A Pilgrim’s Digression

I have foreseen my own death, and it ain’t pretty. I am going to die the addict’s death, alone in a rented walk-up somewhere in an uncaring Eastern city. My wife has divorced me; my son has forsaken me. My teeth are rotten from poor nutrition, since I subsist mainly on noodles I scavenge from the garbage cans in the alley behind Chinese take-out restaurants. My body reeks of foulness from my soiled clothes. I can’t remember the last time I bathed. I sit all day and all night with my one companion, an ever-faithful iBook that keeps my drug flowing continuously into my bloodstream.

Just you and me, my sweet iBook. You’re all I’ve got left in the world. You and me and World of Warcraft.

The New York Times has yet another article about World of Warcraft in the Tuesday online edition. Overall, it’s a positive article, and pretty fluffy in terms of content. No doctors offering their expert opinion that excessive playing of WOW will lead to impotence, psychosis, and hemorrhoids.

Instead, we get comments from players like Jason Pinsky, 33, who plays WOW from 8 PM to midnight six days a week, and defends his behavior by saying, “When I say that to people, sometimes they look at me a little funny. But then I point out that most people watch TV at least that much, and television is a totally mindless experience. Instead of watching ‘The Lord of the Rings’ as a three-hour experience, I am now participating in the epic adventure.”

The Lord of the Rings reference is interesting, because I find myself drawn into the game for the exact same reason. To me, it is like living in Middle Earth for awhile, or at least a sort of generalized, skirting the bounds of copyright infringement permutation of Middle Earth.

Those feelings aside, later in the article Pinsky is quoted as saying he has a pregnant wife. I’d venture to say his gaming is going to be curtailed once the baby arrives. And if he isn’t prepared to curtail his gaming himself, there may just be a little tension between husband and wife in the Pinsky household. The article doesn’t mention how his wife feels about his gaming now, during her pregnancy.

That said, I generally think Pinsky has a good point. Most people do spend four hours a night watching TV or movies. I guess my question would be, how does his wife fit into his gaming? He could be watching TV with her for four hours a night, and that would not necessarily be considered a waste of time. Or they could be playing the game together, which arguably might be a better use of both their time than tube-watching.

It’s a difficult balance to maintain. For the first two years of Brendan’s life, I didn’t play games at all. Then gradually, I began finding more time for myself, as did Lynn I think. For example Monday, while Lynn napped and Brendan played with his trains in his bedroom, I played WOW for two hours. That’s a luxury the parent of a two year old, maybe even a three year old, cannot afford. It’s also one big reason I don’t want any more children. I realize I am revealing my selfishness with that statement, but some of us don’t consider breeding to be the end-all of existence.

I am still trying to figure out what it is about this game that makes it so different from anything else I have ever played. I played for about two hours late Friday night; I did not play Saturday night because I had to get up for church Sunday morning; Sunday night I played for a couple hours, from about eleven PM to one; then on Monday, the Labor Day holiday, I played for about two hours in the afternoon. I do not usually play in the afternoon, partly because like smoking, it’s not a behavior I particularly want Brendan to witness his father participating in. I want him to have a normal, video game-less childhood for as long as possible.

Monday was a cool, rainy day, however, and there was little else to do. It was one of those days where you want to curl up in bed and sleep much of the day. Or play World of Warcraft. So Lynn napped and I played WOW.

I created two new characters this weekend, a dwarf hunter I named Nori (the name of one of the dwarfs in The Hobbit), and a female night elf Druid I named Nynia (from my book of Anglo-Saxon names). I am probably going to keep these two characters and delete the first two I created. I really did not know what I was doing when I created them. Both are warriors because I did not know how to select a different character class, and warriors aren’t as much fun as some other classes. Hunters get to own pets, and Druids can shape-shift into animals such as bears. Warriors just bludgeon things to death.

Also, when I created those first characters, I did not understand how important it is to choose professions carefully. You are only allowed two professions, and the two should complement each other. Thus for my Hunter dwarf, I chose to learn skinning and leatherworking, so that I could make my own clothes for my own use or for sale. These two professions also provide a potentially huge cash windfall, since animal skins are available everywhere, either from one’s own kills or from other players’ kills.

