Although there are oh-so-many substantiative diaries on the List right now, I'd like to take this opportunity to piss people off by talking about how the World of Warcraft trial went, with a brief, n00bish overview of the game and my experience playing it.
So, join me over the fold - or go somewhere else and talk about John Edwards' affair. Whatever.
For those of you even more out of it than I am, World of Warcraft is pretty much "the" Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, or MMORPG, with more players than you can shake a stick at.
Play is, like "Go" or "When Harry Met Sally", deceptively simple - when you fire up the client, install patches, swear because it says your hardware isn't supported, reinstall on a different system, forget your Administrator's account password, reinstall your OS, reinstall the client, and install all the patches, you are given the choice between several "Horde" and "alliance" races to play, each with their own available jobs or "classes". Gender is pretty much irrelevant except that for most races the female models don't look like shaved monkeys with steroid abuse issues.
Two of the races, "Blood Elves" on the Horde side and "Draeni" on the Alliance are only available through the Burning Crusade expansion. So are levels above sixty - but don't worry about that as you can only go up to level twenty on a trial account. You also can't chat on the private channels, exchange items, send/receive mail, or shut the God-damned Trade channel up.
Now, classes - your character can be a Warrior (big dumb meat shield that gets pounded on by angry monsters) , Paladin (big dumb meat shield that gets pounded on by angry monsters and feels self-righteous about it), priest (combat medic), rogue (sneaking backstabbing criminal. Like a Republican, only with better ability to obey the law), mage (using the secrets of the universe to blow shit up), warlock (80's death metal, only for "good"), and hunters (cowards who use distance weapons from cover and run away).
I went with hunter. In fact, I went, at first, with a Night Elf Hunter - which is the best way to scream "I'm a n00b!!one!" short of running around screaming "I'm a n00b!!" at the top of your lungs. The other way, by the way, is to roll up a Blood Elf paladin.
Well, I did roll up a Dwarf Hunter on another realm - and dwarves get guns! w00t! but when my quests started talking about radiation I decided I didn't want to be a dwarf anymore.
By "roll up" of course, I mean pick a name, gender, class, and customize the look of the character - all the icky numbers are well in the background. Then you will get a lovely, panoramic movie showing you where your capital city is and telling you a little bit about your race and faction - that is, if you have the sound on and your daughter isn't climbing on your head. Yes, this does come back to bite me later.
The first thing, once the scenery stops moving, that you will see, no matter where you start, is a small clearing with someone better-dressed than you with a big yellow exclamation point over his head. You walk up to this person and right-click on them. They give you something to do and you go do it, come back, and get a small reward and experience points.
That, in a nutshell, is the game mechanic for "PvE" or "Player vs. Environment" - going on quests to get items and experience. It sounds boring put that way, which is unfair of me - quests have taken me all over the world, sneaking past Horde patrols, exploring vast panoramic vistas of unspoiled wilderness, getting pounded in to Night Elf bacon by large, possibly-extinct animals, desperate fights against unnatural arcane forces, all of the classic adventure tropes.
There is also "PvP" or "Player vs. Player". That is when, after killing the guy you're trying to get quests from, and the guy you're trying to sell all the crap you've picked up while doing the quest, the Horde 70th level monstrosity terrorizing the low-levels can go ahead and kill you too without challenging you to a duel or setting you up to flag yourself as PvP. What fun. Leveling is a little harder in PvP, but once you reach 70th the prospect of taking it out on the other faction's lowbies provides motivation.
There are also role-playing servers - where the bad news is if you talk out of character and use modern lingo they make you stop, and the good news is if you talk out of character and use modern lingo they make you stop. Role Playing Player vs. Player servers are like PvP servers, only when they make your levelling miserable they're pretentious about it.
That's the basics of the game - you can go here to get a glossary of the lingo so you can pretend I taught you something.