It's Monday
And no discussion about writing has occurred since I last wrote. In that time, I've done a couple of non-writing related things. Firstly, I cancelled my subscription to DC Universe Online. Because that game was a dull, unfun bore, and it was making me nostalgic for games with much better design standards like World of Warcraft. Secondly, I resubscribed to World of Warcraft. Like I said, nothing makes me nostalgic for a good game like a bad one.
I've been thinking a lot about the game since I started playing again because everything is different, and I don't just mean in-game. I mean, every aspect of my life has changed since, and so has my relationship to gaming in general but this game specifically. When I started playing WoW, I was just out of high school. I lived at home, and I generally spent 98% of my life in my room. I got really into raiding, into the politics of the server and of the guilds and people we interacted with. I guess it was easy to get caught up in the drama of the great players wanting more recognition or more of just about everything, but that part I didn't really get too pulled into. I don't remember lavishing in some of the overt negativity that every guild experiences. I do remember it sucking that a lot of people that I liked didn't like each other. That was unfortunate. But to say the game wasn't a substantial part of my life would be a lie. And it was in ways that games are not expected to be. Take music for a perfect example. While playing WoW, a fellow guildmate suggested I check out a band called Birthday Massacre. I usually ignore when people suggest music (don't ask why, it's a weird social tic) but I thought, sure why not. I listened to them and I liked them. I got their first album and shared it with Dalder. Dalder liked them too, and he told me about a concert they were playing in SF. We went, and we saw a band called Mindless Self Indulgence. Their stage show made me completely rethink how to write a fairly major character in my story, and I wrote him his own chapter as a test to see how it worked. It did, and since he's changed in my mind, his place in the story and his relationship with the main characters and also THEIR relationship with their own arc is far more detailed and intricate. This is off one throwaway moment where a guy who sympathized with me camping in a tree to tame a specific wild cat for my hunter for a couple hours wanted to share something he thought was cool. Generally, non-gamers do not want to acknowledge or simply don't realize that life intrudes this way in a social game, and the value of that game can't be determined on physical details. It's easy to say a thing is worthless or even damaging when you have no knowledge of how it functions or how a culture grows around it. Let me mention another example: a couple years ago, when Burning Crusade was the newest expansion and I was just getting into playing the Horde (I'd played alliance for years but had a falling out with someone and quit the entire side so we wouldn't have run ins), a guy who was real friendly with our guild and was in the top raid guild at the time was hanging out with us after we ran a dungeon. I had just hit the level where I could buy a flying mount for the first time, but they were crazy expensive then and I was bitching about how it would probably be another week at the least before I saw one. He asked how much I needed and then just handed me 600 gold. Me who didn't know him, with zero guarantee that I'd repay him or even be grateful. I was. Being able to fly was so fucking cool. Later on down the line, rumors that he might join our guild started circulating, and sure enough, he did. He was a fantastic shaman and hunter, and since he spent time in the top raid guild, he knew how to run a raid and how to get high-end content killed. He was really damn good at the game, and whenever I had any hunter questions, whether it be enchantments, or shot rotations, or who to build rep with, he had an answer. Then one day he left a message on our forum saying that he was quitting the game, deleting his characters and heading out. We found out later that he had shot himself in the head at his desk.
This is what prompted my departure from WoW. Really, nothing else was going to. I went back and forth on whether that game was fun or not for a long time, as the politics of it went up and down. These people had become a second family to me online, and had been part of my life for literally years. After our raid leader killed himself, I needed some time to do some soul searching. This guy was my age. That's way too young for anyone to check out. And I respected the hell out of him. Did I not say that enough? Was there something me or anyone else could have done? Is there some way this whole thing could have been avoided? I started thinking about my own mortality, and my own penchant for negativity. I began to wonder if the same thing was going to happen to me. Would my own perspective become so limited that killing myself would seem not only rational, but attractive? Meanwhile, the same old politics game was happening in-game. And why shouldn't it? Life carries on. But it became dissonant noise to me. Why does it matter who gets what item, or what kind of raid schedule there is? And I don't mean to frame this like things were petty, although there will always be moments of that. It was just normal. And I didn't want normal, though I didn't realize it. I just needed to figure out how I was affected. I didn't realize that either, at the time.
Life is strange. That's the only consistent truth that I've witnessed firsthand, and I have witnessed it many times. Names, people, and habits fade. You meet new people, do different things, and the people around you never have an inkling of the things you do that don't involve them, how personal and shaping they can be, how they alter you in subtle ways over time, and how they lead to a series of events and experiences that change you more overtly. A year and change has passed, and now I'm back in this game. The maps are different, the graphics are different, the classes are different, the experience is more refined and intuitive. At the core, it's the same game. And yet more importantly than that, I'm different. I want to believe I'm more refined and intuitive. I think the truth is more akin to me just being older and having my emotional investments be different. I don't care about items, or progression. Those things are cool, and I hope the guild succeeds with or without me. But I have a different life now. A more adult life. All I want is to have fun with my friends. Maybe because my friend over the internet killed himself, all these things changed. Maybe not. It's just as easy to wax philosophical as it is to be ignorant. I can't say for sure that my buddy killing himself made me less susceptible to the kind of loneliness that did him in. Because maybe I am. It's hard to know yourself beyond the moment you're in. It's hard to say who you're going to be, and what you're going to do. The only thing I can say with full confidence is that my friend had no idea what kind of effect the ripples of his death would create. And I say the same thing of all the seemingly innocuous life choices we make. Many of which we don't even realize we've subscribed to. But I think it's worth some thought. Time is our currency, and what we spend it on has value, but it's up to us to ponder at and try to understand that value.
