World of Warcraft

I always have this feeling when I look at games & comic-books, that they are electric with promise. Yet somehow they never deliver, for me.

But they can.

I played World of Warcraft yesterday. I relaxed, enjoying the love that puts better and better massively-multiplayer-online role-playing games into the world. Make no mistake, these are creations of love. World of Warcraft took five years to make, and that's not counting all the years it took to make Warcraft or Diablo first.

I felt that same tremor. A longing for a stage and for actors. A recognition of the growing power of the role-playing-game genre, and of its continuing inadequacy.

I always feel as if I am looking at computer games from 50 years in the future. They seem as evocative and archaic as lead soldiers. World of Warcraft on a souped-up PC; SpaceWars on two PDP-6's -- same thing.

There is a human neurolinguistic-processing bandwidth that computer games miss. There is a cognitive-chunking/mapping bandwidth that theatres miss.

I thought last year about writing a play that was just an algorithm for the director. Not a script, but a series of tasks, out of which falls a unique script & production.