Going back home for the holidays only every other year means that I get to watch change happen almost like it's in time lapse photography. I was raised in Michigan and enjoyed all of the four seasons, and most of them were great for playing outside on the playground. But, going back every other year the playgrounds I knew are all gone and new ones have popped up in their place. I noticed that this is the same thing that happens to an MMO and that is eventually why I stop playing them.

I have played World of Warcraft on and off since the beta in 2004. When I started playing I saw hundreds of new things and went on great adventures. It turned into my playground and I knew where all the slides were and how fast I could swing across the monkey bars. My friends and I ran around Azeroth and had fun in every corner.

Then someone built a new playground right next door, Outland. We went out there and looked around but just didn't like the new playground so we went back to our old Azeroth and went to Scholomance and read the books piled up there. Slowly, we warmed up to Outlands and would go out there to play on the shiny new things. No matter how shiny the new place was, we still met back in the old place and then went from there.

Now, an even newer playground was built called Northrend. This place was great and had all kinds of new lights and flashing slides. But, it was still not the same as our good old Azeroth. We had many good trips to the new playground, but nothing felt as good as coming home and riding around on our cats and horses under the trees that we had first run through when we were level ten.

Then came the day our favorite playground was bulldozed. The cataclysm tore down our old playground and put up a brand new one with shiny new things in it's place. Scholomance was still there, but all the corners were rounded off and the fresh paint wasn't the same color it used to be. Some of the things that we loved were still the same, but others were gone, and still more got changed to almost unrecognizable forms.

It's not that my friends and I no longer liked the game, we still loved it. But, to us it had changed from the game that we loved into a game that we could appreciate as well made. Just like playgrounds can be built amazingly tall, in the shape of castles, made of wood or plastic, but they will still have swings. That is because fun is fun n matter how it is dressed up.