Oh dear. On Saturday, The Times newspaper came with a DVD with World of Warcraft and a free 14-day trial on it. Naturally, I couldn’t resist, even though I knew World of Warcraft would do terrible things to me. Like make me want to play it all the time.

And even though it meant having to buy The Times, which, thinking about it, wasn’t the first newspaper I’d have thought to do this sort of promotion. In fact, it’s did a pretty good job of introducing WoW to a new audience, with a mini supplement devoted to the game containing fairly enlightened articles about journos getting their first taste of MMOs, and the following, which I found on the back page:

“Most people wouldn’t comment on a book they hadn’t read or a film they hadn’t seen, yet the same courtesy is rarely extended to video games. If you have never played a video game, you will perhaps come to understand the appeal of this growing industry, which is already worth billions of dollars. What do you have to lose?”

Hear, hear. Course, I wonder if this is really the game to start with, what with the hell of about a gigabyte of patches needing to be downloaded before you can start the damn thing (bloody PC games…). Oh, and the little detail that to the uninitiated the gameplay must be almost incomprehensible.

Anyway, this is my first postcard from Azeroth - that’s Tuffnel, my level 10 Orc hunter, on his first visit to the city of Orgrimmar. Ahhh, isn’t he lovely?