by Jess Howe

Created on: December 21, 2009   Last Updated: December 22, 2009

My husband got me a trial of World of Warcraft as a "finished NaNoWriMo" present; I write fantasy and science fiction, and he's known I have been curious about this game for a while. As a gamer himself, and one who reviews them occasionally, he was very excited to see what my impressions of it were once I'd tried it.

Frustration was unfortunately the first impression, as the game took a couple days to load in my computer. I'd had a similar issue with Spore, so I knew it was because WoW is complicated and huge in size, but it still irritated me.

Then the fun part began, and I was really swept away. My eyes boggled as the opening movie came on; I hadn't ever played a game or seen one with graphics and artwork as spectacular as this one. I at best play computer games sporadically - when I was in college, I used to use the freestyle RPG Mylanders to give new characters for writing a "test run," and that's the closest I've gotten to that sort of thing since. But Mylanders was a chat-format game, and so nothing at all like the amazing, sweeping landscapes, the highly-detailed people and creatures... when they invented the term "visual feast," they meant games like World of Warcraft!

Playing at first in this gorgeous world was, however, difficult for me. Like I said, I'm not normally a huge gamer - this means that there are a lot of things my husband finds intuitive which I do not, starting from something very basic like needing to have two hands at work constantly. In Spore, you need it every so often, but not constantly, you see. Also, there are little things like figuring on logic; in World of Warcraft, you don't automatically die if you drown - at least, not if someone's with you who can heal you, or even if you can heal yourself. This defies all logic I know, and is very hard to wrap my head around.

However, the two-handedness of the WoW game is something that produced a surprising effect. You see, I've been disabled for several years via many stroke-like instances and two actual strokes throughout my life. But forcing myself to learn to use both hands, and to make something move on a plane, is something that at first gave me headaches and made my brain feel very foggy after a bit, and then settled in. After a week of it, there were no neurological issues, and my walking was straighter and more confident, my memory which has been bad for years was better, as was my focus!

Playing also gave me a different version of the benefits Mylanders used to give me;

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