Gibberish is My Native Language - October 21st, 2005

I'm back into World of Warcraft again, as some of you know. For those of you who don't know what WoW is, it's an online role playing game set in the realm of Azeroth, the setting for three previous offline computer games. Basically, two factions -- the human-led Alliance and the orc-led Horde, battle against each other and the virtual game world for power, territory, and wealth. It's a lot less epic than that, but for those of you disinterested in the game it won't make much difference to you anyway ;)

So anyway, one of the great things about WoW is that the game developers will slightly change the game world during major meatspace holidays, such as Christmas and now Halloween. During Christmas you could eat virtual candy canes or throw snowballs at other players. For Halloween, certain computer-controlled non-player characters will trick or treat you once per hour. The effect is random and has no real bearing on gameplay, but considering that Blizzard didn't have to implement this at all I'm majorly impressed.

( Spooky write up follows )