The Funeral of WoW Gold

Best Buy employee Stephen Suttles, 27, didn’t expect a story about him jamming out to a Rock Band video game last Christmas with a
Fort Hood soldier would get him 15 minutes of fame, but that’s what happened.

If you haven’t seen the commercials yet, you’ve probably received a call from your out-of-state relatives who saw the Best Buy commercial featuring a Killeen employee. The man in the commercial is Suttles.

What started with a company-wide essay contest in September led Suttles, a Best Buy employee for six years, to a 300-person casting call at the company’s headquarters in Minnesota.

Suttles’ story about playing Rock Band with a Fort Hood soldier and selling gifts to deployed soldiers caught the attention of company marketing. He became one of about 30 employees to star in commercials filmed in Hollywood by Oscar-winning director Errol Morris.

Suttles became an instant celebrity when the commercial first aired in November. He has been featured on local TV news and interviewed on the Dennis Miller radio show.

Before the commercial, Suttles’ claim to fame was a 2007 Killeen Daily Herald article about his passion for playing the computer game World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold ).

Now co-workers occasionally call him “Hollywood” and customers ask for him, sometimes seeking an autograph.

“It hasn’t changed him as a person except he has funnier things to say,” co-worker Demond Manson said.

However, an unexpected phone call from old friends has been the best reward for Suttles, who said he shies away from attention, even though he won Best Buy Killeen’s 2007 funniest employee award.

Two weeks ago, his best friends from college, whom he hadn’t spoken to in several years, called the store to reconnect with Suttles.

“I think that’s the best part. Take away the fame, just the fact that I got to talk with my friends again and have a little fun,” he said.

The glamour of a Hollywood film set and celebrity status don’t mean much to Suttles. He still prefers Killeen and the challenge of helping deployed soldiers’ families find the perfect gifts to the business-like atmosphere of filming commercials.

“You’re essentially shopping for somebody that’s not here. … You get to know the person who’s not here,” he said.

As the recent cult documentaries “King of Kong” and “Darkon” have shown, geeks make for great entertainment - even for those who don’t necessarily share their weird interests. Mark Barrowcliffe’s humorous, self-deprecating memoir of his misspent youth, “The Elfish Gene,” is another welcome addition to the growing nerdsploitation genre.

“I knew far more about the wants and needs of a golden dragon than I ever did a girl,” he confesses early in his story. That’s because at an impressionable age, he discovered Dungeons & Dragons, the fantasy role-playing game that was a sensation among adolescents in the 1970s and 1980s before it was supplanted by such online games as World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold ).

With the fervor of a religious convert, a young Barrowcliffe immerses himself in his newfound fantasy world. His imagination shifts into overdrive as he applies the game’s mores to his everyday life, whether they have any bearing on reality or - far more frequently - not.

An example of this appears early on when Barrowcliffe tries to extinguish his family’s flaming home by conjuring a rainstorm as he waits beside his weeping mother for the fire department to arrive.

Usually, though, the stakes are little more than Barrowcliffe’s own social standing and self-esteem. D&D soon becomes his main interface with the world, and he manages to disenchant nearly everyone he meets - even other devotees - by smothering them with his obsession.

This especially frustrates his efforts to charm the opposite sex, as when he insists on describing an admirer in D&D terms and unwittingly offends her by assigning a low score for desirability. “I have to say, she picked it up quickly,” he writes. “Perhaps, I thought, there was promise she could learn the game.”

The saddest thing about Barrowcliffe’s childhood is how easily it could have turned out differently. What sets him apart from the other boys is not his addiction. Many of his peers are nearly as obsessive, although they tend to imagine themselves as soccer stars and commandos and other roles more rooted in reality. Over time, their fascination fades as they discover teenage pursuits such as girls, fashion and looking cool. Young Barrowcliffe covets the maturity he sees growing in the boys around him, but can’t understand that his own development is confounded by his devotion to a game of make-believe.

However, he is far from alone, and that’s where the book’s appeal lies. Many of the experiences he describes resonate because they are universal to adolescence. Gamers, especially, will recognize themselves in the author’s follies.

D&D’s success isn’t surprising, given kids’ hunger for escapism, especially in the dreary British Midlands where Barrowcliffe grew up. It’s also little wonder that some of the more sensitive young players of a certain disposition lose themselves in the game, finding its world of wicked sorcerers and rampaging ogres more hospitable than the school yard.

Unfortunately, Barrowcliffe spends little time describing his actual adventures in the game, which may make it difficult for readers who have never played it to understand how D&D could be so consuming. But he keeps it accessible to newcomers by skipping over the more arcane mechanics of gameplay.

D&D exerts a worrying grip on Barrowcliffe and his young companions, and some of them never grow up completely. Luckily, Barrowcliffe himself is just a late bloomer, and by the end of the book, he’s a successful, married writer. His ability to look back at his experience with humor and grace is what gives his story a happy ending.

PARIS – A travelling show featuring a symphony orchestra playing videogame theme music gave fans in France a first taste of what the organisers describe as “a new art form.”

With game heros and heroines such as Mario, Zelda or the epic scenery of World of Warcraft cavorting across a giant screen, a crowd of 3,000 crammed a Paris concert-hall Thursday night for a one-off first-ever public concert staged in the city by Video Games Live.

Its U.S. creators, Tommy Tallarico and Jack Wall, three years ago launched the idea of throwing three decades of videogame music on stage.

