Posts with tag sleep

Looking for a guild? Well, you can join ours! We have a tabard and everything! Check back for Amanda Dean talking about guilds and guild leadership in We Have a Tabard.

Drama is not the only issue to cause hardship among raiding guilds. We've seen guilds crumble and fall over new raid content. It seems we've come across another time-sensitive factor: the beginning of the school year. Guilds that have been blissfully progressing throughout the summer may be seeing their attendance plummet.

Remember folks, some things are more important than WoW. Education tops the list. It would be poor form to badger your scholastic members into raiding when they've got homework to do. Students also need a good night's sleep in order to perform successfully. This goes for college students as well as high schoolers, but they may have more flexibility in scheduling. In the end, WoW is just a video game and school affects the present and the future.

World of Warcraft lends itself to the night owl. The game is detailed enough where if you want to be effective at it you need to concentrate a little bit, and that usually means not having distractions around you like kids, a significant other, or your pets. The best time I find that I can get distraction free is in the late evening and early morning hours.

I'm a night owl, if you will. In fact I'm sitting here typing this up at 2:15 a.m. CST. Quite late for most of my WoW friends even (however at least a few WoW Insider writers are still up and working on things).

This leads me to ask for today's breakfast topic, what kind of player are you? Take a stab at the poll too and let us know.



One of the best parts about playing late at night is a certain attitude that I find hits around three in the morning. It's the phenomenon when everyone is tired, nearly falling over on their keyboard, and suddenly somebody says over vent "Let's just do one more heroic."

WoW tends to be a night time activity for most people, many of whom find that it's surprisingly easy to move from one objective to another and lose track of time until the wee hours of the morning. Some people I know sometimes stay up most of the night playing WoW, only to get an hour or two of sleep before whatever they have to do the next day. They're young and they say they make up that sleep at other times, but still, no one would argue that this sort of situation is ideal.

A recent study reported by CNN says they're not alone. People who play MMORPGs tend to sleep less and spend more time playing than players of other computer games. It may seem obvious, since MMOs are by nature somewhat of a time-sink, but there is undeniably something more to it; any activity can potentially be a time-sink, after all -- so what is it about MMOs that makes people actually sink time?

The answer is up for debate, of course, but one important factor is that WoW's community of players gives the accomplishments within the game a context of reality. The game's goals, dangling in front of us like carrots, would be nearly meaningless if we could only appreciate them in a single-player context, but with a whole realm of other players working alongside us to get them too, they can feel very important. If the choice is between a few hours having dreams you won't remember, or getting a little closer to riding an impressive dragon mount, then certainly sleep can seem boring and useless by comparison.

Imagine the scene: the boss has been defeated, and after five grueling hours you're finally able to step out of the instance victorious. You log out to catch some shut eye, and your mind fills with images of the mobs you've just defeated. You're now dreaming of WoW.

A forum post about this subject really got me thinking. In fact, evidently even Eyonix dreams of WoW, which I guess isn't all that surprising really. I often dream that I am in game when I am happily zonked out. For me, I think it is a case of sensory input; I dream a lot of times about what I see and hear. A while back I prepared the night before a business meeting by printing out my reports and leaving them by the door so that I wouldn't forget them. I didn't, but in my dreams that night I did. The same is true of World of Warcraft. I spent so much time immersed in the game that it sometimes slips into my dreams as well.

Do you dream of WoW? What sorts of in game elements slip into your slumber?