me is looking forward to growing old so I expand my slipper-wearing domain to include short trips to the corner store.
3. Lawnmower racing.
   That’s right, I said it. Lawnmower racing. The sport that even NASCAR fans think of as white trash. The minute I saw a champion lawnmower driver speak lovingly of his souped-up vehicle, named “Cause For Divorce,” I was hooked. If you have access to a satellite TV that gets eleventy billion channels you owe it to yourself to check it out.
4. Lapdogs.
   In most ways I’m the total opposite of Paris Hilton. She has genital herpes, I don’t. I spent my early 20s in graduate school, she spent hers making low quality porn and leaking it online to gain notoriety. But we can both agree that dogs are awesome. The smaller they are, the more likely people are to overlook them and let them tag along with you into “No Dogs Allowed” zones.
5. Ramen noodles.
   If you’re anything like me you swore that when you finished university and got a “real” job, you’d never spend dinner with Mr. Noodles again. (If you’re eerily like me, you also went right to grad school, where you learned that a bottle of Wild Turkey can count as a full meal.) But you really can’t beat the convenience of boiling water, waiting 3 minutes, and having something edible and, let’s be honest, pretty tasty.