My chair
grates against the dirty tile floor in the Gamer's Anonymous meeting room. My
cheeks flush red for a moment and I pause to take a look around at the dozen
pairs of eyes all fixated on my every move. I imagine them for a moment
transfixed by the illuminating glow of computer monitors and take a deep
breath. They are just like me.
"Hello,
my name is Bob and I am a gamer."
There is
a murmur of "Hello Bob" and I do my best to smile. My name isn't
really Bob but I doubt the authenticity of several other name tags in the room.
Misskitty and Gankymcgank are obviously reflections of online personas. These
are the real addicts, those who can't separate their characters from their own
individual personalities, at least - that's what I tell myself.
Ganky
applies some smelly herbal concoction to his felt-tip marker and winks at me as
he positions himself behind an unsuspecting victim. I continue, "I have
played World of Warcraft off and on since Open Beta."
I used
to be Bob, the gamer who missed out on eating dinner with his wife and kids
regularly; opting instead to eat my meals in front of the computer screen. It
is so many others on a daily basis. It could end up being you. World of
Warcraft touts 11.5 million subscribers, according to some sources. While that
doesn't take into consideration the sheer number of customers who pay for
multiple accounts, the number is still impressive by industry standards alone.
Regardless of who pays for the accounts, each one returns a monthly profit for
Blizzard. MMO addiction spells big profits for gaming companies and World of
Warcraft has proven that it can hold and maintain market interest, or fuel
addiction according to some.
The
scenario at the beginning of this article is fictitious and does not represent
any personal experience, nor any experience that I have heard of. It may sound
extreme to some, while others may wish for such a support group to help them
break free from their virtual chains. We can all understand a weakness to
entertainment and a desire to be constantly entertained. Most of us go to work
or school, both in some cases, and then come home and look to gaming as a form
of stress relief or escape from the responsibilities that no one else seems to
understand. Soon we find that we're staying up just a little bit later in order
to finish an instance run or a quest chain, a few minutes turns into a few
hours. In the morning we log in before dashing out the door so we can see if
our auctions sold. We log in again as soon as we get home and then repeat the
process.
Somewhere
along the way we get lost. The gaming loses its purpose and we log in to do
nothing in particular. Questing doesn't sound fun, PvP (player versus player)
has lost its charm, not everyone is interested in getting achievements for
doing the same old crap... so we log in and we sit. It is then that addiction
becomes the most apparent, when the game turns into a chat program with
phenomenal graphics and you still pay 15 dollars a month.
Some
read the trade, city, and guild chats - making funny comments here and there.
Others find enjoyment in becoming an internet bully and chide silly questions
and belittle other players at random. I stopped posting to the forums a very
long time ago, but I often stopped in to read the class sections for tips on
how to cope with patch changes. It has never been uncommon to find well put
together posts suggesting changes or protesting actions taken by the developers
hammered by the forum trolls with responses indicating that the player should
"learn to play" or "just quit - can I have your items?" or
maybe the most absurd: "tldr" (too long didn't read) as if telling
someone that you didn't read their post because you thought it was too long is
worth the effort of mentioning in the first place.
Perhaps
it becomes like smoking, where some claim that the desire to smoke had been
replaced with the habit of lighting up and holding the cigarette. I know that
there were days when I would log in just because it was habit to do so. In that
regard, maybe it isn't that far off.
Unlike
in life, however, the player has some control over how they interact with this
virtual environment. Everyone looks the same and on face value, everyone starts
out the same. The geek can become the jock, the kid with no friends can be
popular. The guy who’s always been picked on can be the bully. The
possibilities are endless, just as they are in real life, but many of these
same individuals have associated life with failure, with responsibility, and
perhaps with impossible odds. Anything risked in the game world can be
associated with entertainment until the game becomes life. For most, life does
not allow you to simply start over whenever you are unhappy with the results of
your decisions.
It's
only when I step back from the game for a while that I see what makes World of
Warcraft so alluring. In many ways it is just like life. It is unfair and
disappointing. The developers change aspects of your class that you loved and
so you re-roll, creating a new character that better fits the flavor of the
month changes. Some players choose to stay true to their original class and
continue to play in the face of patches that cause them to receive less invites
to raids and strip them of their unique abilities in an effort to homogenize
class roles - designed to promote the concept of 'Bring the player, not the
class'.
If such
changes were made in real life, the consequences might result in the loss of
your job as the company you work for decided that reductions in production
staff could be offset with an increase in sales staff with more reliance on
automated production lines. In World of Warcraft, however, negative changes to
the class you play can be mitigated by playing an alt (alternate character)
instead.
Addiction
to video games is real. Addiction to World of Warcraft is real. Regardless of
why you play, of why you continue to log in, and why you haven't quit time and
time again when you thought you would for sure, many people feel the same. The
good news is that there is life after World of Warcraft and there is life
outside of it. Sometimes it takes getting angry with the direction the game is
headed, sometimes it takes someone else quitting and successfully re-entering
life, and sometimes it might just require some counseling like it did for Bob.
Any way you shake it, though, life is good. You should join us sometime - no
guild application required!
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