I've been thinking a lot about the game since I started playing again because everything is different, and I don't just mean in-game. I mean, every aspect of my life has changed since, and so has my relationship to gaming in general but this game specifically. When I started playing WoW, I was just out of high school. I lived at home, and I generally spent 98% of my life in my room. I got really into raiding, into the politics of the server and of the guilds and people we interacted with. I guess it was easy to get caught up in the drama of the great players wanting more recognition or more of just about everything, but that part I didn't really get too pulled into. I don't remember lavishing in some of the overt negativity that every guild experiences. I do remember it sucking that a lot of people that I liked didn't like each other. That was unfortunate. But to say the game wasn't a substantial part of my life would be a lie. And it was in ways that games are not expected to be. Take music for a perfect example. While playing WoW, a fellow guildmate suggested I check out a band called Birthday Massacre. I usually ignore when people suggest music (don't ask why, it's a weird social tic) but I thought, sure why not. I listened to them and I liked them. I got their first album and shared it with Dalder. Dalder liked them too, and he told me about a concert they were playing in SF. We went, and we saw a band called Mindless Self Indulgence. Their stage show made me completely rethink how to write a fairly major character in my story, and I wrote him his own chapter as a test to see how it worked. It did, and since he's changed in my mind, his place in the story and his relationship with the main characters and also THEIR relationship with their own arc is far more detailed and intricate. This is off one throwaway moment where a guy who sympathized with me camping in a tree to tame a specific wild cat for my hunter for a couple hours wanted to share something he thought was cool. Generally, non-gamers do not want to acknowledge or simply don't realize that life intrudes this way in a social game, and the value of that game can't be determined on physical details. It's easy to say a thing is worthless or even damaging when you have no knowledge of how it functions or how a culture grows around it. Let me mention another example: a couple years ago, when Burning Crusade was the newest expansion and I was just getting into playing the Horde (I'd played alliance for years but had a falling out with someone and quit the entire side so we wouldn't have run ins), a guy who was real friendly with our guild and was in the top raid guild at the time was hanging out with us after we ran a dungeon. I had just hit the level where I could buy a flying mount for the first time, but they were crazy expensive then and I was bitching about how it would probably be another week at the least before I saw one. He asked how much I needed and then just handed me 600 gold. Me who didn't know him, with zero guarantee that I'd repay him or even be grateful. I was. Being able to fly was so fucking cool. Later on down the line, rumors that he might join our guild started circulating, and sure enough, he did. He was a fantastic shaman and hunter, and since he spent time in the top raid guild, he knew how to run a raid and how to get high-end content killed. He was really damn good at the game, and whenever I had any hunter questions, whether it be enchantments, or shot rotations, or who to build rep with, he had an answer. Then one day he left a message on our forum saying that he was quitting the game, deleting his characters and heading out. We found out later that he had shot himself in the head at his desk.
This is what prompted my departure from WoW. Really, nothing else was going to. I went back and forth on whether that game was fun or not for a long time, as the politics of it went up and down. These people had become a second family to me online, and had been part of my life for literally years. After our raid leader killed himself, I needed some time to do some soul searching. This guy was my age. That's way too young for anyone to check out. And I respected the hell out of him. Did I not say that enough? Was there something me or anyone else could have done? Is there some way this whole thing could have been avoided? I started thinking about my own mortality, and my own penchant for negativity. I began to wonder if the same thing was going to happen to me. Would my own perspective become so limited that killing myself would seem not only rational, but attractive? Meanwhile, the same old politics game was happening in-game. And why shouldn't it? Life carries on. But it became dissonant noise to me. Why does it matter who gets what item, or what kind of raid schedule there is? And I don't mean to frame this like things were petty, although there will always be moments of that. It was just normal. And I didn't want normal, though I didn't realize it. I just needed to figure out how I was affected. I didn't realize that either, at the time.
Life is strange. That's the only consistent truth that I've witnessed firsthand, and I have witnessed it many times. Names, people, and habits fade. You meet new people, do different things, and the people around you never have an inkling of the things you do that don't involve them, how personal and shaping they can be, how they alter you in subtle ways over time, and how they lead to a series of events and experiences that change you more overtly. A year and change has passed, and now I'm back in this game. The maps are different, the graphics are different, the classes are different, the experience is more refined and intuitive. At the core, it's the same game. And yet more importantly than that, I'm different. I want to believe I'm more refined and intuitive. I think the truth is more akin to me just being older and having my emotional investments be different. I don't care about items, or progression. Those things are cool, and I hope the guild succeeds with or without me. But I have a different life now. A more adult life. All I want is to have fun with my friends. Maybe because my friend over the internet killed himself, all these things changed. Maybe not. It's just as easy to wax philosophical as it is to be ignorant. I can't say for sure that my buddy killing himself made me less susceptible to the kind of loneliness that did him in. Because maybe I am. It's hard to know yourself beyond the moment you're in. It's hard to say who you're going to be, and what you're going to do. The only thing I can say with full confidence is that my friend had no idea what kind of effect the ripples of his death would create. And I say the same thing of all the seemingly innocuous life choices we make. Many of which we don't even realize we've subscribed to. But I think it's worth some thought. Time is our currency, and what we spend it on has value, but it's up to us to ponder at and try to understand that value.
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