Roanoke.com

I can tell summer is finally here in Blacksburgand not just by the spate of 90-degree days.

On my weekly harvesting of the trash bush in front of our rental house, I didn't find a single beer can, hot dog box or Jimmy John's wrapper.

Living on a busy street, surrounded by fraternity houses, two blocks from downtown, our yard has been a perpetual favorite drop-off spot for pedestrians' trash. The 200-year-old boxwoods are a particularly attractive spot to stash empties. Sometimes I have found half-full 40-ouncers tucked way back in the shrubs. Was the owner planning on returning for it later?

A second sure sign of summer is the plethora of cardboard boxes for packing and moving. In a college town, many renters' leases end at the end of May. Boxes overflow from the backs of cars, back yards, back rooms. It's a townwide game of musical chairs, the music has started and everybody shifts to a new abode.

The third sign of summer, the one that is hardest to accept during my favorite time of year, the time of long hot days and a quiet town, is graduation. Both my roommates have finished their master's degrees, and our two years of sharing a house is coming to an end.

I'm going to miss them. I've been wondering what is going to become of all our projects when they are gone. What's to become of the weekly Dungeons & Dragons campaign?

Deep in my funk of impending change, I went to the experts at one of Blacksburg's gaming stores, Fun N Games, and talked to the owner, Michael Mutschler. Upon hearing that I was from The Roanoke Times and writing about D&D, Matthew Highcove, the current de facto president of Virginia Tech's role-playing club (gotrpg.org), was quick to assure me, "We don't worship Satan -- except on Saturdays."

As you might have guessed, role-players tend to be not only intelligent and good-looking, they are also pretty funny people.

We've gotten a bad rap in the press, but the game is about imagination, not being out of touch with reality. It's not a small number of people playing, either -- the most popular computer game last year was "World of Warcraft," an online multiplayer game with its roots in the venerable table-top D&D.

In the interests of journalism and at great personal risk of sleep and a continued healthy relationship, I have tried out World of Warcraft. It's not like traditional D&D where all you need is stack of books, a semi-benevolent megalomaniac to run the game, and some friends to roll up characters and strike out for adventure.

To play WoW, you need a fairly new computer with plenty of hard drive space to burn, a fast connection to the Internet, $50 for the software and $15 a month for access to the servers. If you can get all that together, you may find it to be strangely addictive. It can also be a time sink -- you'll find yourself doing things repeatedly to gain experience and money to advance your character.

Some people find that aspect of the game so tedious, they buy "virtual gold" and pre-made characters with real-world dollars. There are cottage industries (in countries that can afford to pay workers 50 cents a day) that revolve around playing WoW just to generate virtual gold that will eventually be sold for real dollars.

This "gold farming" is against the rules of the game, but there's an awful lot of it going on. The current exchange rate is roughly 1,000 game dollars to 100 American dollars.

Fun N Games doesn't sell WoW software. When I asked Michael and Matthew if WoW was cutting into traditional D&D, they didn't think so. Males and females, singles, groups, families and couples play both. WoW is even attracting new players to D&D, which Gary Gygax created in the 1970s.

As we clear our house, I stashed my D&D stuff in my backpack so I wouldn't accidentally pack it in one of the many boxes going into storage. We've decided we're going to play every week as usual, minus a couple of pals.

Adventures are wrapping up and stories are being told to account for the players that are leaving, their character sheets carefully tucked away until we see them again.

Pris Sears grew up in Florida, lives in Blacksburg and works among Virginia Tech's computers.