Couldn't sleep last night (hence the late start) so I fired up my tauren druid and got started on Hellfire. I got to thinking about how I wish the instances were a little harder in WoW and little less predictable. And then I got to thinking about conservatism, not because of my druid, but because I had a lecture by Sam Tanenhaus playing in the background.
Books that proclaim the death of anything instantly repel me. But as is the case with a lot of books, Tanenhaus's argument was much more nuanced and much more interesting than its title. It's worth checking out. I would have liked to see him talk a little more about the Right's embrace of the racial politics of the South.
But, hey, it was 3 A.M. And I was hunting Fel Orcs. You can't have it all....
Lecture embedded after the jump
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
I used to listen to books on tape while leveling, but sometimes during tougher fights I would loose focus and have to rewind.
And yeah, some of the TBC instances are a little boring, but the Northrend instances are awesome.
Wait.. how the heck do you guys play a game while listening to a book on tape, especially something as nuanced as that Tanenhaus book sounds? Then again I do not play RPG's (haven't played anything in a while other than cell-phone Tetris actually) so perhaps 'leveling' takes a lot of repetitive action in those.
The long and short of it is, once you get down the interface and the mechanics, most of the game is REALLY boring. The single player part of the game is basically tuned so that someone who knew very little about the mechanics of the character could plod along reasonably well.
Imagine if traffic laws (and actual behavior!) were predicated on the notion that all drivers were brand new. All roads are 100 feet wide, no cars are parked on the shoulder, all cars maintain >5 car length distance and all drivers signal properly.
While it might have been impossible to imagine listening to an audiobook while learning to drive, it would be trivial to listen to an audiobook and drive in the world described above.
Triviality like that is either relaxing or frustrating (depends on the player), but it is a fact for most of the game experience. Hence comments from long term players that "the end game is the game" (describing either grouped dungeons or player versus player combat).
You sir, are my kind of nerd.
Tanenhaus for me is universalizing a temporally located phenomenon. Conservatism isn't dead, it just doesn't have a power structure attached to it right now.
When I was Soloing EQ, I used to read between pulls. What a horrible game that was in retrospect. I also listen to books on tape while soloing WoW, but not so much in instances. I actually like TBC instances more than Northrend, they seem more challenging. The 5-man instances in Northrend seemed to require no CC or strategy. I think the tanking abilities of DKs are so good, or the 70+ tanking abilities of tank classes are so good, they can hold aggro for multiple mobs pretty easily.
The last toon I leveled to 80 (a pally) didn't run a single instance through the entire leveling process. With all the heirloom gear that adds experience to kills/quests it seemed silly to waste my time desperately trying to find a rag tag group for one of those excruciatingly long TBC instances. Just thinking about MgT makes me shudder especially in comparison to the recently released ToC.
This Tenehaus dude is smart!
and this gets me thinking...if WoW races/classes would have to be placed on the political spectrum where would they be and why? A childish experiment but it may be fun. Druids seem like they would be liberal's likewise for pallies. I could imagine warriors and mages as conservatives. Random musings. I had better get back to work.
I dunno. Paladins are holy warriors, I think they sound more like conservatives. Druids are environmentalists, and therefore liberal. Hunters are libertarians. Warlocks are Cheney conservatives, as are DKs. Warriors' political preference depends on spec. Prot warriors are conservatives, as are arms warriors (right to bear arms, NRA, so on). Fury warriors are anarchists. Mages value intellect above all other stats (especially arcane mages), so they're highly educated ivy league elitists, and liberal (shoot they even reside in ivory towers). Priests are all over the place.
My 78 Paladin is on ice while I get tired of Champions Online, but I did see myself as more of a radical non-pacifist Unitarian, especially when purging the Scarlet Crusade, which has led by Cardinal William Donohoe.
Isn't justice the paladin creed? I guess justice and god are intertwined in many rpgs, but they generally give you many gods to choose from. Social justice seems to be the liberal creed. And responsibility the conservative one. That would make paladins liberal and warlocks conservative. I wanted to say priests are conservative but with the many gods thing, yeah, can't.
I'll agree that Arms warriors are conservative, but for a different reason. They insist on sticking to the tradition of ONE twohanded weapon, staying in the same battle stance they started the game in.
Prot warriors, and tanks of all sorts too, I can see as liberal. I think of my prot warrior along the lines of a public defender, and drew inspiration from Ruth Bader Ginsberg's work as an ALCU lawyer. She'd go in there and get the legal aggro needed so that everyone working with her could change some sort unjust law. Tanking really can be seen as as either liberal or conservative. Conservative in the link between traditionalism and protection, or liberal in that they are protecting the weak and powerless.
Warlocks aren't liberal or conservative per se, but rather corporatist. Enslaved demons work cheap, so pure profit for the 'lock.
You guys are leaving out Rogues! There are two types: those who rob the rich to feed the poor... definitely Liberal. Those who rob everyone to line their own pockets... definitely conservative.
Dammit T, why am I still not in your guild?
