A Pilgrim’s Digression

This weekend was a big one for my gnome Warlock, Holdwine. After more than a year playing World of Warcraft, I finally got him to level 70, the current level cap. It was a pretty intense weekend of play, and I drew some pretty intense aggro from the wife, as well, because of how much time I spent in the game.

For those of you that don’t know, “aggro” is a term used in the game to refer to the amount of “hate” one has built up on a monster. For example, you get too close to a monster and it “aggroes” or notices you and starts attacking. Well, players have taken that term and applied it to real life, specifically to their significant other.

“Dude, I’ve got to quit now and do some laundry. I’m really drawing aggro from the girlfriend.”

Similarly, players refer to “grinding rep” with the significant other. In the game, when you complete quests for specific factions, you earn Reputation with them that unlocks rewards.

“No play for me today; I’m grinding rep with the wife. I’ve got to do ten loads of laundry to earn time to raid tomorrow night.”

I have never heard of any female players who have aggro issues with their boyfriends or husbands. In fact I specifically asked in guild chat the other night if there were any female players with “husband aggro” stories. It must be a rarity. One woman responded, “The only husband aggro I get is when I’m playing on his account and he wants to play.”

Anyhow, I started grinding to 70 on Saturday afternoon. When I began, I was about 25% of the way from 69 to 70. My wife lay down to take a nap with Brendan in the afternoon, and I decided I could grind out some of the XP points I needed to take me to 70. Immediately after log on, I noted that some folks were trying to get a Shadow Labyrinth run together in guild chat. I debated: did I have enough time? Would I still be playing when my family woke up?

I finally decided to give it a go. I was playing with guildies, after all, who understand that real life comes first. If I had to quit, they would understand (but quitting really is a last resort option, in my opinion; it’s just rude to join a group and then quit halfway through, unless something really pressing arises).

We did pretty well, up until just before Blackheart the Inciter. For some reason that is unclear, we wiped (the whole group was killed) on some ordinary, trash mobs. We ran back to our corpses and resurrected and finished clearing the room up to Blackheart. By now, my son is stirring and my wife is not far behind.

I’ve lost track of time, as I always do when playing. People who don’t play cannot understand how one can become so absorbed in a video game, but this game can be intense, especially when playing with others, where you need to be most concentrated on playing.

Blackheart is an ogre with some interesting abilities. For one thing, he has a mass Mind Control called “Incite Chaos” where he takes control of the entire group and sets us against each other. The trick to not killing your group mates is to burn all your cooldowns (use your most powerful spells) beforehand, so that when Chaos erupts, you can’t one or two-shot kill a fellow player. Even so, the second time we went through Chaos, our Paladin tank killed me. I was the first to die. By the end of the battle, only the Paladin was left alive. He had basically killed us all.

But I had left a Curse of Doom ticking on Blackheart, plus some other Damage Over Time spells, and the Paladin was amazingly able to finish him off solo.

Meanwhile as I am watching this long fight get steadily worse, my team mates dying as my corpse lies helpless on the ground, my son and wife are up and moving around and I am starting to feel anxious. I can feel the wife aggro building. How much longer is she going to stand for this? She wants to do dishes, make dinner, and meanwhile Brendan is running loose without close supervision.

I keep asking Lynn, “Am I alright? Can I keep going?” And she keeps saying yes, but I can tell her mood is becoming darker each time I have to ask.

“Do you have any idea how long you’ve been playing?” She asks at one point.

“Um, an hour and a half?”

She doesn’t even respond. I know I have just about reached the limit. There is another term used in WoW that translates into real life: CC, or Crowd Control. When you somehow incapacitate a monster so that it can’t attack, it’s called Crowd Control.

I tried to CC my wife by saying, “If I can just finish this, I promise I won’t play anymore today.”

My CC was resisted, though, and I could tell that at any moment she was going to aggro on me like Varimathras after being poked by a level 10 Gnome rogue that has stealthed his way into Undercity.

Yet finally, we reached Murmur, the final and hardest boss in the instance. It went surprisingly easy, probably because we had people in the group who knew the fight, knew to stay at maximum range and don’t bunch up. But as the fight was coming to an end, the dog came running out of Brendan’s bedroom and jumped up on my lap.

