For years I had only a vague idea of what World of Warcraft was.  To the extent I thought of the people who were caught up in it (or other games like Grand Theft Auto or Halo), I pitied them.  I couldn’t fathom why people would choose to waste their time like that, how anyone could prefer staring at a screen and pushing buttons  to all life's other options.

But a couple years ago, all that changed ...  and I’m still a little mystified about what happened to me.  I mean, I’m a grown man.  You might not know it from a distance, but it’s true.  How did I get caught up in an online fantasy game?

It was winter in Chicago.  That was part of it.  Have you ever been to Chicago in January?  Or read To Build a Fire?  It's not a climate that encourages people to go outside and play.

This particular winter coincided with me getting out of a turbulent relationship.  I was down and emotionally weary.  The real world felt harsh and sitting inside my warm home in sweats, growing a beard, ordering in, felt like just the thing.  Cocoons aren't just for becoming butterflies. Sometimes you go into your cocoon, pop out the same, pay the pizza man, and go right back in.  

---

You begin by creating your avatar.  You pick faction, class, and appearance.  I went with a human warrior. Self-loathing gamer from the start, I named him "Lifewaster."

Next you see a button that says "Enter World."  That's a positive spin on what's happening but I don't suppose anyone ever considered having it say, "Leave world."  To the people who play, I'm not sure it would make clicking that button any less inviting.  It's kind of the point.

---

Inside the world you can look and move in any direction.  It’s impressive for someone who grew up on games like Donkey Kong, where your flat avatar moved left/right, up/down across a flat world.

The four arrow keys are still the center of your control, but now it's left/right, forward and back.  Now you're not going back and forth like some sad shooting-gallery duck.  Now you're going in.  This is one of the things the game is best at, a feeling of depth, of real movement through three-dimensional space. Things in the distance are small and dimmed by atmospheric perspective.  As you move towards them, they get larger and sharper and more detailed.  You go inside a structure and the light is different.  You turn around and can see every corner of every room.  It feels like you’re somewhere.

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The Achiever

If you complete a quest in WoW, on return you are rewarded with gold, a new piece of gear, and, most important, experience points, or XP.  When you reach a threshold number of XP, you go up a level.
You start at level one.  You can rise to eighty-five.  When your level increases, so do your abilities.  You get a little bit stronger and tougher, able to deal more damage and take more.  In this world, self-improvement is easy.  You want to be better, healthier, more resilient?  Don't worry about which self-help book to read.  Forget about years of therapy and anti-depressants.  No need to hit the gym.  Just get XP.

As you get stronger you move on to harder regions, but sometimes it was fun to return to an area that was tough for me a month before.  Where I used to have to bring a group to have a chance, a couple weeks later I could go alone and get through easily.  Did I figure something out?  Become a better player?  Not really.  Just kept playing and leveling up to the point that all the bad guys in the lower zone were like insects.

Here is the ultimate fantasy experience: Coming out on top.  Not dragons and flying gryphon and magic spells.  No, it's getting exponentially stronger and going back to where you got beat up and seeing the ones who did it and saying, "Hi, remember me?"

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Death

I think most people would call me a gentle soul, but that’s because most people aren’t aware of the tens of thousands of virtual murders I’ve committed.  But it’s ok - They were fake.  This is part of what's fun about role-playing games: the lack of consequence takes away anxiety. In a world with consequences, you have to sweat your decisions.  You have to figure out right and wrong.  It's tiring.
So part of the pleasure of fantasy is knowing it’s not reality.   Yes we have to suspend disbelief, but not completely.

If we did, gamers would pee their pants and cry.  We’d all have nightmares and PTSD.

Some people worry about violent games.  But I don’t think they mean that people are evil at heart.  Just because you feel like lashing out doesn't necessarily mean you want anyone to be hurt. That's why it's satisfying to hit a punching bag.

But let's be honest: When we behave in real life, we aren't acting out of pure altruism.  A big part of why we don't go around hitting people in RL (as WoW players refer to it) is they might hit us back.  Or you can get in trouble.  In WoW, you can indulge your violent impulses without anyone getting hurt, including yourself.  If you screw up, you can just try again.  Nobody goes to jail or the hospital.  Nobody's insurance rates go up.

