not your usual thursday

This post was so damn serious, I realised I just had to update Snottydin in order to compensate for it.

Y’know the best thing about Xmas presents? They stay with you throughout the year. I’m still catching up on the Syphilis Party – partially because I am slow and disorganised but also because it’s kind of cool (for me at least, everyone else is probably bored of it) to still have, err, gifts to open.

Ages and ages and ages (and ages) ago, Spinks issued me with the following:

Tam, my challenge to you in return is to write about how playing MMOs has affected you in real life. Anyone else, feel free to join in also.

This post took me a while to write, and went through several drafts because … well … to address the question properly requires a degree of personal honesty I am simply not used to giving… at least not in writing in a public forum. And, y’know, there are several glib things I could write about on this subject, but that struck me, basically, as cheating. I mean, this sort of challenge is only worth the consideration you give it. I also think there’s a natural instinct to pull against it – to stamp your feet and shake your head and deny vigorously that something as banal as a computer game could ever have any meaningful affect on your life.

So, I guess this won’t be my usual style of posting… normal service to be resumed tomorrow, whereupon I will endeavour to, err, bring the fun in. Bring the fun back in. Feel free to skip this one.

I should probably say before beginning that Spinks refers generally to MMOs but WoW is, and has been ever, my only MMO. What can I say. I’m loyal. I don’t know what made me want to dangle my feet in the MMO waters to begin with – whimsy I suspect, and the prospect of being a cow. Truthfully I’ve always been quite resistent to MMOs in general, viewing them as time and money sinks, grind fests without merit or story. Despite being on the games are art fence, I’m quite “Story Man Story” about my games – something Chas views, rightly, with a degree of disdain. But anyway, enough proviso, enough ramble, enough prevarication … here, as true as I can make it, are the ways Wow has affected my ‘real’ life, in vague order of ascending impact.

The Vernacular

I guess I’ve always been susceptible to language, sponging up words, almost unconsciously. And language, of course, is more than the words and expressions that comprise it – it’s a way of perceiving, and responding to the world. And, partially as a consequence of writing about it so much, currently WoW is everywhere, in my speech and my thinking. As I’m bimbling about my daily business, there’s a part of me that’s always wanting to play games with it – to translate the world into WoW and WoW into the world.

Usually, of course, I keep it all sensibly under wraps but, sometimes, when I’m not paying proper attention the WoWisms can slip out. Last term, for example, I inadvertently began what I assure you was a very sensible and intelligent enquiry about the financial implications of the RAE with, “apologies if this is a noob question but…” The Professor to whom I had addressed this oh-so sensible and intelligent enquiry sat upright. “What,” he asked, rolling the unfamiliar word around on his tongue as languorously as foie gras, “is a noob.” “It’s, uh, a slang term, such as undergraduates who spend too much time on the internet might use,” I explained, hastily. “It’s derived from being new at something … you know, a newbie. Except noob is derogatory – essentially someone who ought to know better than to act like a newbie.” “Noob?” he said again, chewing on it now like toffee. “Noob. Noooob!”

He seemed rather to like it. Who knows where this could end? Mark my words, in a couple of months time, Professor Wibblebottom will turn to his colleague, Dr Blatherstock and observe: “The bursar is a total noob.” And I will be very happy indeed.

The Aesthetic

Again, this seems a rather shallow thing but I think the vastness and the beauty of Azeroth, and the sheer insane amount of time we spend in it, gives the place a peculiar, or not so peculiar, reality. Perhaps it’s just the sort of foolish whimsy that comes from not having done nearly as much travelling as I’d like (or, at least, I’ve done the sort of travelling that is little more than a succession of generic nowheres, since all airports, trainstations, taxis, hotels and conference venues look the same). But sometimes when I’m walking home and the sky is the right shade of pink I find myself thinking of sunsets over the plains of Mulgore, as instinctively and effortlessly as the dazzle of sunlight on bright water reminds me of Venice and the golden gleam of sandstone in the rain takes me back to Vienna.

Sometimes I’m not even sure if I like Azshara because it reminds me autumn or autumn because it reminds of me Azshara.

Before Christmas, M’Pocket Tank and I were walking through Christ Church meadows. It was before the snow caught up with us here our damp dip in the middle of the country and this particular morning was cold and crisp and bright, and the world around us felt untouched. A sort of pitted gravel path curves with the river, and since it had recently rained the pits were full of water, and since it had been a cold night, the water had frozen over until it was the colour of misted glass. And the first words out of my mouth were: “It looks like a DK cast path of frost along here.”

Maybe that’s a little bit embarrassing.

But it really did look just like that, you know…

The Default

Leaving that sort of talk behind, the other thing I think you have to accept if you get into WoW is that it becomes the default hobby. I think this isn’t as dire as it seems – most of us have a default, and I suspect for a lot of people it involves stepping through the front door after a long day, crashing onto the sofa and turning on the TV. This doesn’t undermine or invalidate other hobbies but when I need a break from life, when I need to turn off my brain, chill out, or if I need to increase my little green “fun” bar as quickly as possible (Sims reference, by the way) … then WoW is likely to be my first port of call. And, y’know, I think WoW does well as Default Hobby – it’s varied and vast enough that I can usually find something to hit the spot, regardless of my mood.

