World of Warcraft Parents Guide

Blizzard has dotted the annual game calendar with fun events that break up the routine of raiding and pvp.

• Feast of Winter Veil in December is clearly a takeoff on Christmas (though it is not at all religious in content).
• Lunar Festival resembles Chinese New Year celebrations in content and timing.
• Hallows End and Love is in the Air are unmistakably designed around Halloween and Valentine’s Day respectively.
• Brewfest somewhat resembles Octoberfest, although it takes place in September.

Most annual events last at least a week and include amusing quests such as racing a ram (male sheep) through one of the cities on a timed run or finding brightly painted eggs laid by bunnies behind fence posts, plants and wagon wheels.  Usually they also include unique rewards, some of which are useful (gear used in fighting) and some of which are simply entertaining (the ability to turn a friend into a frog or shower her with pink rose petals).

Event content is generally harmless fun suitable for all ages.  I have friends who make a point of completing all the quests every day for all the festivals just for the silliness of it, much the way kids read the Sunday comics every week and adults read the jokes and cartoons in The New Yorker.  As with most things in WoW and with most festivals outside of WoW, the festivals in Azeroth provide opportunities for friends to have fun together and to laugh and joke and share and teach each other.  Who can argue with that?

One festival puts the PG rating in WoW, and that is Brewfest.  Alcohol, sex, cigarettes, and drugs appear in movies on a regular basis and Brewfest is tamer than a PG movie.  The annual 4th of July celebration that you hold in your real-life back yard undoubtedly features beer and wine, if not stronger stuff.  Hot toddies and mulled wine go with Christmas as much tinsel and presents.  It would be illogical, therefore to use Brewfest to argue that WoW is a morally decrepit game, unless your family is Mormon or Muslim.  Brewfest simply requires some awareness.

Blizzard does a great job of simulating the negative effects of drinking. When a character drinks alcohol in WoW the screen becomes fuzzy and the movement of the character becomes uneven. The more alcohol consumed the more difficult it is for the player to see the WoW environment and control his character. There is a lesson in this experience about the impairment to motor skills that alcohol imparts. This simulation is one of the great life lessons found by playing WoW. (If you are not old and wise enough to understand it already!)

Furthermore, through Brewfest, WoW again creates opportunities for talking with your kids about important subjects, such as drinking and other “adults only” activities.  Ask them what they do during Brewfest.  Tell them about some of the parties you’ve attended where someone got really smashed and made an idiot of himself (maybe the story is about you in college or high school).  Talk to them about the real life idiots who drink and drive and how they put all of us in danger.  Ask them if there is anything like that in Brewfest (the answer will be “Not really.”), and then you can laugh and say, “That’s good.  Yet another example of how WoW is a safer place than the real world.  Don’t get the idea that just because its ok for your character to drink alcohol in WoW it’s ok for you to drink alcohol in real life because it’s not.”

Tags: Annual Event, Brewfest, PG Rating

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 6:16 am and is filed under Parent's Guide. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.