“Videogames are their own unique art form, including the music,” Wall told AFP.

Just as much of 20th century film music was inspired by turn of the 19th/20th century classical music, most of the themes in today’s videogames were inspired by film music dating back to the 1970s, in particular the music from “Star Wars”, Wall said.

“But we decided we didn’t want just a concert, we wanted to do a show, we wanted to synchronise music, lights and pictures.”

Using a 41-person symphony orchestra and 25 singers and actors, the concert raced from iconic first-generation Pong through to Mario to online record-breaker World of Warcraft （ Buy wow gold ）.

“World of Warcraft is absolutely my favorite,” said Wall, “because the music is so endemic to what the game’s about.”

Video Games Live has some 20 concerts planned for 2009, including dates in Sinagpore, Seattle, Beijing and Moscow.

They stand in line outside stores waiting for midnight launches of new video games. When they get home after a long day, they plop down in front of the TV not to sit back and watch, but to play.They’re known as “core gamers.” They are people like Greg Wilcox, who writes about video games and has bought roughly 100 this year, and people like Mark Hengst, who’s in law enforcement and says daily gaming gives him an “interactive form of escapism.” And there’s Wyatt Du Frane, a geology graduate student who’s been playing since he was a little boy.“I like their scope,” said Du Frane, 28, a student at
Arizona State University. “A movie is only a couple of hours. A video game is more like a book or a TV series, where you can kind of continue the story.”For the video game industry, core gamers are proving crucial. Their willingness to regularly, loyally buy new titles — no matter what — gives the industry a better chance of success than other businesses that rely on discretionary spending vulnerable to the recession.“As long as hard-core gamers have a job, they will continue to buy games,” said IDC video games analyst Billy Pidgeon.The industry’s ability to lean on core gamers is a bit of a twist, because video game makers have been working hard to grow by expanding their mainstream appeal.Families and people who haven’t picked up a game controller in ages, or ever, have flocked to the easy-to-master Nintendo Wii since its 2006 launch. Taking note, Sony Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have been expanding what their game consoles offer, adding movies and TV shows, to attract people whose idea of the perfect Sunday afternoon doesn’t involve shooting aliens. Software publishers like Ubisoft Entertainment, Activision Blizzard Inc. and Electronic Arts Inc. have boosted their titles aimed at young girls, families and women over 35, who have helped push game sales higher.Yet some analysts believe it will turn out to be core gamers — who might be more reliable consumers of their favorite form of entertainment than movie buffs or sports fans, for example — who keep the industry afloat as the rest of us cut back.Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan, estimates that core gamers buy roughly half of all video games.“They may be wealthy, they may be poor, but they have no clue we are in a recession,” Pachter said.Wilcox — who does know we are in a recession — said he’s trimmed how much he spends on video games because of it. Still, he said, “people will always be buying games.” After all, added the 44-year-old New York City resident, people need entertainment.New blockbuster titles, like the post-apocalyptic “Fallout 3,” the choose-your-own-adventure epic “Fable II” and alien shooter “Gears of War 2,” go for $60 each. So if they don’t have a lot of cash, core gamers have to get creative by renting, trading or selling used games. Du Frane uses this strategy to often avoid paying full price for games. But at least he’s still buying them: In the economic downturn, instead of pulling back on games, he’s cut back on going to bars and restaurants.“For the same price I can get a game to occupy me,” he said.Similarly, while the game industry appears to be weathering the recession better than many businesses, it certainly has felt the effects. GameStop Corp., the world’s largest video game retailer, has cut its earnings targets for its fiscal fourth quarter, which ends in January.Core gamers, however, were not to blame. Chief Executive Daniel Dematteo said the company reduced its outlook to reflect an uncertainty inherent in the business this time of year. For most of the year, GameStop’s main customers are reliable video game fans. Around the holidays, the company’s customer base briefly shifts, as gamers’ friends and families start poking around GameStop shelves looking for gifts. This is when things get more unpredictable, especially in the current economy.In fact, in a recent conference call with analysts, Dematteo pointed to the success of new games such as “Call of Duty: World at War,” “Gears of War 2” and “World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King.” All three are targeted at game enthusiasts.“World of Warcraft,” the world’s most popular online game, brings in about half of the operating profit for its publisher, Activision Blizzard, according to analysts.“If the core gamers and the avid gamers are with us through these very unpredictable times, that’s a very, very good sign for us,” said R. Richard Fontaine, GameStop’s chairman, during the call.So far, so good. Americans are spending more money than ever on video games — nearly $3 billion in November, according to the NPD Group. That was a 10 percent increase from the same month last year.In 2007, people bought $18 billion worth of games, consoles and accessories. Even with discretionary budgets shrinking, the NPD Group expects this number to grow to at least $22 billion this year.In contrast, U.S. consumer spending on home video is going down. Spending declined 2.4 percent for the first three quarters of the year, to $14.2 billion, according to industry tracker Video Business. The decline reflects lower purchases as well as a dip in rentals. Meanwhile, major pro sports leagues have begun cutting jobs and expenses, fearing that ticket sales will drop next year.Hengst, 31, who lives in Los Angeles, recently bought the new “Prince of Persia” and the latest “Call of Duty” video games and estimates he spends a couple of thousand dollars a year on games.“For me it’s much like why I enjoy reading so much,” Hengst said. “It’s a form of escapism.”