If you go out in the woods today you better have played some WoW, at least if you’re going to confront an angry moose. That is one of the coolest sentences I’ve ever written. But it’s real. Two Norwegian siblings were confronted by an angry, and territorial, moose while on a jaunt through the forest. The twelve year old Hans Olsen saved his little sister by bringing skills he’d developed in the WoW world into the real world…
Thanks to his numerous encounters in Blizzard’s MMORPG, his first reaction was to “taunt” the moose so that it would ignore his younger sister. With its focus shifting to the boy, the sister was able to flee and head for safety.
In the PC game, taunting is the ability to draw the attention of the attacking beast away from the lower-level and less-armored party members. Apparently it works on real-world beasts too.
After the girl escaped, Hans initiated another World of Warcraft tactic he learned at level 30: feigning his death. Dropping to the ground and remaining inanimate, he waited for the moose to sniff him out and lose interest.