Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Experiment MoM


(mom's level 1 paladin)

Over the last three weeks, I've been spending time with my folks as they were trying to quit smoking. (so far a success).

During my time, I thought about addiction vs addiction. I heard some rumor that crack addicts have tuned to WoW to help over come their addictions. Probably not true but it seemed plausible.

Anyhow, don't laugh but I got it into my head that I should teach my mom how to play wow. I mean she learns fast and she didn't actually oppose the idea of playing when I first mentioned it to her. And she seemed to really like the idea of playing the Auction House much like she loves to watch the stock market.

And maybe if I got her to play wow she'd stop judging me and all my friends as "being unproductive slackers"....:(

So I took her to Walmart and she bought the game...although I tried to pay for it. She said she wanted to buy it. I told her about all the characters (alliance side). She seemed interested in gnomes.

I let her watch the intro and she got to see the different character styles. I explained to her the super basics about healing and dps. "do you want to heal people or hurt people?" LOL.

She's a registered nurse in real life so I wasn't surprised she wanted to play a healer. Unfortunately you can't be a gnome and heal.

She hated the way the night elves and dwarfs looked. She didn't get to see draenei because we didn't buy the expansion pack. SOOoo.. she picked a human female. However I think she thought all of them looked retarded...and she's kind of right...Blizzard did a great job of making the humans look aloof.

So she gets into the game and MAJOR ROAD BLOCK. ADSF?!??? Totally foreign concept to her. She's never played a computer game before...ever. She has no concept of movement or perception of control. It took us a while for her to get W and S down. Then she kept running straight into buildings.

The hardest part however was getting her to understand how to control the camera view with the mouse. I kept thinking WoW should have some kind of tutorial for totally new players that gives graphics of the keyboard and mouse.

It's just too much info to soak in. I let her talk to the first quest giver and she was like "I have to read all that?"

Yeah. So it didn't go very well. I think she got frustrated with the movement part. But she did admit the game was artistically interesting.

I think I'll try again later when I have more time with her. I just need to get her mobile enough to play the AH for me and be my AH stock broker. lol.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I remember my first time -- February 2005 -- and I was like a lost puppy. I was a Tauren and I stood there in the starting place for about 20 minutes trying to familiarize myself with the GUI. I finally did a few quests, and was nervous about losing site of the noob town, like I'd never find my way back.

Then some quest sent me into a cave. Wow, that was scary! I found my way back to town by following some other characters. Hadn't discovered the map command yet.

When it came time to leave the noob zone, I carefully followed the path out of town to the next thinking "Wow, this place is huge."

I also was real paranoid about doing all the quests. I was so used to games on rails that I thought if I missed something I'd be screwed up -- and there was no way to save the game and go back using a save file if I made a mistake!

Ah, the good ole days. In short -- be patient with your Mom -- we were all noobs once!

Starman said...

You didn't give her an account on Boulderfist did you?

"Um, honey, some cow just killed me"

LOL

Unknown said...

That's really funny. I had my mum try WoW as an experiment and she also picked human female paladin. I left her with the strategy guide when I went out to work. I couldn't have been more shocked when I returned home to find her still playing it and running from Murlocs in Goldshire.

Leala Turkey said...

Oh good luck! I hope she sticks with it for a while at least. If she's having trouble with WASD, maybe try the arrow keys instead. =)

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