This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we talk about conjuring gaming memories, AI-generated Birkin bags, and a rejection of a certain type of criticism.
JOSEPH: Yesterday I did something unthinkable. Deranged. Sordid. I played World of Warcraft.
On Thursday Blizzard launched fresh servers for the Classic version of the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. Basically this means that, although World of Warcraft is still going strong (its recent expansion, The War Within, has got pretty good reviews and player counts), and despite there already being World of Warcraft Classic (which started at the original, or ‘vanilla’, state of the game and has steadily progressed through its expansions), there is now a third, maybe fourth parallel strand of the game which has gone right back to the beginning.
I played World of Warcraft a lot back in the day. I joined during The Burning Crusade, the first expansion which came out in January 2007. The idea was to keep in touch with a best friend at the time who had moved away. I was absolutely playing it for social reasons rather than anything about the game itself. But I got heavily invested. I became one of the best PvP (player versus player, where players kill each other) players on my server. I will never forget the moment I crossed the threshold of a particular ranking which meant I unlocked the final piece of PvP armor in the game.