Every nation has its kooks—excepting of course the Swiss—but there's something utterly American to me about the UFO sighting. It's probably something to do with the sheer size of the place. A tired, potentially hopped-up trucker, trundling across the endless plains of… whatever state has endless plains in it, spying something mysterious and illuminated in the canopy above? That's America to me.

Also America to me: the Grand Theft Auto videogame series, so it was only natural that I bring real UFO visits to Rockstar's fake LA. I installed UFO Sightings, "a simple script that spawns a UFO at random locations throughout the map."

Its aim is to be eerie and mysterious, which is probably why it limits UFOs to appearing at night. I didn't know that at first, though, so I spent quite a lot of time flying around Mount Chiliad at high noon, trying and failing to find visitors from other worlds. I did find the now-ever-present swarms of hitmen trying to kill me, though, so I had fun.

Once I realised my error, I nudged the game clock forward. Voila! All of a sudden, a distant part of the map glowed red. "UFO sighting reported" declared a pop-up. My reaction was swift—I immediately took flight (I have Superman powers; don't worry about it) and headed towards the marked zone.

Now, look, here's where things didn't quite go as I planned. In my idyllic visions, the American spaceman-spotter sees a hazy disc in the middle distance. He squints, he rubs his eyes, he thinks but is never sure that the object he's looking at is aliens, and there is no one in a 10-mile radius to back him up when he talks about it later. His defining trait is uncertainty. If he speaks, he becomes a disbelieved outcast. If he keeps quiet, the questions haunt him to his grave.

The truth wasn't quite so romantic or secretive: My UFO appeared about 30 feet in the air over an intersection in downtown Los Santos, flashing with enough enthusiasm to immediately kill anyone who's even familiar with epilepsy.

I guess it worked out. At some point, possibly in response to me shooting it with my laser eyes, it stopped flashing and began to ascend, eventually vanishing completely. Maybe I never saw it. Perhaps it was never there at all.

Like many others who carry the spiritual stain of prior MMO contact, I've been spending some time in the WoW: Forever beta. After piloting a freshly-minted orc through the introductory quests in the Valley of Trials, I emerged into the wider Durotar scrubland where I soon entered into combat with a hostile scorpion that had strayed too close to the road I was following to Razor Hill.

For the next 38 consecutive seconds, I did nothing but watch my orc slowly bludgeon that scorpion to death with a wooden club. And reader, I say this with full sincerity: Those were 38 seconds of peak gaming.

I haven't just been playing Forever to sample Blizzard's distillation of year one WoW nostalgia. I've been testing a conviction that I recently forwarded after a week with Star Wars Galaxies: a belief that MMOs would be better off if they rediscovered their lost willingness to burn more of our time.

My half-minute and change of scorpid combat has left me feeling pretty confident in the hypothesis.

The notion that slower could be better might feel antithetical to current trends in game design, particularly in MMOs. Games have given themselves over to the pursuit of acceleration: the drive to win faster, kill more, and make the numbers bigger as soon as possible—to achieve the most gaming in the least amount of time.

Judging from the ecosystems of optimization guides and meta build videos, players seem very eager to indulge. But when the rhythm of retail WoW is tuned with the assumption that even low level characters should enjoy a frenzy of special attack animations, button presses, and near-instant kill times, a meditative arachnid clubbing is a reminder of what's been lost in the exchange.

Namely, a chance to appreciate the rest of the videogame.

When I've been acclimated to years of high-speed flying mounts and an abundance of off-cooldown abilities, the contemplative pace of my orc's club-swinging opened up so much room for admiring the surrounding space—room I hadn't realized I'd been missing so badly. I could savor the way the in-game sunrise spilled over the Horde heartland's redstone crags, or the interplay of ambient wind samples and the soundtrack's intermittent war drumming.

And crucially, unlike when an MMO is doing everything in its power to propel me along a highway of reptilian brain chemicals, those 38 seconds give me time to think: about what spells I might unlock over my next few levels, which zone I might want to quest in next, or what business that troll warlock is running towards in the distance. It's time to wonder, weigh options, and linger in the concepts and possibility spaces that WoW proposes.

Knowing how WoW—and games like it—have gradually become a blur of constant doing, Forever's massive popularity is validating how much satisfaction there can be in slowing MMOs down. Maybe this time it'll stick.