Shit-slinging is a pretty big and entertaining part of gaming culture, particularly where games played over the Internet are concerned. Competition combined with the relative anonymity of sitting behind the computer or television screen, rather than face to face with the person you’re insulting, can breed within even the nicest of people a sense of uncontrollable nerdrage.

Personally, I like it.

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Have you ever fallen in love with a game so deeply that you’d fight for it? Did you grow so attached to characters that you’d reminisce about their final appearances? Would you’ve thrown yourself in front of a bullet to have kept it from damaging your cartridge?

I’ve been there. There are games I’ve obsessed over. Sometimes it’s not an obsession so much as a resonance, a thought about it that lingers in your head after you’ve turned it off. Some games just stay with you.

One of the saddest truths is that all good things must come to an end. But occasionally that end is too bitter. Premature, even. How do we cope with the loss of our favorite games?

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The biggest conundrum of the gaming world isn’t whether video games inspire real life violence or the ongoing console wars. It’s not controversy about Fat Princess being, well, fat either. Honestly, gaming has always been about the relationship between fans and developers—the semantics of when a company should listen and when they shouldn’t.

It’s about the acknowledgment that a company can be right and wrong; the realization that change isn’t always a bad thing, but isn’t always good either. And the simple fact that the angry lynch mobs of gaming should not always be heard.

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If I have the console or the PC with the recommended requirements, I will play pretty much any game you toss my way.

It goes without saying then, that I am starting or stopping games all of the time simply because there are so many to wade through. I am often faced with situations where I find myself unable to progress in any of the games I’ve started up. It’s a bump in the road that many have experienced. No matter what you do, or how often you try, you just can’t quite get past a certain spot in what you’re playing.

The first few footholds were easy to navigate to, but you have found yourself at a point that you just can’t quite get out of. Welcome to the gamer’s plateau.

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Now that we’ve touched upon the scenery and epic scale of the new World of Warcraft expansion, it seems like a good point to go into more detail about the content you’ll probably be spending a future paycheck on. As the beta test continues, more and more videos are posted to youtube while the unwitting watchers cry about the lack of balance between the classes. Specifically death knights. Before I go on, let me remind everyone that the expansion is still in the beta testing phase. Nothing is particularly set in stone in terms of talents/spells/etc. The developers have been very good about watching the forums and taking in new suggestions as well as listening to concerns that the players have.

Beta warning aside, I’m not going to get into most of the class mechanics, mainly because I’ve only played three of them in depth. Because of that, I feel I’m unqualified to theorycraft or whine on the unfairness or imbalance in the game. Besides, like I just said, they’re not finished yet.

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Plot advancement, receiving a new weapon, even unlocking skimpy female costumes… whatever it is, when we play a video game, we need an objective. Without anything to look forward to, a game simply becomes an exercise in futility. And what better way to push us forward toward objectives than to threaten us with the hulking beast that spells out our virtual doom, the ominous Game Over? I don’t know about you, but I’m quivering in the corner over here.

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