You don't need to be able to talk gold and swords to understand that WoW, as it's abbreviated, is a "massively multiplayer online role-playing game" — which means that it's a group timewaster through which people bond. (A lot of people: The game, for which Blizzard charges a monthly subscription fee, has 11 million subscribers.)

Sort of like golf! Venture capitalist Joi Ito has called World of Warcraft "the new golf," the social glue connecting a new generation of Silicon Valley businessmen. True enough, I suppose, for the overpaid, underemployed investor class. But for the people who are trying to pick up the slack for coworkers who overdid it on a raid last night, here's what World of Warcraft really is: the new binge drinking.