And nobody dies.

We've all heard descriptions of near-death episodes:  "I floated about myself and looked down on everyone."  This is the norm in games.  The whole experience is out-of-body. Your soul is always safe.

In the earliest video games you had a set number of lives (usually three).  That was still mortality, just multiplied.  In most of today's games, you have one life, but the ability to save your progress periodically when things are going well. If something bad happens, you just revert to the last happy place.

When video games were in arcades the financial incentive for the supplier was to end it quickly so you'd have to put in more quarters.  Then with home video games it didn't matter much one way or the other how long we lived.  You pay once and it's yours.  Your relationship with the supplier is over until you buy a different game.  It wasn't until the Internet made subscription easy that there was any incentive for the game supplier to make us immortal.

In WoW, when you die, you say "Argh!" and fall and then immediately awaken in the nearest cemetery, facing a spirit healer.

The world is colorless. You then run in spirit-form back to your corpse, at which point a button pops on the screen that says, "Resurrect?"  Miracle by point and click.

Blizzard made it this way so the game would be be interesting but not frustrating.  Who would play a game where all your progress could be wiped out with one mistake?  Anyone who is born, of course, but we still long for a life that is not so brutish and short.  WoW delivers.  Death is reduced from tragedy to irritant, not an end, but merely a doorway to further experience.  Like people used to do with religion.

So we make a strange trade-off, spending actual life for a feeling of immortality, throwing away our precious days to help us forget they're numbered.

Here's an old joke:

"Don't you know alcohol is slow poison?"

"Well... I'm in no hurry."

Another benefit of being an avatar is a body that instead of deteriorating, improves, instead of slowing down and getting brittle, gets faster and more resilient.  My RL hair grows thinner and grayer.  My jaw-line, ever softer.  Abs, a distant memory.  Memory, a distant memory.  Why are these games thought of as a pastime only for the young?  They are a perfect escape for the creaky population.  I played so long my back hurt, so I got a lumbar pillow and played some more.

And since aging doesn't exist in this world, neither does age. In life, we see other ages as Other and we stay largely segregated.   In WoW, nobody cares how old you are in RL.  Do you have something useful to sell at a good price?  Someone will buy it.  Do you know your way around?  Are you kind?  Funny?  Then someone will want you in their group.  Every player's character is right there in the perfect middle, frozen at that sweet apex between progress and decline.  The young get to fast-forward to where they yearn to be: free and fully formed.  Finally autonomous.  The old get to return.

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It isn't real

Every character in WoW can learn two professions.  My character's were skinning and leatherworking.  I started with leather scraps, then light leather, then (as I progressed to places with tougher creatures) medium leather, then heavy, then thick, then knothide, and that's not the top.  The tougher leather is used to make higher level armor.  I remember when I killed and skinned some monster and first saw "thick leather" and felt a little "ooh" thrill about it.  What was happening to me?  A tiny graphic, a square centimeter in size, and a different word, and I felt like something had happened.  Pixels on a screen.

I guess a gamer could say, yeah it's just pixels on a screen, and we are just vibrating particles of energy.  Everything is Sunday in the Park if you look closely enough.

 

Once I showed the game to a curious friend. I summoned a gryphon and flew up into the sky.  I shared what was to me a spectacular vista - mountains, trees, animals, sky, even an aurora borealis.
"Isn't it amazing?" I said.

My friend, somewhere between smug and concerned, said, "But it isn't real."

I couldn't argue with that, but so what?  Much of what we do for fun is some form of tricking ourselves.  Watching TV, reading a book, looking at art - it's all largely about entering a dream state, willingly embracing something non-real (i.e. virtual) as real, feeling vicarious emotions about the experiences of another.

I feel awe about the scope of the achievement of this game.  I’ve flown over white-capped mountains, taking in the horizon and meeting it, landing, walking, hearing the crunch of the snow under my feet, able to make my way to every inch of a vast changing landscape.  I can keep traveling and can find myself in a swamp or a desert or the arctic. I can move to the highest elevation or underwater to the lowest. There are miles of terrain to explore.  I don't know how it all fits on my hard drive.  It is stunning.

