December 7th marked the release of Cataclysm Blizzard’s latest expansion for the massively popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft. It also marked the day where twelve million people don’t show up to work, severely crippling the world’s infrastructure.

While some of us continue to function normally in society, my brother, dirty, unshaven, and pajama/sweatshirt clad sits in the dark of my parent’s basement, an official World of Warcraft headset on his 23-year-old head. It is 1 AM and he just got back from the midnight release, in which he sat in the freezing midnight wind for an hour with his ilk, talking about all the new raids, bragging about their rare mounts and average DPS, and chatting about the games most recent PVP imbalances. By now game installation bar is nearly full. He is silent, except for the faint rustling of a bag of Doritos and the Ice bumping into each other in his glass of Coke.

He ended up playing the game for 28 hours straight, only stopping to smoke and go to the bathroom (sometimes). Then he slept for 6-7 hours, got up, and played it for another 12. This continued until all of his vacation days were used up.

What he doesn’t know is how his actions, and the actions of about .2% of the world’s population (seriously, that’s the population of Ireland and Israel combined) affect everyone else.

My brother works in the IT department of a healthcare corporation. Because he didn’t go to work, someone else in the department couldn’t access their files. Because this person couldn’t access his files, they had to deny a claim on one of their clients. Because of this denial, a now impoverished man had to drop out of college so he could work and pay for hospital bills. Now struggling to survive, he moves to Yemen and joins Al Qaida. Because of his former education in Biochemistry, he is able to develop a massive plague and unleash it on the world, inflicting its victims with an uncontrollable hunger for brains. Unlikely, yes, that my brother may cause the zombie apocalypse, but we will see who is laughing when you get bitten.

This is almost as bad as Black Friday (you don’t want to know). The moral of the story is: give World of Warcraft to Al Qaida to stop terrorism.