I Got My Pandemic Mantra From ‘World of Warcraft’
‘You feel normal.’ ‘You feel normal.’ ‘You feel normal.’
Just about every day now I log onto World of Warcraft, and after about an hour or so, three words pop up in my chat window: You feel normal.
It’s become a daily ritual at this point. I play World of Warcraft, and World of Warcraft tells me that I feel normal. This has been a feature since the game launched in 2004.
World of Warcraft tells me that You Feel Normal not because self-care is so important these days but because of a mechanic called Rested Experience. If you spend enough time logged off, your character accumulates a double experience bonus that can be redeemed the next time you log in. If you log off in a major city, or an inn, you accumulate Rested Experience faster than you would if you just logged off in the middle of the forest or a cave.
Practically, it helps players with less time to play catch-up to those who never log off. But more subtly, it’s a cool way to get players to role-play their characters without really asking them to get into character. The benefit of Rested Experience is so great that it’s worth taking the 10–15 minutes to find an inn or head back to a major city before logging off.