"But it isn't real."

My friend was actually not completely right.  One night I was playing with a group and messed up badly and got everyone killed.  I was abruptly ejected from the group and one of the players berated me for my lousy play.

I felt bad.  Our exchange cycled in my head just like real-life arguments do, with me trying out different retorts, searching for the most satisfying put-down. The voice of reason said, "Who cares? It's just a game."  But that only added a layer of shame:  A grown man having emotions about an online cartoon.
But that summation wasn't quite fair to me.  What makes WoW powerful is that it is real in part.  There are real people inhabiting many of the characters you come across.  Somewhere out in the real world, there was a real guy spitting mad at me.  (A pathetic schlub, clearly, but still real.)  That is affecting and it's only natural that it is.  Just as when other people were kind to me or made a good joke or LOL'ed at mine.

Remember in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indiana Jones falls into the pit of snakes? I learned that in that scene they used a great mass of rubber snakes and mixed in a smaller number of real ones.  The real ones slithered in and out of rubber ones and we saw enough life to feel they were all living. WoW's like that.

It's a little real.

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Porn

Does it ever occur to you that some stern, buttoned-up person you're dealing with in the world will likely be masturbating before long?   Sometimes I look at the respectable public surfaces we cultivate and feel like Holden Caulfield in a world of phonies.  Talk about "not real."  Are we not all avatars of our true selves?  All the world a game, and all the men and women merely players?

If you imagine someone else using pornography (assuming it's not someone you're hot for) it tends to be a sad scene.  A lonely man in the dark staring at a screen.  But that’s the view from above.  That’s not his view.  He’s there.  He’s in it.  In his mind it's beautiful imagery, it's bright sensation and release.  Part of why virtual reality, be it masturbation or gaming, seems silly from the outside is because you are two mental steps removed from the experience, you are viewing from outside someone else who is viewing from outside.

And if you feel scorn or disapproval, does it occur to you that you are also indulging in a top-down, gamer's view of things, disconnected from the inner reality of the other, forgetting yourself in the process and enjoying it?

 

Addiction

Mention "World of Warcraft" to anyone and you're likely to hear a cautionary tale that sounds like something out of William S. Burroughs.  Marriages ruined, Jobs lost, kids playing until they die of exhaustion.  I know other people who are curious but afraid even to try, sort of how I feel about LSD.

For me it started with an ad offering a free seven-day trial.  That sounded about right.  I'd heard enough to be curious.  So I'd see what it was all about and cancel before the billing started.  But of course Blizzard Entertainment knows what it’s doing here.  A good dealer is happy to give a free taste.

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One of my first quests, was to kill ten wolves. I did it. It wasn't very fun. It seemed repetitive and pointless.   But then it changed for me.  This is a key point in addiction, when attachment happens, when something foreign gains citizenship.  The TV show you know isn’t great but you get caught up in, or the ex-girlfriend I needed to forget, who in just a few months had gone from stranger to the center of my attention.

After my sample week, I subscribed.

I opted for the more expensive month-to-month plan rather than committing to a longer stretch of time.  Okay, so I was going past ten days.  Surely I’d be done in 30.  But WoW works like every other subscription: auto-renew.  It means you keep buying until you make an effort not to.  It used to be entrepreneurs had to scheme to get consumers to act.  Then some genius figured out that if you really want to get rich, find a way to make money from people doing nothing.

And nothing is what I did.  At least that's how it must have looked to the rest of the world, to anyone who cared to notice my absence.  As the months went on, more and more of each day was going to the game.  Dating, hanging with friends, working out, all began to fall away.  Older entertainments were largely dropped: TV, reading, self-respect... E-mail piled up in my inbox.  Even the common computer goof-offs--Facebook, iTunes, browsing, shopping, poker--were largely consumed by the WoW beast.  It was like that old joke:  Heroin helped me quit smoking.

I have in the past gotten caught up with the occasional computer game.  The difference was it only ever lasted a week or two.  Too short-term to think of as addiction.  Sure, I worked my way through somewhat obsessively, but once I finished, I was fine with it being over.

