Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Would You Pay to Play With A Girl?

Apparently there's a new topic flying around the WoW blogosphere, and it all seems to start from Pugnacious Priest's post here.

Out of curiosity (and a lot of boredom, since I'm at work and work is boring) I took a peek at her blog to see what the hullabaloo is all about - Klepsacovic was on the confession stand, Larisa was musing about her deadly curves - and after reading it, just can't understand it all.

I mean, here's a service being launched by a company, where players can sign up and for a fee play with a girl. I went, "Huh? Why do I have to pay for such a thing?"

Is it indicative of a sign of desperation among boy gamers? Is the stigma that boy gamers cannot bond with a girl that serious a corporation can come in and take advantage of it? Is this issue so dire that BD must step in and save the universe? Okay, maybe not that last part. But still, if you want to look between the lines, this speaks volume of the power of gaming industry - basically anything can be turned into profit.

Speaking for myself - I'm not signing up. I have a wife, a beautiful woman whom I courted and took to dinner and wooed under the moonlight (and sunlight) just to persuade her to spend the rest of her life with me. A wife, who for better or worse, still sat next to me when I'm doing my dailies and ask about the game sincerely even though her knowledge of WoW is equal to her knowledge in quantum slipstream technology (which is nil). That sincerity, to me, is worth more than knowing that someone is playing with you just because you paid her to.

Look at it strictly from a Goblin's point of view next: You pay real money for the experience of playing WoW with a girl. What did you spend? Real money. What did you get in return? Up to a couple of hours (depending on the money invested) of experience playing with a girl. Is there a tangible profit? If you're not raiding, you get some XP, a few tens of gold and some green items. Which is far more inferior than doing a single random heroic for half an hour or an hour of Tourney dailies. Gevlon would weep at this new foolishness of socials... maybe not, he'd probably set up the same service and milk those socials dry.

Now I would admit that there will be a few gamers out there who would purchase the service just to have fun with it. Maybe they'll giggle and laugh, have a few hours of fun and remember it as an episode in their life. But those that go back again and again and again just because they crave that sense of 'attachment' to someone definitely needs help.

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