A Pilgrim’s Digression

Some days by three o’clock in the afternoon, I am so tired I am literally dizzy with sleeplessness. Some days it doesn’t even take that long for exhaustion to smack me down. I work a ten hour day, arriving at the office around 6:30, and sometimes when I get there, I am in a complete stupor because I went to bed between midnight and 12:30 that morning.

Anyone who plays the MMORPG video game World of Warcraft probably knows the feeling. At 6:30 AM, having just finished an instance run barely five hours earlier, you feel dislocated, wandering loose in a half-dream world, head aching, eyes raw.

Coffee helps. Without Starbucks, I probably would not make it through to lunch, some days. I once had a colleague who would crawl under his desk and sleep and pretend he was out for a meeting. Now I wonder if he wasn’t a secret World of Warcraft player. Certainly there have been days when I have looked under my desk and thought, “Could I? Should I?”

Why do we do it? What is it about this game that prompts sedentary thirty-something year olds like myself to further endanger their already minimal good health by sleeping less and becoming even more sedentary? And why can’t we make non-players understand why we do it?

Perhaps because we don’t understand it ourselves, it is impossible for others to make sense of our preoccupation. Notice I did not use the more commonly used word, “addiction.”

In a rather heated exchange the other day, my wife complained that she has noticed I become rather crabby when I don’t get a certain amount of play time during the day. “If you can’t balance your fantasy life and your family life, then you need to make some hard decisions,” she said.

I thought about that afterwards. Why did she use the term “fantasy life,” a phrase I would apply to my sexual appetites but not necessarily to a game I always insist is a “hobby.” What role does living out a fantasy play in our attraction to the game that consumes so much of our time and energy?

I was thinking about that yesterday when I got home from work. Because I live and work in D.C. three nights a week, Tuesday and Wednesday nights are free for me to play WoW as much as I feel like. But yesterday, I was really exhausted. I couldn’t read on the train ride to the room I rent in suburban Maryland. No matter that the book was very interesting to me, I just couldn’t read it. I slept. I slept uneasily, but I slept, snapping awake every other stop or two to check my location so that I did not pass my stop.

When I got in, I went upstairs to my room, hung up my coat, and lay down on the bed. I am on a fixed schedule on these nights. I get in around 5:45 PM, and I lie down for a quick nap of about fifteen minutes in length. I eat dinner with my landlady promptly at six, so that we can watch the news together, converse, and I can go up to my room around seven and play WoW for several hours. I don’t mind if our conversation runs over and I don’t get upstairs until 7:30, but later than that I start getting anxious.

Last night as I lay there taking my quick “recharge nap,” as I call them (a reference in my own mind to quickly charging a laptop for a burst of use), I literally felt beat. My head ached. I felt dizzy, I was so tired. I knew that if I let myself fall deep asleep, I would probably not wake up again until time to get up for work around 4:45 AM.

So I got up and started my evening routine. The desire not to miss one evening that I could be playing WoW was stronger than any physical exhaustion I may have felt, and it reminded me of something: the way in which writers such as Balzac and others would physically exhaust themselves with the act of writing. They stayed up late writing; they forsook human companionship; their physical health suffered–all because of the compulsion to write.

This brought me back to my wife’s comment about my “fantasy life.” World of Warcraft has obviously replaced writing in my life; whatever hole was created by the departure of my compulsion to write has been filled by the compulsion to play this game. The two occupy roughly the same place in my psyche. Is this true for other people as well? Does WoW fill some basic human need for creativity, for meaningful engagement with the soul?

Or is my case peculiar, in that I once had a genuinely creative temperament which has been superseded by fantasizing almost as superficial as if I were watching television for ten hours a day? People like me who play WoW often tell our spouses or friends who look at us dubiously, “Well, at least I don’t sit in front of the TV for hours every night like most Americans.” My favorite excuse I give my wife is, “At least I don’t go play golf for ten hours on a weekend, the way many men do.”

But is there a difference? It is all escape, much as the act of writing is an escape though without the creative engagement in producing something valuable.

