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After delaying for several months I’ve finally gone and done it… pulled the plug and closed the book on World of Warcraft for the last time.

Truth be told I stopped playing three of four months ago. I have not raided, with dedication, since shortly after our youngest son was born in February. As the new year crossed into 2011 my dedicated two or three nights/afternoons a week of raiding sunsetted. Gone was the era of my investing dozens of hours per week in game, progressing and spinning my wheels. The game changes were not a deal breaker, indeed towards the end the evolution of the world was for the best… real life and real life priorities shifted.

I bid farewell to a game that held me, clutched, for the balance of five years. For many of those months and years I mainlined WoW, abstaining from all other entertainment.

In the end I am fully ready to walk away.

I love Xbox 360 and Xbox Live.  David Matthew loves Live and playing Team Fortress 2 against people around the world.  I have blogged that he is spooky good at this first person shooter, beyond the skills I would expect a seven year old to possess.

What Rhonda and I don’t care for is the foul, very foul language you can hear on Xbox Live from time to time.  Some games gather more jerks and testosterone-fueled tirades (*cough* Halo) than others.  Interesting to see the news on a new Microsoft patent this morning.  I remain skeptical as real-time voice filtering strikes me as highly ambitious and error-prone, but I wish them the best of luck.  As a parent who wishes to embrace video games and sharing them with my son, rather than reject them, I welcome things like this.

An input audio data stream comprising speech is processed by an automatic censoring filter in either a real-time mode, or a batch mode, producing censored speech that has been altered so that undesired words or phrases are either unintelligible or inaudible.

Xbox Live: Microsoft Patents Real-Time Audio Censorsing