I spent a good long while last night staring at the snow gently fall around the super-bright florescent parking lot lights outside a Best Buy. Oh yes, by now you’ve deduced that this is a story about waiting in line for the midnight release of the latest World of WarCraft expansion. I was staring at the snow because for several hours, I just didn’t have much else to occupy my attention during the wait. This Best Buy is in Richfield, Minnesota, a south suburb of Minneapolis. It got down to 16° F last night with light wind, which made it cold but not brutally so. Still, it’s obviously not something one would normally choose to stand around in for hours, so I set out to talk to people about their motivations.

This was actually my third such adventure at this location. The first WoW expansion launched in the dead of January, the absolute worst time to be in Minnesota. The wind chill was godawful, and the temperature dipped to under -22 ºF. People would moan as the breeze kicked up, and pressed against strangers for warmth. But the shared suffering brought a festive atmosphere to the wait. Everyone had something in common, and there was a warm sense of camaraderie. People ordered pizzas, and one guy brought a propane heater attached to a high-powered fan to blast some warmth at the crowd. Out of nowhere, a fire juggler showed up. The first guys had arrived up at 4:00 pm the previous afternoon, and the line of hundreds would eventually wrap around the building and to the street.

Not so this time. There were about 30 to 40 people there last night, and the line barely reached the corner of the building. And that was with people spaced out from each other a bit, with much less co-mingling of groups. I observed one loner stand nearly motionless the whole time I watched him, and if he even turned to look at the people near him, I missed it. It seems obvious that the option to digitally download the software so it would be all ready to go on launch day would play a part in thinning the gotta-have-it-now crowd at the store. So I asked the good citizens just what they were doing there when they could be at home sipping beer and watching Monday Night Football, content in the knowledge that they could still sign on the instant the servers go live.

The guy at the front, Scottie, is from St. Paul and said he had line camped for both previous WarCraft expansions. They were the only things for which he’d waited for a midnight release. When asked why he would bother, his emphatic answer was for the collector’s edition, and all the extra goodies therein. “The audio CD, the mousepad. Oh, the art book is really sweet, really well done. And the in-game pet. But also, I guess a sense of tradition.”

Other people scoffed at the collectors edition, but shared Scottie’s sense of tradition and said they showed up for the atmosphere. I talked to a group of four in the middle of the line who arrived together from Lakeville, MN, and were all surprised the turnout was so low. The two guys, Matt and Mitchell, were three-time veterans like me, while the two ladies, Laura and Kiya, hadn’t bothered before, at least not for WoW (but Kiya reports waiting for Halo 3, ODST, and StarCraft 2). Kiya said she was in it for “the social aspect” and “the experience with the WarCraft crowd,” while Laura was actually glad to see the line was short. She was in it just for the physical copy: “Having the actual discs is important, at least to me.”

Once the doors opened at midnight, the tiny crowd was in and out in under fifteen minutes. Even the inside of the store was anticlimactic. While both previous expansions were treated to large tables and shelves of game boxes, gear, merchandise, t-shirts, maps, and all kinds of little odds and ends, there was one solitary table for Cataclysm. It held game boxes, the official strategy guide, and DVDs that were scheduled to go on sale today such as Inception. There were no large cardboard cut-out displays of famous WarCraft characters and no commemorative coffee mugs. Not that I ever bought any of that stuff, but it still used to warm my heart to see it was there.

I can’t help but think I might have witnessed the beginning of an end of an era. As downloads slowly take up more and more commercial space that was previously occupied by discs, we are slowly going to see the death of around-the-building, party-atmosphere, weather-defying lines of folks willing to wait eight or more hours for a single game, surrounded by fellow hardcore fans. Sure, people will still wait for hardware, but the fangroup for something like WoW has more focus and more stories to swap about specific videogame adventures than the crowd for the next Wii or Xbox ever will. I wonder if anyone else feels a sense of loss at the impending end of this awful, hallowed ritual.

It’s doubtful anyone in that line last night cares right now. Absolutely everyone I talked to reported they were taking at least the next day off for gaming.