I should probably hang my head in shame, me, a seasoned gamer with twenty or so years experience behind me and I'm still yet to really have a go at this 'online gaming' malarkey. Oh sure, I've dabbled a little, I remember spending a few afternoons playing Quake 3 and the version of when I first got my broadband connection, but not being particularly good at either I was soon more than happy to stop spending my free time being repeatedly killed by prepubescent grammatically challenged Americans. Then when I first got one of the original Xbox's I seriously considered getting Live until I decided that having to buy a proper router and re-cabling the whole house just wasn't worth the hassle.

So, aside from those close encounters, I've managed to remain blissfully ignorant to the world of online gaming. I can offer a few excuses, if some are needed, at this point. Perhaps it's the snob within me but from my outsiders viewpoint it seems that most popular online games are played mainly by irritating school kids who laugh in the face of anyone unable to easily complete whatever game they are playing. On expert. In under ten minutes. Blindfolded. With one hand tied behind their back. There's also the far more pressing of both talent and time, having a life away from the keyboard or game pad isn't conducive to becoming overly gifted at any particular game especially when there is always something else new and shiny waiting to be played and frankly why I would want to venture online in my precious gaming time for repeated thrashings has, so far, remained beyond me.

However, the rise in the last few years of the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) hasn't entirely passed me by and the idea of being able to take the traditional single player role playing experience into a world populated by other player-controlled characters certainly appeals to me more than the slew of first person titles that seemed to be the online games of choice a while back ever did. The biggest of these MMORPG's is undoubtedly 'World Of Warcraft', which sees developers take the Warcraft universe they conceived for their popular real-time games and bring it to life online as a third person role playing game. No doubt most people reading this will be familiar in some way with the game, a mind boggling eight million people worldwide are currently subscribed to the game and with the release this week of add-on pack 'The Burning Crusade' that number is set to continue to rise. Such a massive installed base means that, as well as probably making all at Blizzard very rich, in gaming circles it's pretty hard to remain untouched by the shadow of World Of Warcraft (WoW). Considering all of this it made perfect sense for WoW to come to mind recently when I decided to finally take the plunge and venture properly into the world of online gaming. What follows isn't a review in the normal sense of the word, for a start it appears next to impossible to traditionally review such games as the experience offered differs so wildly from player to player and is constantly evolving with no defined 'end' in sight, instead this is more of a story following my first steps into the world of WoW and MMORPG's.

And so it was, one chilly grey December morning, the after effects of far too much cheer limiting the chance of any kind of constructive activity taking place, that I found myself sat at my PC unwrapping a copy of WoW (I should note that the standard DVD case came inside a lovely fold out style cardboard outer box that reminded me of the good old days when game packaging used to be far more interesting than the boringly uniform DVD cases of today) and started the mammoth five disk install process. At this point reading about what happened next will be mercifully shorter than experiencing it first hand. Suffice to say the version of WoW is by no means the definitive article, once the lengthy install process has chugged it's way to conclusion the game needs over nine hundred meg of patches to be downloaded and installed, a process that on my less than nippy broadband connection took the best part of the rest of day meaning that by the time it had finished I had long since found something even less constructive to do with my day. So it was on another chilly grey December morning that I found myself sat at my PC with a now fully installed and patched up copy of WoW finally waiting to be played.

After the quick and simple account creation and the impressive CGI introduction I was soon creating my first character. After a quick browse through the descriptions of the different races I decided to be a Druid Night Elf whom I called Isorn, next it was time to decide how Isorn appeared physically using the character creation tool. This part of the process disappointingly isn't as massively flexible as you may expect and while this may well be de-rigour for MMORPG's it's not in the same league as something like 2 which was a bit of a shame. Last but not least it was time to pick a game server to call home. However, while I understood from a technical point of view what I was doing at this point, the game didn't do a very good job of explaining any differences between the servers or which one would be best suited for new players, admittedly only a problem that new players will come across once but I did feel like I was being asked what seemed to be an important question without really knowing what effect my choice would have on the game experience. Taking Isorn's life in my hands I picked a server pretty much at random and I was now ready for the game proper to begin.

Once the narrated introduction had set the scene and the swooping camera had come to a stop behind Isorn I found myself, at last, in the game world. Once there however it didn't take me long to realise that unlike a lot of single player games released these days there was going to be no hand holding tutorial of any kind in WoW and that stood there in the stone circle I'd materialised in I really had no idea what I was doing. Of course I could have read the manual, but as an experienced games playing adult I knew that such an admission of defeat was unworthy of me so instead I used my finely honed gamers intuition and did the next most obvious thing, I clicked on a character standing close to me with a giant yellow exclamation mark floating above his head! A few clicks of the mouse later and I'd been given my first quest and along with it a sense of purpose that dispelled my initial feelings of bewilderment. As I walked away from the circle ready to embark on my quest I noticed properly for the first time the beauty of my surroundings (learning how to change the camera angle from the horrible default probably helped too) as the night elves home land of Teldrassil stretched far into the distance all around me. And so, showing the attention span of a small child loaded with E numbers, the enthusiasm for my quest was duly tempered and my desire to explore took over. As I wandered around the village I appeared to have started in I discovered plenty more characters offering quests and soon I'd accepted more of them than I could shake my Elvish staff at, thankfully the details of which were all kept nicely in my quest log. The next few hours were happily spent exploring and working through those initial quests gaining experience points (XP) as I went, and working out how the games interface worked. From what I'd read about MMORPG's before starting I knew that this initial part of the game was really serving to easy me into things and more importantly gain my character some experience to allow him to move up from the first few levels meaning that I'd not spend the next part of the game having to run away from every creature I came across on my travels. Such a process has been termed 'grinding' within the community and although generally considered something of a bugbear I have to admit that, at least to start with, WoW did an admirable job of making what was essentially a lot of wandering around killing low level monsters feel a lot more structured, imbuing it with a real sense of purpose that from my admittedly inexperienced point of view made it far more fun than I'd perhaps been led to believe.

The one thing that did seem to be missing from the experience however was the actual multiplayer side of things. I could see people running around me all the time, all busy with their own quests and objectives and at the bottom of the screen I could see public chatter scrolling through but at no point did I have any need to interact with anyone or do anything that immersed me in the multiplayer aspect of the game at all. It was an interesting novelty to think that the characters running past me could have been being controlled by someone half way around the world but a novelty was all it was and soon I found myself treating the people running round me no different than I would computer controlled characters in any other game.