There was a thunderstorm stopped me from doing much World of Warcrafting last night, but I got into the game world for long enough to discover I’m a total dork in there. I hate that period of feeling like an idiot. There were several other newbies just standing around looking stupid too (the only words I heard (or rather saw) actual player characters say to each other were “What’s up?” and “Fuckoff!” which looked interesting hanging above their heads as they ran away from each other.)

My main problem is that I have a one-button mouse. And heaps on things in WoW depend on right-clicking, and the manual says you do that by pressing command (which for some reason is marked ctrl 0n the keyboard) at the same time as you click the mouse. That’s the normal way of accessing context menus and stuff on a Mac, too: command click. Not a problem. Except it wasn’t working last night – I tried and tried for an hour, I’m sure, and still couldn’t answer the NPCs who asked me if I needed help.

I’m going to have to find a Mac friend who WoWs and go visit, cos the Mac support forums for WoW weirdly have no FAQ (or I couldn’t find it) and they discuss which two-button mouse they use, not how to play with only one button. I just paid 700 kroner for the game and some playtime, I’m not going to run out and buy a new mouse right away.

I really hate feeling stupid, and yet so many games leave me feeling that way. Oh dear.

4 thoughts on “WoWing on a mac

  1. Thomas

    Just the right excuse to buy the new Mighty Mouse! Good luck!

  2. Knud

    The mighty mouse is cool, but not the perfect tool to play WoW. That’s because pressing both “buttons” at once on the mighty mouse (that’s walk forward in WoW) is registered as just pressing the left button.

    Playing on a mac, I experienced the same problem with the control-click. For some reason, you have to APPLE-Click to emulate the right mouse button, not control-click as one would normally expect.

  3. Jill

    APPLE-click. And now I’m there, killing kobolds and talking to quest-givers. I’ll be second level before you know it 🙂

  4. Clemens

    Funny, just read your article on Feral Hypertext, it’s used in a course here at University of Aarhus which I am teaching assistant on, and wen’t out to check out your blog. I saw you have started to play World of Warcraft, I have played a bit too on Runetotem, give a call if you need assistant, I don’t play that much anymore though, i’m kept busy in the mines. My girlfriend plays quite a bit though, feel free to contact us to get help og get twinked 😉 Im called Abraham, and my girlfriend is called Ambrosia ingame. By the way, the article on Feral Hypertext was very decent. Have you looked at the service called Last.fm (http://www.last.fm/), it might be interesting from your point of view.

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