When I think about what attracts me to this game, about what compels me to keep playing, here is what I come up with:

1. I “create” a character. That is the exact term we use to describe it, “creating.” Sometimes the act of creating a character is itself as simply enjoyable as playing. Players talk about having “alt-itis” (an alt is a character one plays only occasionally, as opposed to one’s “main” character that one plays more frequently), a compulsion to create many characters, most of which are not played for more than ten levels or so. Players also talk about character development, usually in terms of the armor the character wears, the talents of the characters, or even the “personality” of our characters. Especially on a role-playing server, we often think of the characters we create as having personalities. Anyway, it’s interesting how often we use creative terminology to describe our interactions with the game.
2. The feeling of progress. Developers have “game theorists” on staff who look at the game purely in terms of an almost Pavlovian reward/response level. How difficult should the game be before it becomes too difficult for people to obtain their “reward?” Can a game be made too easy so that the “reward” is stripped out of it? By reward, I mean the sense of progress and achievement. WoW delivers that reward experience in buckets. Every part of the game is predicated on the idea of reward. You advance your character from level to level by completing quests, for which you are literally rewarded with pieces of armor, clothing, weapons, pets, trinkets, or just money. Some rewards require large sums of money, and thus many hours of play. Players complain about this, but I suspect they wouldn’t have it any other way. The feeling of achievement is that much stronger when you have spent many, many hours of your life grinding away to earn that special reward.
3. Progress and achievement is so important, I am giving it another bullet on my list. The other day I was thinking about my goals for once I reach level 70. My gnome warlock turned 69 last night, so I am almost at level cap, after which I need to have some other way of measuring my “progress” in the game. And what I came up with is I really want a Netherdrake, a large, beautiful, glowing dragon that I can fly around on as my primary flying mount. It will cost a lot of gold and require a lot of grinding. Training to fly the beast alone costs thousands of gold, and then you have the cost of the Drake itself added to that. But man, how cool will it be to have my little gnome flying around on top of one of those things. Is this desire for a mount really much different than, say, a man looking at that sleek BMW sports car and calculating how much he will have to work/grind to get it? I mentioned this desire for a Netherdrake to one of my few guildmates who has one, and he seemed almost perturbed, or perhaps just jealous of his own achievement: “I hate to disappoint you, but you know you will still need to pay for the flight training before you can buy one.” Yes, I know that. I know it’s an uncommon flying mount, and that is precisely the reason I want one! The sense that I have achieved something special will just be tremendous.
4. The feeling of accomplishment. Perhaps I am being redundant, but that feeling of accomplishment, moreso than the accomplishment itself, is what really brings me back to the game. It makes me feel good to have brought a character I care about all the way from level 1 to 70. The feeling is similar to the feeling I used to get from writing a short story. Having completed a short story, there is a feeling of productive energy and achievement that is better than almost anything else in life. It is that positive feeling that is the big payout for WoW players.
5. Sense of belonging and of relationship to other people. Odd choice of words there, “relationship to other people,” but it seems to me the central problem of modern life is lack of connection with others. Call it self-centered-ness, if you wish, but I think it is closer to loneliness than selfishness. As working adults with families, how many true friends do we have? And how many acquaintances? How many of us live many, many miles from the family that raised us? Now think about the number of online relationships we have today. I consider myself nearly friendless, in terms of the number of people I do things with in “real life” on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. But there are countless people I communicate with online, some of whom I have never met, but many of whom I have met but no longer see face to face. We email, IM, or we “Friend” each other from our Facebook pages. But we don’t physically meet anymore, at least not often. I’m not sure we think of those virtual relationships as being different than “real” friendships, but at the very least the mode of relation has been altered by technology. I remember when Blizzard enabled voice chat in game and I started hearing the voices of people I had been playing with for awhile, it felt quite weird. It was as if people I hadn’t been sure existed suddenly confirmed the reality of their presence, for me.

Where am I headed with this long, long blog post? I believe the compulsion to play WoW, often at the cost of sleep, health, and even freedom or our very lives (the media always makes meticulous note anytime a WoW player commits a crime or kills himself or herself), is triggered from a need for meaning; meaning through the act of creation or even procreation, meaning through achievement and relationship to others. Our own lives often seem so empty, pointless, and lonely. WoW gives the semblance of meaning to people who often feel disconnected from the people around them, and who may feel that their lives lack some essential creative component that gives it meaning and a sense of achievement. Perhaps WoW provides all this only superficially, I don’t know.

I know that once, before the advent of Internet and online games, I read a lot of books and thought that I wanted to write them. This gave my life meaning. Eventually that came to seem like a childish dream; however, without it I became depressed. Then along came World of Warcraft, almost simultaneously with the end of my childlike fantasy of literary creation. I guess the question now is, is there life beyond WoW?