by Casey Lynn
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Last night, CBS’s geektastic sitcom The Big Bang Theory featured the MMORPG Age of Conan. Without giving too much away, I’ll just say that it explored the perils of game addiction in a humorous way. Like the rest of the show, it’s not framed in a way to mock the geeky characters but rather makes them pretty endearing. I imagine that to the non-geek it seems like an anthropological view of some foreign culture–like a kid enjoying an adult TV show despite not getting all the jokes. But for us, it’s even more fun because of the nuances.

This isn’t the first time that an MMORPG has been highlighted on the show; last season, an episode opened with four characters playing World of Warcraft, engaged in a rousing battle to get the “Sword of Azeroth:”

Also last season, an episode of the CBS show How I Met Your Mother involved a relationship between the protagonist and a new woman in his life… the revelation being that the two of them had met on WoW (this geek is almost ashamed to say that she actually recognized their meeting place as Stranglethorn Vale).

I don’t play Age of Conan myself, but I’m curious as to how accurate the portrayal of the gameplay was. I do know enough to have spotted a problem with one of the characters becoming a “level three warrior,” since I’m pretty sure that there isn’t a warrior class in AoC (they’re called “guardians”). I have a feeling that Sheldon isn’t the type of guy to call a class anything but by its proper name. Of course, there’s no such thing as the “Sword of Azeroth” either. I’d be interested to hear what our AoC-playing readers thought of the episode! You can find clips from the episode here at CBS’s website (Season 2, Episode 3). Or for those of you out of the country, it’s available on YouTube for the time being: parts 1, 2, and 3.

One part in particular that made me laugh was a comment about wanting a pair of enchanted boots in a different color…. maybe it’s a girl thing, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been playing an MMORPG and have thought the exact same thing. I bet that there are some of you out there who have gone on playing with outdated armor for a while because the better stuff is just too ugly for words. That’s actually one of the things like I like about City of Heroes–total wardrobe control!