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"You can never go back. Or can you?" I wrote when I named World of Warcraft my game of the generation. It turns out that you can. I have.This story doesn't start the way it has done for so many others: with a combination of peer pressure from old guildmates, the good word of mouth around WOW's fifth expansion Warlords of Draenor, and the free boost to level 90 that shortcuts you straight to the new content. It's not the tale of a former addict's bewildered return so eloquently told by Bertie either, because the truth is I'd never really been away. Though I hadn't played seriously since Wrath of the Lich King, I'd always enjoyed revisiting Azeroth for a spell every now and again - albeit a shorter, more half-hearted spell every time, with a longer hiatus in between.
No, I started playing WOW again because my wife bought a new laptop. (This was about six months before Warlords was released.) She installed Blizzard's peerless MMO on it, not at my behest, nor the behest of her childhood friend who had healed Molten Core runs back in the day and had fruitlessly tried to persuade her to join then, but because another friend of hers had started playing. That friend had started because her colleague had talked her into it. The colleague was playing because her boyfriend had got her involved. And so on. That's the power of a great social game; it never dies, living on without you, finding generations of new players. And then it circles back around to find you when you least expect it and by the unlikeliest route.
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