Tomorrow is MMORPG Day, well… today, I suppose; it is after midnight. It’s also Independence Day, I can tell because Microsoft is trying to sell me a Confederacy uniform for two dollars for my avatar to wear. I’d prefer the Union, but that is oddly unavailable. Oh, and the Civil War, you know… came more than eight decades later than the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Odd, that.

MMORPG Day started in 2001, quite by accident. Anarchy Online just came out and I had been playing it on the night of July fourth with my window open. In the game I had been involved in some large scale assaults, and with a set of Klipsch speakers set to eleven, it was all very immersive. I played the game for several hours before deciding I’d had enough. But when I turned the game off I noticed that I could still hear explosions. It took me a moment to realize that I was hearing fireworks. In 2002, I’d make the same mistake again. Having remembered the mistake of the previous year, I decided to do it on purpose in 2003, and it became a compulsion, or a tradition.

The games have changed over the years, but the tradition remains. This will be my eleventh consecutive MMORPG Day, and I’ll be spending it with World of Warcraft.