She had the distinct scent of lemons about her. Where had I smelled that before? I had just cleaned and dusted on Friday (rep grinding with the wife), could that be…?

“Why does the dog smell like Lemon Pledge?” I asked.

And all hell broke loose. Brendan and I both pulled aggro on that one, because it was essentially my fault since I had been ignoring him for who knows how many hours. He had sprayed nearly a whole can of Lemon Pledge on the dog (fortunately not in her face). Game over, and just in the nick of time.

Incidentally when asked why he did it, Brendan said he wanted the dog to smell good. I don’t believe he did it maliciously; he has always had this olfactory fixation. I was reminded the other day by my sister-in-law how Brendan used to walk around with tealight candles in his hand or pocket, taking them out to sniff them every once in awhile.

Out of that S-Lab run, though, I got this really cool level 70 staff, The Bringer of Death. The really cool thing about running with guildies is that even though I lost the roll for this item, the person who won asked me if I wanted it. He could have sold it for probably several hundred gold on the Auction House, but instead he offered it to me.

Only problem was I was still not 70. I finished S-Labs at about 25% left to go to level 70. Still, I did not play anymore on Saturday. I did not get back to the game until Sunday afternoon, when Lynn and I got a babysitter and went to the coffee shop, as we often do on Sundays. She works on her lesson plans for the coming week, while I play WoW. After about an hour (again, I am not certain about the time because I lose track), she said she was ready to go to the grocery store and do our shopping for the week.

I said, “Honey, I am so close to 70, I can’t leave. I need another hour to finish leveling.”

She agreed to let me stay.

“How much time do you need to get ready, if I call you when I leave the store?” She asked.

“Maybe one minute,” I answered.

“OK,” she said, “I’ll call you when I am getting in the car and you can quit and pack up. Be ready to go when I get here.”

I spent my last hour or so as a leveling player working some yellow quests in Netherstorm, killing Blood Elves for Scryers rep. Every quest I turned in was netting me about 12,000 XP, but my Experience bar only seemed to be inching in minuscule movements toward the end of the level. Finally, just about the time Lynn called, I hit 70 killing a Blood Elf magister in Manaforge B’Naar.

It was a great moment. Think about it: over a year of work culminating in this one moment where you literally cannot achieve anything more in this part of the game. There are plenty of other ways to progress in the game besides leveling, but for most people this is a climactic moment. It felt good. I shared it with guild mates. They joked about my initiation ritual, which they said was to give our guild master (a feral Druid) a flea bath and clip his claws. I replied that I’d have to buy some Soap on a Rope from Griftah, the sleazy salesman in the Lower City quarter of Shattrath. Maybe I’d assign the task of shampooing the GM to my imp minion, Nokkin.

And I took too long in logging off. Lynn had to wait for me to pack up. She was double parked outside watching me pack up, and she was not happy. It was not my best moment, and in retrospect it was very inconsiderate of me. She gave me a lot of time to play this weekend, at the expense of her and Brendan. And she is overall more understanding of my hobby than a lot of wives would be.

There isn’t much I can say for myself. I play a game that can easily take over your life, in all kinds of different ways. It is a game that takes an extraordinary amount of time to play. It is almost impossible to play the game casually; it requires some serious time commitment in order to make progress. It infects your thoughts, so that it is all you think about. It even infects my web surfing, so that I spend lots of time browsing WoW forums and websites looking for information and tips about how to make my character even better, or get even more enjoyment out of the game.

My hope is that now that at least one of my characters is level 70, I will be able to take a more relaxed stance toward the game. I don’t know if that is possible, however. Once, I also thought that like many games I have played over the years, I would get bored with this one, too. It hasn’t happened. It is too deep and rich in content to ever see the light at the end of the tunnel. 70 is not an end, despite how it might seem.

There is Netherwing rep to grind, so that eventually one day I can put my Gnome on a glowing dragon and fly around Outland. There are more ogres to kill, more gold to accumulate, Karazhan, Gruul’s Lair, and other places to see and experience. Not an end (to my wife’s sadness). Just another beginning.