The Digital Museum

One aspect of WoW that fascinates me is the capacity of the digital terrain to act as a museum. As traced by Donna Haraway, early 20th-century big game hunters were collecting specimens to be taxidermically preserved, offering museum-goers a "peep-hole into the jungle." Anyone who has crossed paths with Hemet Nesingwary will know that big game hunting is alive and well in WoW, but the virtual world itself acts as a museum—and an animated one at that. Each zone is its own habitat diorama, complete with flora, fauna, and sometimes weather conditions.

The fact that the upcoming Cataclysm is going to change that very world is a little unsettling. The digital terrain was once a comforting place with all its conditions under relative control. What happens when those animated specimens—once a symbol of unthreatened preservation even in the face of overhunting—find their habitats drastically and irrevocably altered? And consider: our real world faces environmental disaster, but there is always the hope and effort towards rectifying or postponing the damage. In WoW, we have no control; we cannot prevent the Cataclysm (actually, we'll all welcome the exciting new changes). Those digital animals walking around always had their own doom written into their code, but the inevitability of the Cataclysm underscores that doom.

In light of these considerations, I thought I'd undertake a bit of nostalgic museum-work in this blog. Take a tour through the old country, snap some photos of the little things that may be gone all too soon, and just generally appreciate the world as it's on its way out.

On Achieving

I live for achievements. The burst of that commendatory banner, the satisfying soul-soothing song of that /script PlaySound("ACHIEVEMENTSOUND"), the unwieldy list of titles that will never grace my name, the pets and mounts and tabards that stay hidden for 99% of their lives. Above all, the systematic completion of that achievement window and the steady increase of points. In a game where nothing really is, achievements are markers of times past and reminders of great adventures, of all those times I went There and Back Again. They inspire me to stop and smell the more outdated roses in WoW, which I never regret. They immortalize acts of otherwise ephemeral epicness.

On the other hand, they can also inspire me to depopulate entire zones for days on end, like my recent collection of nearly 1400 dampscale basilisk eyes, not to mention my subsequent genocide of the Dawnblade Blood Elves in order to compile a library of arcane tomes. But I ask you, is it not worth that glorious sound effect? In these dark days of pre-Cataclysm unmotivation, my compulsion for completion is what convinces me to log on most days, or drives me to rash actions like joining an arena team. Scroll through that list of deeds well done, and remember the glory of yesteryear.