the politics of avoidance

You can generally divide up every E3 according to what's hot that year, and in E3 2006, it was MMORPGs. Every second booth had one in some degree of completion, because World of Warcraft was in the process of taking over the world, and I spent the entire show trying to act like I knew what I was even looking at.

Aside from a brief, abortive swing at Anarchy Online and a couple of Korean free-play MMOs (brief mini-review of Rappelz: tits! thank you, that is my mini-review), I'd avoided the genre entirely out of the fear that it would take over my every waking moment. At this point, though, I could no longer put it off, and picked up a copy of World of Warcraft.

Then I moved to Washington for work in 2007, and not only the job but the industry it was located within fell out from under me, and I spent a few years scrambling for employment. Along the way, I'd stumbled into a membership in an Alliance guild in WoW that was actually a pretty decent place to hang out, courtesy of the community on the old Quarter to Three board.

The leadership in the guild wanted to try out more hardcore raiding than the guild at the time would support, back in the day when "hardcore raiding" meant getting 25 dudes together and getting your face caved in by the tier 5 meat-grinder: Serpentshrine Cavern, Tempest Keep, the ridiculous amount of coordination required for Magtheridon, etc. One day in March of 2008, I was in the middle of a heroic dungeon run when the guild master messaged me, said he was making me the guild master, promoted me, and logged off. To this day, I'm sure he waited to do so until I was verifiably busy.

Part of the next few years has to do with the attendant sense of responsibility that being the guild master involved. A lot of it's under the hood; you talk to pretty much everyone in the guild, you get a lot of random whispers, and you end up with a weird reputation on the server based on who passes through the guild over time. It helps that the guild skews older, and mostly involves casual players, but there were still moments of bizarre drama, including one major schism.

A couple of years later, when account hacking got out of hand during Wrath of the Lich King, there was one dude who, as near as I could tell, was writing his login information on random men's-room walls. About once a month, he'd get hacked, somebody would steal everything valuable from the bank, he'd report it, and all two hundred of those valuable in-game items would get mailed straight to me. It was basically the WoW version of that that unspoken inventory-management game that OCD people play in Resident Evil 4.

It should be said, though, that a lot of my involvement with the game had to do with two major factors: my own addictive personality (to go by family history and genetics, it was either this or a severe drinking problem) and the fact that things weren't going all that great in "real life." At the end of a short day of filling out a dozen job applications and taking a couple of abortive stabs at freelance, there was something freeing about entering an environment where I could beat reasonable sums of money out of anything with a red nameplate that looked at me funny. A lot of the energy that I'd ordinarily be investing in one of several jobs was going into WoW instead, which is why I now have an account with multiple characters above level 80 and over 20,000 achievement points.

It's lucky that I happen to be on a career track where this kind of thing is a warped badge of honor, and that I landed in an area where half the people I run into have similar if not identical experiences; it's difficult to feel too bad about your MMO life decisions when you can randomly run into Halo cosplayers on a bus. I had a job interview once that almost went south because the guy giving the interview was a die-hard Horde player, and I remain steadfastly Alliance.

(Which is a separate rant. The Horde never appealed to me aesthetically, and now, playing their exclusive content is an awful lot like going through a Bioware game on the "asshole" path.)

Yesterday was the guild's 10th anniversary, and March will mark my eighth year as its GM. I was telling people last night that my abiding opinion of the whole thing was that somehow, I didn't break it; due to a lot of people, the guild's managed to stay relatively intact throughout several expansions, and there's only been one major bit of drama. (Two, really, but the second was limited to one person.)

Right now, WoW itself is in a down period. Warlords of Draenor started strong but has turned into a wet fart of an expansion, with very little to do at the level cap, which is doubly damning since the final patch of the last expansion lasted for 14 months. The guild's quiet as a result, which is a little depressing, but I have to remind myself not to take responsibility there.

Things are better for me right now. I've got a day job that works very well with my biases and leaves me with a lot of free time, which has done as much as anything to break my WoW addiction. It was never so much the game itself as the distraction it represented, and were it not for WoW I might be heavily into some other obsession. It was a useful project for that time in my life, and I learned a couple of things about dealing with people along the way.

That's something I don't think people give games in general enough credit for, although you see a lot of it in play with crafting/construction titles like Minecraft. They're a pretty decent anti-drug.