A Pilgrim’s Digression

If you wanted to know how bad my addiction has gotten lately, you had only to peak inside my brain during church this morning. In Sunday school, we were discussing a lesson about Romans 12, verses 1-11, in which Paul speaks of the spiritual gifts with which we are all endowed and bound to use for the good of other people.

Several times, I found myself on the verge of speaking up, saying, “It’s like in the video game World of Warcraft…” In WoW, each person is given two professions to master, such as herbalism, skinning, leatherworking, mining, engineering, etc. People become artisans in their trade, building their talents to the point that other players desire their manufactured items. No one can master more than two talents/professions, so this makes players reliant on others.

When the Sunday School instructor got to the point of asking why God would endow us with certain talents and not others, I did speak up (without mentioning the game) and said that I believed the answer was that we are supposed to combine our talents and work together to achieve God’s will in the world. In the back of my mind, I was thinking: just as WoW encourages community and discourages “rugged individualism” by making many tasks so difficult that “grouping” is necessary to complete tasks.

After Sunday School, we gathered for worship. I often find my mind wandering back to Azeroth throughout the day, even in church, but in general I think I succeed in focusing on what I am supposed to focus on in church. I hear the sermon and only occasionally find myself wondering, “Would it be better to combine a gathering profession, such as mining, with a craft profession such as blacksmithing…or should one adopt two gathering professions through the initial levels simply to earn more money?”

Today, we sang a hymn of praise titled “Glory to His name” in which one finds the lyric, “There to my heart was the blood applied,” and I am almost afraid to say what crossed my mind. In WoW, a good alchemist can create a life-giving potion called Weak Troll’s Blood. In my mind, I saw Christ giving a Night Elf a vial of Weak Troll’s Blood.

Is this what addiction is like? To think about something almost obsessively, to the point that almost nothing else is given a thought?

Unfortunately, it sounds like it might be worse for the friend whom I brought into the world of Azeroth. We played together late last night for several hours. I quit around 2:00 AM. She is on Pacific time, so it was only about 11:00 PM in the west. From what she told me in an email this morning, she tried to go to bed, but could not stop thinking about the game. She got up early, watched a movie, but found it didn’t calm her mind either. All she could think about was wanting to play again.

I know how she feels! My sleep was very fitful last night. I dreamed I was planting an herb garden in the Darkshore town of Auberdine, so that traveling alchemists would have a place to gather their necessary herbs. And I’m not even an herbalist in the game!

Partly, the problem is that the game is just too stimulating. Actually, that’s both its strength and its weakness. It is just an incredibly detailed, all-involving, game. One can literally become just as obsessed with social relationships in the game, as much if not more so than in real life .

Case in point: last night, my friend jokingly invited me to join a guild she belongs to called the Sisterhood of the Dirty Dancers. It’s a female only guild. We agreed that I’d say I was a gay male, if anyone asked. I could pass: after all, I am a tailor in the game. Another “sister” even asked me to create a red linen robe for her, such as I had made for my friend.

Well, eventually the guild-master whispered me to ask if I were a male. I said yes, gay male. She said she was sorry, but they were going to have to boot me.

It hurt. I felt unfairly discriminated against. Can you imagine the levels of irony one must pass through to get to a stage where a straight man posing as a gay, male elf, can feel discriminated against in a fictional, fantasy online game?

This is screwed up. Sometimes, when I am tossing and turning at night, dreaming of Azeroth, I think I am losing my mind. Is this obsession? Addiction? Psychosis?

Waking, I tell myself, “Really, how different is this from the days when friends got together to play two or three hour long Monopoly tournaments?” Is it different? True, when playing WoW, I am not in the room with my friends. Indeed I don’t even “know” most of my friends any traditional sense of the word “know.” Only one is someone I interact with outside the game. The others, I have never met them; but we meet and play together, laugh, joke, kill monsters, craft neat weapons and armor and potions for each other.

My question is, is this obsession healthy, or not? And will your answer make a difference in whether I stop playing?

Probably not. But I’m interested in the answer anyway