Video games are the closest thing to crack that I can imagine.
I could abandon all hobbies, cease all social interaction, and never leave the house. I’m certain of it. So, I’ve tried to limit my exposure. I have a ton of other hobbies, and a family! I must keep these devil pixels at arm’s length so I can live my life! Get away, pretty devil pixels!
The past year or so I’ve played a handful of walkies — Gone Home, Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch. All recommended by my friend Nick, who has his finger on the video-game pulse so I don’t have to. Those games are just right for a quick binge, but they aren’t so open-ended as to let you spend months or years exploring and building and becoming more and more crazed.
I still play the Sims sometimes (I have to run 2 on the new iMac, insanely, because 3 won’t run). I don’t love the Sims 2 but Holden is obsessed with it. He just art directs me. He likes me to make new families (all versions of our own family) with crazy names and clothes. The fathers all look like Kurt Cobain. If you go into any of the neighborhoods and hang out at a public place, you will be surrounded by a bunch of dudes who look like Kurt Cobain.
I have fantasized about bringing a PlayStation or an Xbox into the house, but have felt like it would not be the right thing to do, because of the slippery Pandora’s Box slope. Open the box, fall in, never get out, unleash chaos on all other parts of your life. That sort of thing.
So I don’t know how it happened, but I started playing World of Warcraft the other day. Just had that craving, you know, for some sandbox action, and halfway convinced myself it was for world-building research for the YA fantasy project I’m working on. (I will do literally anything to avoid writing the no-man’s land of the middle of a story or novel.) I’ve had friends play WoW over the years but had never tried it myself.
Blizzard made it so easy, which is obviously what they mean to do. I was delighted to find out that WoW would play on my iMac (which is completely insane to me, given the aforementioned issues with a 10-year-old offline Sims game). And that you could play free for the first 20 levels. I thought I’d set up a character and just mess around for a little bit in the world and see what it was like.
That was hours and hours and hours ago. And 29 levels ago. It happened so fast.
I didn’t expect it to be so fun. There’s a lot of repetitious quests (“go over there and kill a bunch of X”), but the world building is just outstanding, and I’m loving the humor in the writing. There’s even a Plants Vs. Zombies minigame. I’ve traditionally steered clear of playing games with creepy or combat elements because I get VERY STRESSED, but one thing that has been super helpful is seeing other actual people running around near me, doing their little moves and fighting the same baddies as me. It feels less lonely, I guess. The absurdity helps it feel less scary to me to be voluntarily heading into a cave to face some unknown gross thing.
Occasionally someone will come along and help you take down a bad guy (good guy, I guess; Horde 4 lyfe) either intentionally or unintentionally; doesn’t much matter! And yesterday someone riding what looked like an ostrich ran up beside me and asked me to help him kill some big monster. I was very nervous that I wouldn’t not be able to perform under pressure but my summoned demons and I made a very coordinated ass-kicking effort. I logged my first assist and then I promptly died when the bad guy respawned, because I was standing there like a dolt trying to think of what to chat to my fighting partner to close our brief interaction.
I think I’m what they call a noob.
It’s wild thinking back to all the memes that blew up when Warcraft first launched, those first few years. All the weird net/meme speech we adopted that had some sort of origin in this game. How ancient that feels in a way, while still feeling completely beyond my grasp. I feel fairly grandmotherly now, tabbing over to forums to figure out how to configure my character, and then over to Google every time I see unfamiliar acronyms and words, which is every three seconds. I still don’t feel like I understand how the factions work or how the world is constructed, and I don’t care. I’m just mowing down dwarves and humans and lesser zombies with my sick spell skills.
I joined a Guild and now I’m stressing about What That Means. There’s no onboarding; expectations are not clear. I don’t know what I’m supposed to contribute. I haven’t talked to anyone yet or done anything with any of the other members. I’m soloing, which is how I like it, but I get updates on what other people are doing, and that’s a fun distraction when I’m running across a huge field, trying to dodge giant spiders. A digital wallflower.
I don’t know how long my WoW affair will last. At least a month, I guess, since that’s how long I paid for once I blew past level 20. I’m trying to moderate my time so that it’s just one of many things I do in my free time. I’m being very grown up about this, can’t you tell?
(Check back on Monday and see how the weekend went, and whether I showered even once.)
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