Advocatus Diaboli

On top of my insatiable beer habit, I also have a healthy infatuation with video games.

I’ve been a gamer as long as I’ve been a computer user. I was typing nonsensical commands into the text field in King’s Quest before I’d even learned math. By third grade I knew most DOS commands, just so I could load my favorite games.

C:\>cd games, C:\>games>cd sierra, C:\>games>sierra>kq1.exe – the mantra of my childhood.

If you weren’t already aware, today marks the release of Diablo 3; a Blizzard Entertainment creation 12 years in the making. I wasted (enjoyed) hundreds of hours on Diablo and Diablo 2 back in middle and high school (respectively) and am a huge fan of the series. I played the open Beta a few weeks ago, and a happy to say the Diablo 3 looks like it is going to melt everyone’s face with its innate awesomeness.

Approximately nine hundred billion people wanted to play the second the servers went live. I get it. I really do. We’ve been eagerly awaiting this day for ten plus years, greedy little hands on our our greasy little mice, waiting with unabashed anticipation to hack and slack and loot. It’s not like there were any other good games in the past ten years to tide us over, so this is the culmination of a decade of rumors, theorycrafting, teasers, and tidbits of Diablo lore.

But the servers went down. It was a shock to gamers around the world, as we have no prior examples of this happening. Ever.

As I read the torrent of rage that flowed across the internet like lava flow of nerd tears, I got to wondering. Weren’t all of these people playing Diablo and Diablo 2 at the same time I was? Assuming they were similar age, shouldn’t they have jobs and responsibilities and families and cats? Do they really have time to explode into a dork-furor over some servers being down?

Am I the only gamer who grew up?

As my friend John put it: “You’ve waited over 10 years, a few more hours won’t kill you.” A couple more days won’t matter either. Unless you were scheduled to die in the next few days, in which case, I question why you’d want to play a video game for your remaining time left on this planet.

My advice? Do what I do. Get a job. Go to said job. Do work at said job for 8-9 hours. Eat a nice lunch. Write a blog post. Go home and see if the gaming universe has collectively calmed down.

If the servers are up, play for an hour or two. If the servers are down, hang out with your wife (or husband). Pet your kitty. Drink a beer. Go to bed.

If you absolutely need your Diablo fix because you’re a strung out heroin addict who would kill somebody for just a taste of sweet, sweet dungeon crawling, get creative.

Crazy creative.

Behold, the upcoming franchise: Lego Diablo 3!