Beware the Deviate Fish.

Hello, virtual audience…My name is Feilynn, wife of Spooner, female gamer and fellow WoW enthusiast. I hope you won’t mind if I take a bit of your time to discuss a topic I’ve kept bottled up for the past three years!

Blizzard seems to have a metaphor for everything. If you look deep enough into the game, you’ll find non-coincidental references in just about every seemingly harmless corner. Today, I’d like to discuss my view on what I’ve lovingly named Metaphor #1: The Wailing Caverns: Women in Gaming Form.

I’m a woman, and as such I would never intend to insult another woman without due support; however, in light of my experience playing World of Warcraft for the past four years, I’d have to say that in this instance (no pun intended), I am armed with enough evidence to debuff an entire raid of attention whore-ish women in under 60 seconds flat.

First, lets consider the Wailing Caverns and mobs contained therein: Deviate Ravagers, Deviate Guardians, Evolving Ectoplasms and, yes, Biletoads. When you think of an Attention Whore in the game, do any of these names apply? Of course they do! But none apply more than my favorite, the Deviate Fish.

If you catch a Deviate Fish, you’ll see that you can either turn the Deviate Fish into Deviate Delight, or simply eat the Deviate Fish right there on the spot. Eating this fish will cause you to enter a state of hyper-mania: random dancing, crying, laughing; a mixture of high intensity emotions brought on by one tiny little (seemingly) insignificant creature. This, in essence, is an Attention Whore.

Deviate Fish sneak up on unsuspecting male gamers like worgen in the mist. They understand foremost that many males who play the game find women gamers to be quite elusive… which makes us highly attractive. After all, most women in this world look down upon guys who play MMOs, so its easy to understand why guys find us to be the Holy Grail of gaming.

Like all opportunities waiting to be exploited, Deviate Fish take immediate advantage of this Holy Grail point of view and capitalize on the potential to be lavished upon, admired, flirted with and sought after.

Now, it’s not hard to spot one of these femmes of the Wailing Caverns. On Vent, she’ll be the one giggling in a high pitch at everything you say and, quite possibly, running amok through the instance wearing nothing but her skivvies and a cloak (if that). She’ll also tend to whine constantly about how nobody seems to save her when she’s dying, why won’t anybody help her out on quests and oh yeah, I have no money so can some nice guy lend me a few hundred gold?

In a crazy experiment which could only be pulled off by a nameless friend of ours (we’ll call him “Farquad”), the point on these Deviate Fish (and their Life Drain hold on helplessly unaware male gamers) was proven without contest. Over a period of six months, Farquad managed to woo another male character under the guise of femininity. He responded to the other gamer exactly how he’d seen many a Deviate Fish do it in the past: sly in-game smiles, naked dancing, little notes of “you’re so strong! how do you do that??” until eventually, the male gamer had given him nearly 2,000 free gold, actual flowers and candy sent via 1-800 Flowers to his home, and countless other in-game items of value including materials, blues, some purples and consistent run-throughs on any instance Farquad may have requested during this period of experimentation.

Sadly, Farquad couldn’t find it in himself to admit to the male gamer that he was, indeed, a male himself. Instead of letting the guy down, he simply up and transferred servers without a single goodbye and, from that point on, put down his female guise and has gone on to earn his own way in the World of Warcraft. Amen, sir.

Now, although I don’t agree with Farquad’s experiment (which undoubtedly got out of control), I do have to admit that it was fairly brilliant. He did exactly what every other Deviate Fish has done since the birth of the Wailing Caverns: he woo’d, he used, he gathered, then he left the poor unsuspecting guy high and dry without a hope in the world.

To summarize, it’s stupid to be desperate. If you have to give away items in the game to retain the affection of another (aside from nice little bouquets of flowers or those cute Valentine candies available in February), it’s not worth it. You don’t need a giggling, writhing, retarded little box of malicious intent to make you happy.  Save those moments for Tier 6 gear, fighting Illidan or taking out the Lich King.  Believe me, you’ll gain more from the endless availability of pron on the internet than you will these wiley in-game creatures.