Fear and Loathing in Azeroth: Is WoW Stealing Writers from the World?

[n.b. Though many posts on this blog are more serious, this one sets my tongue firmly in my cheek.]

Many writers are born from the depths of obsession, addiction, and neurosis. Think about the man pictured here, Hunter S. Thompson, who Wikipedia describes as 'known for his use of psychedelics, alcohol, firearms, and his iconoclastic contempt for authoritarianism'. [Let me say, before going any further, that I love the way the author of that entry puts it in that order specifically.] Thompson is the very best example of an obsessive author, but there are plenty of others: Hemingway, Beckett, Kesey, and Plath just to name a few.

Some would even go so far to say that obsession and writing go hand in hand. If that is the case, I wish to alert you all to a potential problem:

I speak of course, of the game World of Warcraft. Now I'm sure many of you play this game and know others who do. If you're familiar at all with it, you know it is an all-encompassing uber-obsession capable of turning normal, decent people in hopeless addicts almost overnight. We've all seen it: bloodshot eyes, chip crumbs, can after empty can of red bull.

As a writer, it is time I put my foot down. How dare you, gamers, steal our obsessive thunder? Hopeless addiction, unmatched obsession, and complete clutter has been the purview of writers for thousands of years. Now you come along with your night elves and your lich kings to lure an entire generation away from being shut-in authors to being shut-in gamers.

Enough, I say! Would Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas have been written if Hunter's guild had a raid? Probably not. Would Jack Kerouac have been able to write On the Road on a single roll of teletype if he was trying to get his character to level 80? I'm almost certain he wouldn't have.

It's clear to me what's happening here: the majority of perfectly good obsessive compulsive potential writers are instead turning their attention to WoW. What does this leave us with? A generation of writers made up of people who enjoy social media, who form a community that learns and grows together instead of wallowing in self-destructive behavior like alcoholism and drug use? No one wants that! This game must be stopped.

Find Your Equilibrium with Google-Powered Translation Party

To end the week on a lighter note, here's a very cool little tool that's sure to eat up your free time. It's called Translation Party, and it gives you a quick and easy way to perform a well-worn translation trick.

When you enter an English phrase into the site's box and hit "Find Equilibrium," the site will automatically translate your words [using Google's translation tool] into Japanese and back into English as many times as it takes until the Japanese and English match exactly. By the time the two phrases match, it's been turned into something quite different. The whole process is a bit like a game of bilingual telephone.

It works best with sentences or phrases that are out of the ordinary, so poetry provides the perfect fodder for a party. For my first Translation Party, I grabbed the book within nearest reach, which happened to be Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. I entered a phrase from Ecclesiastes that is on the novel's first page: "...unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again." [The translator didn't recognize the word "whence," and I had to change it to "where."] This is what it came up with:

"Here, the intrusion of water from the river" isn't even close to the original phrase, but it's kind of interesting in its own way. My favorite example so far is when I entered "You got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them" from Kenny Rogers' The Gambler. I wound up with "I know the time to keep me," which is a pretty zen way to say the same thing.

Have fun with this tool! The possibilities for humor and insight are pretty much endless. Plus it really highlights issues with slippery signification: Derrida would be so proud.