Emo? Fishing in Azshara.
Excitable? How about some PVP.
Brain dead? Farming and Grinding
Sociable? Hang out in guild
Silly? Come up with some new crazy scheme
Novelty Seeking? Time for an alt!
Challenge-hungry? Raid!

Of course, there are also disadvantages of having WoW in your Default slot. I’ve written before on maintaining the life-WoW balance (and this has nothing to do with addiction rhetoric). The problem with WoW is that, if you let it, it can be all-encompassing. You can, if you so wish, hide in there and never come out. This isn’t something that’s usually a problem but if life starts kicking the shit out of me, if I get a little demoralised or a little depressed, if other things start to slip and slide, THEN I have to be a bit careful because it’s too easy for WoW to become a way for me to avoid my problems rather than deal with them. I emphasise: this is not an issue with WoW. It’s just the way of human weakness.

The price of Azeroth, my friends, is eternal vigilance.

The Safe Space

Y’know … I don’t like teamwork. I’m not good at teamwork. I quite like people, don’t get me wrong, and, although a lot of my past-times are solitary (I mean, reading, writing and thinking about stuff – not THAT solitary past-time) – but I have to say I don’t like working with them. It’s possible I have trust and control issues (hello … healer) but I like my failures, and my successes, to be my own. I’ve managed to get through life avoiding situations which required me to work with others… although I did once get sent on one of those “pretend you’re marooned on a desert island” team wrecking building events. For them as care, the other members of my team elected to club me to death The Complete Works of Shakespeare (which was the item I chose to bring with me from the wreckage of the ship – well, I’d rather die of starvation than die of boredom) and then eat me, a plan for which I voted favourably.

Anyway, the point is: not good with teams, don’t like em, don’t want em.

But WoW … well … it’s a relatively safe place to experiment with putting your virtual life in the hands of others. I don’t know think it’s making me a more trusting person, but at least I’m having fun, and I am – voluntarily, shock horror – working tolerably effectively with others towards a common goal. This is a big fucking deal for me.

And I know anonymity also makes us susceptible to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, but there’s a flip side to this – the shy can be outspoken, the awkward can be flirtatious, the insecure can find acceptance, the followers can lead and the anti-social can be social. I don’t necessarily believe virtual spaces miraculously turns us into people other than we are, but I do think it can allow us to tap into aspects of ourselves that may not find much expression in our chosen lives.

The things I do in WoW are not things to which I think my nature instinctively tends. I’m not drawn to support roles, I’m not particularly focused towards communities. But here I am, a healer in a guild – and you can’t get more opposite me than that.

The Refuge

This is, um, where it gets difficult. If you’re still reading, thank you. If you intend to go on reading, thank you again. (I promise I will try to write about cheerful stuff tomorrow).

In October 2008 I lost someone I loved very much indeed – urgh, lost, I hate that euphemism so much, as if this person has just fallen down the back of the sofa cushions or behind the fridge, as if you can possibly in some way find them again. But writing “she died” seems way too harsh, not for me so much but for the poor souls who are reading. I’m not trying to throw myself a pity party here but it was without a shadow of a doubt the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, again, a strange and selfish thing to write since we may presume it was even worse for her. I wish I could speak about this in a ‘better’ way.

I am okay… well, okayish. It’s been over a year. The sheer obscene wrongness of it still catches me unawares every now. People I have cared for have died before, she was not the first, nor will she be the last, but sometimes it feels as though the whole basis of our flailing and limited understanding of our mortality is rooted in the notion that death is something that happens to people older than ourselves, that there is a right and natural order to things. But I think over time one becomes resigned to loss.

And she was … very very ill. She’d had chronic, clinical depression for most of her life and there wasn’t a glimmer hope on the horizon for her. Rationally I wouldn’t want her to have continued to struggle through life, in pain, and misery, and despair for the sake of, well, me. Emotionally … that’s harder to accept. Grief is an unpleasant, ignoble emotion, and leaves one thinking only of oneself.

Anyway. So, yes, that happened, not so very long after I’d started playing WoW. And between the call we all dread and the funeral itself, I think I played more WoW than I ever had in my life before. You see, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t read, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t bear having anybody near me… and I was desperate for distraction. Anything to fill up the empty, grieving corners of my mind with something that was neither demanding nor painful. So, yes, I played WoW. I can’t remember anything specifically about what I did in WoW at that time, only that it was there, and that I played it. I think I probably levelled my Cow.

The thing is, I’m sure if I hadn’t had WoW I would have found some outlet – people have, after all, being grieving each other since the dawn of time and without MMOs. Maybe I would have written a big arse poem, but probably I’d have gone slightly mad, and lost myself less harmless worlds. I know WoW was just a ‘thing’ that happened to be there, but I’m inexpressibly grateful that it was. WoW is a selective effort activity – yes you can interact with it with affection and imagination but sometimes you can just, y’know, be in it, with nothing from you required at all. It demands no pretences, and its patterns and progressions draw you only as much as you need them to.

I’m sitting here now wondering how to to conclude this. I might have to leave it hanging … since WoW, like a life, is always a story without an ending.