The Funeral of WoW Gold

Welcome to Desert Pepper, a cerebral look into baseball’s Arizona Diamondbacks. While a Detroit Tigers fan first, this series will focus on the writer’s National League fallback team, and he will always be convinced the 2001 World Series cured him of his mononucleosis.

As of this year, the Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks are the only two franchises who’ve never had a Hall of Fame player or coach in their dugout. Hey, they haven’t been around that long. They have time.

And even if the retired Curt Schilling (well, retired for now) goes into the Hall of Fame earlier than Johnson, odds are Schilling will be more synonymous with Red Sox postseason glory than his 2001 ring with the D’backs when he started three games and won half a World Series MVP. There’s also a real chance he will lobby to go into the Hall as a member of his World of Warcraft guild.

But Randy Johnson, who hardly has a reason to leave him out of
Cooperstown, could be the first true Diamondbacks player in the Hall.

Including 2009, he’s played for six different teams in his career. We can safely rule out the Expos, Astros, Yankees, and his current Giants as teams which will earn the right to have their emblem on his bronze plaque’s hat. That leaves the Diamondbacks and the Seattle Mariners. In the M’s favor, he did pitch 10 seasons for them (as compared to Arizona’s eight) and appeared in the hit flick Little Big League as Randy Johnson, Extremely Scary Pitcher With Greasy Mullet. That’s tough to beat.

But, sadly, t’was not only beaten, it was killed mid-flight. As a Diamondback, Johnson played the reality role of Extremely More Refined Pitcher With A Slightly Less Greasy Yet Still Hideous Mullet. His lone World Series appearance, his perfect game, and four of his five Cy Young awards came with the Snakes. And he was with Arizona when he killed a bird with a fastball.*

* - I strongly feel that this feat should be an automatic entry into the Hall of Fame. If Tim Helling would have killed a bird with a fastball, the sportswriters and Veterans Committee should immediately swear him in and I would not have a problem with this. Please, MLB, make this a rule.

While his enshrinement will not happen until at least 2014, it’s interesting to note today because they’re cooking a somewhat room temperature story about Randy Johnson, clad in Giants gear, facing the D’backs in a spring training game. Johnson says it’s “no big deal … just spring training” to him, but his former teammates like Conor Jackson aren’t looking forward to it — not because of any emotional reason, just because the man is just a pain in the ass to bat against.

Yet the 45-year-old only was offered $2.5 million by Arizona in the offseason, prompting him to sign with San Francisco for $8 million. The East Valley Tribune tried to show that the D’backs signed Jon Garland for $6.25 million and therefore could have had the Big Unit for the same money. Yeah, um, Giants GM Brian Sabean’s contract offerings do not dictate what other teams should do (See: Zito, Barry).

So it’s just spring training. Big deal. But even if they chase that still-wicked slider for strike three, they’ll know that when Johnson’s career is over, the Giants hat won’t stay on him for long.

A researcher from the
University of Minnesota is using the popular MMORPG Everquest 2 to study human behavior. According to the researcher who is working on conjunction with colleagues at other universities the online populations, playing Everquest 2 is so large that the behavior mirrors that of traditional populations.

The researchers used the virtual world to model social and behavioral dynamics of individuals, groups, and networks within large communities. The study found evidence that social sciences are at the threshold of a fundamental shift not only in understanding but also in the ways used to study behavior.

The researchers say that Everquest 2 has over 300,000 players who average a whopping 26 hours per week playing the game. World of Warcraft has huge player base many times the amount of players that Everquest offers. I wonder why they opted for studying Everquest 2 rather than WoW.

I’ve never quite worked out the point of a stein. I’m not often plagued by insects landing in my pint and why I should want to drink beer out of a stone mug is beyond me. But then, cover one in World of Warcraft geekery, give it an ornate handle and I’m starting to get the point of why you might want one of the Lich King special edition.

You can pick up a $89.99 Blood of the Horde or Alliance United version if you can’t bear to part with the eye-watering $174.99 for the big kahuna. You still get a lavishly designed 10-inch,
1.3kg booze vessel with a pewter lid. What you don’t get is a hand drawn signature from Alex Horley and the knowledge that there’s only another 749 in existence.

We all have addictions, small or large. They toy with us. They ruffle our hair, whisper in our ear, slip their hands down our shirts, and tickle us just the way we like it.

Among gamers, a key addiction, according to Sweden’s Youth Care Foundation, is playing World of Warcraft.

“There is not a single case of game addiction that we have worked with in which World of Warcraft has not played a part,” the foundation’s Sven Rollenhagen told the Metro newspaper.

Could that be because World of Warcraft may enjoy the majority of the market that some might describe as “People All Over The World Playing This Thing Without Washing, Eating, Cleaning Their Teeth, Or Attending To Their Underarms”?

However, just in case the message hadn’t quite sunk in, Mr. Rollenhagen declared, “It is the crack cocaine of the computer game world.” This was shortly after suggesting that WoW is “the most dangerous game on the market.”

I am sure that the foundation, whose Web site carries a curious Pac-Man image and the phrase “Game Over-Stockholm,” does valuable work. But given that Mr. Rollenhagen’s organization works with all kinds of addictions, which is the most serious?

The foundation says that in 2007, it received 2,000 calls to its addiction helpline, 170 of which concerned computer games. Presumably, all 170 calls involved World of Warcraft. Would it be fair to ask how many of the 2,000 involved crack?