A Pilgrim’s Digression

Yes, I play a video game as a hobby.  Some would say World of Warcraft is a lifestyle choice, not a hobby, since it consumes so much of its players time and lives.  But I still call it a hobby, like playing golf with one’s buddies on a Saturday afternoon…er, playing golf four or five hours a night, five days a week plus weekends.

I am often ashamed to admit to my lifestyle in mixed company.  Saying that one’s hobby is a video game is often, to another man, a signal that he can feel superior to you.  It allows him to say that in his free time he goes to the gym/plays a game of football with his friends/rides a bicycle/runs a marathon/makes love to multiple women at the same time.  Or just watches sports on TV.  Yes, even watching sports on TV trumps video games in manly culture.

Never mind that in his man cave, you will probably find an XBox and a Rockband setup, which he uses to jam to “More than a Feeling” when he’s feeling special.

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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?”

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