The peril of World of Warcraft is it's never over.  It's like some severe Tantric practice where you don't climax.  WoW has a devious Bear Went Over the Mountain quality.  There's always another quest and another after that, another aspect of your character to improve, make stronger, a new skill to acquire.  WoW logic is circular.  Why do you quest for rewards and XP?  To gain power.  Why do you want to gain power?  So you can do better at quests.  Repeat.  There's no finish line, no end, no roll of credits, no clear signal to ever leave.

 

We Care

Beyond the personal guilt of dissipation, I feel some to the world.  So many problems and I’m not helping with any.

The legend goes: Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Today people refer to Nero to say someone is dumb, blithely unconcerned, frivolous, but I prefer to imagine a Nero who is not so much apathetic as confused and overwhelmed, who feels like whatever he might try would be futile.

I heard a news report that said a nuclear or biological attack on the U.S. is likely in the next four years. Our dominant cultural camps seem to be religious fanaticism and Girls Gone Wild. Unemployment.  Debt.  Earthquakes, tsunamis.  We all know about these things.  And what do the vast majority of us do?  Live our lives.  Do our work, raise our kids, and when we find a little free time, we watch TV, play on our computers, have a drink, catch a movie or a game.  We fiddle.  It's not because we don't care.  It's because we’re not sure what else to do.

We could try a little harder, choose struggle over comfort a little more often.  There are people    who do.  If we make it, it will be thanks to them.  If we don't, and if these words are somehow heard by the ones who crawl out of the rubble to start over, I just want to say it wasn't that we didn't care.

And sorry.

 

Ugh!  Who wants to think about all that?  It's enough to make you seek out small tasks you know you can accomplish.  Like kill ten wolves.

I took to muting my computer when I'd kill a wolf because I worried the sound [yelp] might upset my real-life dogs.  I imagined they had some sense that I was making the sounds that came out of the machine and would wonder why is he hurting dogs and when will it be our turn?

My poor dogs' lives grew dull as I fell deeper into the game.  There's no place for them in the virtual World.  They sat on the couch in the real world and waited for my return.  When I neglected them too long they came over and whined to let me know.  Throughout the depths of my addiction they were a tether to the physical world and possibly my sanity.

Almost daily, they were tormented by a squirrel who sat on a branch outside the window. They barked and whined at what they saw in the flat glass pane. I laughed at them:  "Silly girls.  Why do you want to fight?  Now sh!  I'm playing World of Warcraft."

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Feeling Fewer

Every Tuesday morning WoW is shut down for maintenance.  That's when the junkies find themselves.  There's no Jonesing if you have a steady supply.  It's one thing to choose to walk away for a time, but to want your fix and have no possibility of getting it, that feels like prison time.  Of course it's actually freedom, but addiction is about escaping freedom.  It's about shrinking the world and all its noise and choice and elbows down to something manageable.  Numb is not just about feeling less; it's about feeling fewer.

Some drugs make you feel more, speed you up, but games fall into the downer category.  The hallucinogen parallels are there too, but I think that's secondary to just wanting a little peace.  I know "War" is right there in the title, but for all WoW's violence, this place is easier, softer, less perilous.  It's like one of those sanitariums people check into voluntarily.  A big, colorful padded cell.

We live in an age of options.  A cereal aisle. Hundreds of channels.  Thousands of podcasts.  Millions of songs.  It's impossible to be well-read any more, in any medium.  And who to marry?  Log on and browse an endless supply of potential mates. It can be overwhelming.  But this little screen we enter to expand our lives is also there for us when we want to contract it.

Games do it for some, but everyone has their ways of shrinking the world to some manageable facet.  Fashion.  Sports.  Celebrity gossip.  Gambling.  Needlepoint.  Grammar policing.  The people who go to comedy clubs are looking for laughs, yes, but also to enjoy a vast terrifying universe being reduced to amusing minutiae.   (Maybe I should put that in my promo package:  "Guaranteed to diminish your existential terror!")