Yesterday, I made quite a bit of silver just by hanging around the Wendigo cave and skinning Wendigos as other players killed them. Also, apparently there is a war going on somewhere else in the “world,” and when I visit Ironforge, the capital city of my territory, I can donate leather to the war effort in exchange for some pretty high value items that I can resell or auction in the auction house.

For my night elf Druid, I chose the professions of Herbalism and Alchemy. Collecting herbs, roots, and flowers basically provides the ingredients for potions created via alchemy, but some herbs are rare enough to resell for a high price, too.

So essentially, just as in real life, professions are a way to raise quick money. And just as in real life, if a player wants, he or she can devote themselves to their professions and not go questing at all. There are auction houses in the capital cities of the WOW universe, and players can auction off their crafted items, such as clothing, armor, and weapons, to other players, and one can develop a reputation for good quality items. All clothing I create is stamped “Made by Nori,” so as a leatherworker/tailor, I suppose I could eventually become the Tommy Hilfiger of Azeroth.

Still, I can’t get to the root of why this game is so different. I’ve played a lot of games in my life, all of them single-player PC or console games. Now, when I think about picking up the Playstation 2 controller, or loading a WWII shooter like Brothers in Arms onto my Mac (Brothers in Arms was a game I loved, previously), I just can’t imagine that any game would be half as fun or as interesting as WOW.

Just before discovering WOW, I had recently finished playing The Godfather for Playstation 2. Unles you’ve played it and then tried WOW, you can’t imagine how limited, boring and repetative that game seems to me now. Most buildings were not accessible, and the map was basically a city grid of straight roads. No parks to get lost in. No rooftops where you could get a grand view. Even though I enjoyed playing it, I was very aware of the limits of the game map.

And there were only about four different forties-era automobiles, even though the time frame for the game extended through the mid-nineteen fifties. Your interactions with the computer-generated civilians in the game were limited to a few stock phrases. The game had so many flaws, none of which I really perceived at the time. At the time, I viewed it as an interesting take on the Grand Theft Auto-style of console game, and I enjoyed playing it.

Now, The Godfather’s flaws are magnified ten-fold. Everything in WOW is accessible and interactive. There is hardly a creature, non-player character, person, or item that isn’t interactive. It is truly a world unto itself.

My only qualm about WOW is that I don’t know if I will be able to play it as a loner for very long. This New York Times article referenced above suggests that there are some quests better tackled with a group of friends. The problem is, I don’t think I have any friends who would be willing to play this game with me.

Second, it could be problematic scheduling time to play with friends, even if I could scrounge up one or two who wanted to play. It sort of raises the age-old conundrum for married men: do I spend time with the family, or do I go bowling with the boys. Of course the Soloman-like solution is to take your family bowling with you. But what if they don’t like bowling?

Anyway, the problem of eventually having to abandon my loner status is something I will address when the time comes. Right now, I just think this game is the best ever created by the mind of man.

I sort of feel sorry for traditional board games which I enjoyed as a kid. After playing a game like WOW, returning to a board game, or even a traditional console game, is like driving a Yugo after driving a Mustang for several years. The Yugo is perfectly fine, if you’ve never driven a Mustang.

Rather humorously, there is a Dungeons and Dragons advertisement that appears in the Mac magazine I read, the gist of which is that at least in a D&D game, you know that the hot elf chick you’re questing with is actually your 200 pound, middle-aged friend Darrell. So “Get together, roll some dice.” Somehow that plea seems almost pitiful. I imagine a handful of grizzled forty-something nerds sitting around rolling dice and playing “make believe.”

Anyway, part of the fun of World of Warcraft is that you don’t know the backgrounds of the people with whom you are playing. You become your character, and other players become their characters, and together we populate a world nearly as vast and complex as the “real” world. Somehow rolling dice over a game board just sounds so nineteen-seventies, compared with that.

It’s like the difference between childhood pretend and adult creation. Given, there is something to be said for the imagination of a child. That’s part of the reason why I am intent on limiting Brendan’s exposure to video games at this early stage. However, there may come a day when we play this game together. The beauty of World of Warcraft is that there is no end of development in sight. The game grows like a real living, breathing organism. Like our world. Or like a matrix.

Friends, be prepared to stage an intervention on my behalf. I have taken the blue pill.