Rogues are small-l libertarians in that we can't be controlled. One wave of the hand and we disappear into thin air when displeased.
The fun is in the hard modes now, but you need plenty of time and 9 (or 24) of your closest friends to see them. Going out of your way to make a fight harder for a stupid achievement and (sometimes) extra gear might not be everybody's idea of fun, but the vanilla fights are pretty straightforward, even in Ulduar and ToC. I usually listen to music or the vent server when I'm playing, maybe I'll try audiobooks if I get really ambitious.
Sadly this point rings too true for me. Whereas pulling off some of the Burning Crusade instances smoothly was a major accomplishment (I was, after all, an undergeared and unexperienced pally tank) full of challenge and danger (seriously, that first pull of the Mechanar with those three groups of mobs? Good thing you were by the door for that so that when it invariably went belly up you could just run out), my geared-to-the-teeth pally tank along with the easier 5 mans mean they are horrifically boring. When your healer has time to push nearly 1k dps, things can't be too challanging.
Meanwhile, I can't afford to raid like I did when I was getting all of that BiS Ulduar gear that trivializes everything I'm able to run. Which is why I've been clean for about two weeks now.
Is this really a surprise, though? Heroic instances were originally tuned so that you could do them perfectly well in mostly ilvl 187 blues, but now people are running them in 219 and 226 epics. Tanks today have about a third more HP than the first crop of 80 tanks, and damage dealers can easily bring twice as much DPS. The instances are all too easy because we outgear them. I never played much in burning crusade (my main dinged 70 the day before wrath hit), but I bet if you went back to Mechanar in full epics from Kara and Grull, it wouldn't be as bad.
The shame of it is that a lot of the instances in Wrath are actually pretty cool. Nexus is a perfect instance. You have 5 quite different bosses each with their own unique tricks. Splitting mages, spell reflecting giants, whirlwind and fear from the commander, target switching and adds from the elemental, and a dragon who kills you if you don't stop moving. All are very cool, particularly the dragon boss. However, player health has shot up in good gear, and healers can heal bigger and bigger, so the challenge has gone out from a really interesting encounter because player numbers are too large, and the boss's numbers are too small. Contrast that with Trial of the Champion's fights which are barely more than tank-and-span (oh noes! you have to turn around on Eadric! you have to kite the rogue a little during chaps and the black knight during his ghoul-phase). The boss's numbers here are higher, and the fight is a challenge for the healer, but really trivial for anyone else.
My fingers are crossed that the new Icecrown fives will be Nexus-level interesting (or dare I say it, Oculus), but the numbers are ToC-level big.
I can't imagine that killing orcs to the tune of "conservatives tried, conservatives fried, conservatism died" would actually put you to sleep. But I don't have a better cure for insomnia; maybe it works.
Springsteen sang "Everything that dies, some day comes back"
Over the years, I have heard the death of
Irony
Democrats
Republicans
Baseball
Rock and Roll
Hip Hop
Baseball (one guy in SI theorized the death of baseball gets proclaimed when the Yankees not playing well)
Bricks and Mortar stores
The business cycle
Radio and the radio star
Statements about the death of CB Radio and 8 Track cassettes however, do appear to have been correct.
and Elvis. Mikey J.
First showing of baseball should have been basketball
Yesterday the "death of twitter" was floating around FB. And probably twitter. So... yeah.
Things I do while gaming: hold a 7 month old, because if I put him down he'll wake up, start screaming, and wake up mommy.
I usually try to catch up on some new music too. Lately I've been recycling She & Him : Volume 1. I think I like it. It *could* be awesome - but it's not. Lot's of potential though I think.
On a tangent, but yeah to She & Him. I always get the feeling that that album should have been better than it is. Sentimental Heart and You Really Got A Hold On Me are killer, though.
http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14257358
That offers a good contrary view. I haven't read the book, sharing your inherent distrust for "death of..." narratives and seeing that review first didn't help.
I worry that we have a HUGE recency bias and make the poor assumption of linearity. Meaning that if we see conservatives lose in 2006 and again in 2008, then they must be dead meat in 2010! Combine those two problems and we get really inaccurate at inflection points, just where we need the most foresight and nuance. In other words, the republican tide crested in 2005 (roughly), but how many books were written in 2005 saying "boy those conservatives sure are fucked"? Compare the relative factory of books devoted to "no democrat will ever be elected to an office outside Harlem, San Fran and Beverly Hills, ever again" in 2002. I'm not arguing that Tanenhaus relies on those errors, but they are inherent to the process.
I would suggest Sarah Vowell on tape, unless that is gonna get you in trouble w/ the better half. If you want to stick to politics and conservatism, try Nixonland. Or if you want to read about politics, civil rights and strange bedfellows, try Robert Caro's Lyndon Johnson series.
Also don't bother w/ TBC instances. Level in Hellfire-->Zangarmarsh-->Nagrand-->Blades Edge-->1/2 a level in Shadowmoon or Netherstorm them go to outland at 68. Unless you really miss Outland, it isn't worth the wait.
Err, go to Northrend at 68. :)