On the road, I used to hang out after shows, joke around with club staff and other comics, drink, chase women.  When I was into WoW, I just wanted to get back to my quiet hotel room, open my laptop, and play.

 

Before long, every WoW player is confronted with the futility of the undertaking.  At some point in the game you pass by the place where you cleared out those wolves (or orcs or zombies or giant spiders) and notice it’s just as crowded as before.  You are constantly asked to thin the ranks of some encroaching enemy, but in a few minutes, everyone you killed reappears.  They have to, for all the other players who have yet to do the same quests.  So nothing ever changes in this world.  There are barbarians at the gate, but they never break through.  It challenges your ability to buy into the fantasy.  Nothing you do amounts to anything, even within the  game.

That’s okay for the addict, because addiction is the hunger for sameness.  It means getting today and tomorrow what you had yesterday. The addict is split though. The addict is both the child who has just been flipped in the air ten times saying "Again!" and the exhausted parent pleading "No more!"
But change is hard.  I made resolutions.  One was not to play WoW during daylight hours.

I kept it for all of two weeks.

There are so many things pushing us to our bad habits.  Not just the many kinds of pleasure we get from them.  There's the rut you dig doing something day after day.  It becomes a deep gorge that's hard to climb out of and hard not to fall back into if you do.

Addiction gives you guidance.  It gives your days direction.  It feels more like your job than your actual job.  More like your family than your real family.  It’s dependable, faithful, doting.  It calls you when you’re out and says when are you coming home?  If you try to quit, you feel lost, adrift.  You know what you're getting with the old ways for good and for ill.  Progress is a step into the unknown.

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All That Good Needs to Triumph

Many people think there's something innate that makes us want to hate an Other.  instead of trying to deny that, or overcome it, why not just pick a better Other?  Maybe WoW and other games are solving a pr oblem.  We want to fight.  We want the excitement and distraction of war without the suffering and misery.  Well... done.

People put down gamers because they sit inside all day and aren't part of the world.  But that's a glass-half-empty view of things.  Consider: they're inside all day and not hurting anybody. They're not hijacking your plane or burgling your house or even pissing in your alley. They're out of trouble.  They get the thrill of brandishing weapons without any of us having to be frightened.

We all know the old Edmund Burke line that all evil needs to triumph is for good people to do nothing. But how about the converse: Maybe good can triumph if the evil do nothing.  Maybe the problem wasn't that Nero fiddled but that the ones with the torches weren't holding instruments instead.  We've gotten to a point where the fiddles are really fun and easy to learn.  So instead of fighting the unwinnable battle of trying to stop the playing, let's at least make sure we're not the only ones.

Where war is virtual, peace is actual.  Yes, let's try to be better.  Let's stay strong and vigilant and stand up to our enemies.  But let's also give them all computers and WoW subscriptions.  Watch the world turn serene.

And invest in restaurants that deliver.

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Escape

As for me, getting over the game happened gradually.  I hit the top level, finished all the quests.  The game then shifts and becomes a search for better and better gear. You run dungeons at "heroic" level. The circular logic continues.  Why do you do runs?  To get better gear.  Why do you want better gear? To do better on runs.  You also do runs for fun of course, but there are only about twenty and with repetition the thrill fades.

One day I was playing and a thought bubbled up that gave me pause:

All your potential sits outside this place.

Spring arrived.  Warmth and color returned to the real world.  I got over the hurt of that rough relationship.   I caught my reflection in a full-length mirror and didn't like what I saw.  I got back to exercising.  I started getting out more.  Writing and performing  more.

Finally, six months after that first trial week, I cancelled my subscription.

It’s two years later now.  I moved to LA.  No more Chicago winters for me. Once a year, Blizzard sends me a free week. I always happily take it and so far have not fallen back in.

I know this would be better reading if I had hit bottom in some dramatic, sordid way, and deleted my character. But I didn't.  It took me so long to build up Lifewaster, I couldn't bring myself to erase him.  And even if I had, I might still be tempted back.  You can always start a new character.  And Blizzard comes out with expansions to keep their players interested - new lands to explore, new quests to complete, new enemies to conquer.

And always the same old one.  

April/July, 2011