Photo by San Diego Shooter
I started playing World of Warcraft (WOW), an online MMORPG game, so I could keep in contact with my friends. Six months later I was playing twenty hours a week.
Previous to this, my gaming experience ended at being used as target practice in Halo. Not one of the highlights of my life. I was on a university budget and a WoW subscription was cheaper than phone calls and frankly my friends don’t answer their phone when their gaming. Sad but true. I created a character after the Arthurian myth, Morgan Le Fay. She was a bitchin’ warrior. Awesome.
For about three months life was good. Things were simple. If you don’t like someone type /ignore and no matter how hard they try to talk to you ‘<insert name> is ignoring you’ will pop up in raging red. Got a crush on another person in the game? /flirt will have you saying saucy things you didn’t even need to think about. World of Warcraft was Instant Messaging with interactive games that kicks tic tack toe’s arse.
Then it got worse. I enjoyed it so much I experienced my first ‘all-nighter’ then my first ‘LAN’ (Local Area Network, where gamers congregate in the same room and play).
The LAN was my acceptance that I had an addiction. We went for a night out in the city to celebrate a birthday and ended up in an Internet Cafe playing against each other till 7am. My room started to be filled with Kill on Sight posters of characters that I hated.
It’s bullshit that only females are naturally bitchy. Mos WoWers are males or males masquerading as females. On one forum there is a secret strand flaming other players, with screenshots and vicious nicknames included. Anyone who plays their character wrong is called a ‘noob’ and bitched about when they’re not logged on in private chat or in full view.
People get harassed. People make alliances. Some people even beg for WoW money so they can buy that uber sword that matches their outfit. There’s an Ebay equivelant called an Auction House.
Just like the real world, there’s an ugly side. ‘farmers’, mainly from China, work 23 hours of the day, constantly playing the game. English speaking players learn quickly that anyone saying ‘Ni Hao’ (hello in Chinese) is a farmer trying to sell their wares. The farmers then sell their matured characters on EBay for roughly $100 a pop. It took me twenty two days and thirteen hours of play time to reach level sixty, the finished product. The last thing I would want to do is sell it for only $100. That would be a profit of 18 cents an hour, not including internet and account fees.
I bit the addiction bullet, admitted to my issue and met up with the ten online people I had been talking to for nine months. All were males, though some played females. Only one was in his late twenties, still living at home, and smoking weed because he was overweight. He was the first on my /ignore list. The rest were sun-loving, relatively normal people.
During my WoW peak, I borrowed a computer from my parents so that my then boyfriend and I could play at the same time. How romantic. We would type sweet nothings as opposed to whisper in an ear.
I could see no end to the game once they increased the levels a character could reach. I had had enough of having dreams about characters, fighting with my boyfriend about play time versus “quality” time and the pressure of putting in four hours each night.
I thought about it. I was playing twenty eight hours plus per week and wasn’t getting paid. I was putting it all this effort so I could get a computer generated item that will make it easier to kill monsters that are constantly duplicated. That pissed me off. So I quit.
Not cold turkey, of course. Slowly I weaned myself off and substituted it by reading books and talking to people. I imposed on my loved ones a restriction on WoW talk.
I still have lovely friends who after four years only take one night off. Why the break? That’s when the servers shut down.