Note: I don't usually post on this blog because I'm not the kind of person to have thoughts that would translate well to a blog post; nor do I have many 'followers' as I don't use this website very often; however, I feel inclined to increase the populous of my blog posts somewhat, so I'd thought I would start with a piece of writing I did based on a certain gaming experience.
The Plunge
Let me describe an emotional state, and you come up with the cause. First, emptiness. Emptiness like hunger, ravenous hunger; emptiness like the blackness that descends behind closed eyelids at the instant before sleep; emptiness as need; emptiness as blind desire; emptiness visualized as a gaping hole where the heart once held court. Then, regret. Regret for loss, regret that the emptiness exists, regret that the memory of what once filled the hole—the heart, remember—lies dead and dies more each and every passing day; regret that the knowledge of what other people do to fill up their life has been lost along countless missteps and misspent hours trying to find the path on which you once, as a child, so deftly picked your way; regret that something is gone and has left an emptiness as deep as the blackest reaches of outer space. Anger, next. Anger that emptiness is remembered with regret; anger at the witless world that allowed such a gain that could become a loss that could be defined as emptiness with vast regret; anger that you, who once were so strong, so supple, so springboard-ready to bounce back to a mean emotional state, a psychical purpose, can see yourself suffering and maundering over the black heart, its regretful state, and your pointless rage. Despair, finally, that you will ever be another way
Love, you say? If you did, and I hope you did, then you got it right, at least in purpose and point of origin; for though it smacks of the lovelorn puppy dog ministrations of a mooney-eyed lover, the emotional state I described was of an addict's absence of soul, of spirit, of the will to experience. Which is to say, they are not all that different after all?
Unhealthy obsessions, selfish solipsism…the fables and myths that give us succour and teach us morals warn against anything so monomaniacal: it is hardly necessary to think of Narcissus to extend any story's teleology to death by personal infirmity, moral laxity, or, quite simply, gazing too long at a mirrored self. Love, the quaint excuse for the angst-ridden teen's outrageous outcries—the union of two souls! Death by dissolution! Not life, no, but bliss!—is seldom more than a mirror made to trick the viewer into seeing a better self. What of other mirrors, or tricks? What of those that mask the truth but lightly, and in the dancing points of light you can see the fiction, the misdirection, life not lived but carefully avoided, painted in unearthly colours and brighter, happier, than even the most stunted man-child could ever want life to be? We could say that the infirmity is weaker, the morals ignored with more purpose and pain, the waters of immurement approached with more knowledge, dire knowledge, that it is death the soul seeks.
All this is pretty heavy-handed for someone talking of love. Even more so for someone talking of a video game. But there it is. Where love once filled the hours of thousands of men and women who had nothing else to divert their attention away from the painful, plodding progress of life as we know it, we have a game. To be sure, there are other diversions, some do drugs, others take to drink, but for general amusement, for avoiding thinking, there have always been games and activities meant to satisfy other base yearnings—accomplishment, pride, mental facility, physical prowess, social adaptability—but no game quite like this.
World of Warcraft is a massively-multiplayer-online-role-playing game, which is to say, quite simply, it is a game played simultaneously by millions of people in concert to escape life. The escape comes in waves, a progressive submersion of the personality in a virtual space. First, the player chooses a character, an avatar, through whom they will vicariously live a virtual life in the virtual world (often, not strangely, men choose to become women). Then, the player coddles this character from plebeian to hero, experience and accomplishment marked in ascending levels, level 1 to level 80 (soon to be level 85 with an upcoming expansion). Level 80, once achieved marks the full immersion of the personality, not the end of the game, as some would suspect. Achieving level 80 is the terrible moment wherein the player half-decides that he will never leave the game. It would be helpful to think of the first touch of damp on Narcissus' nose. Did he hesitate? No. Did he plunge? I don't think so.
The World of Warcraft player only plunges in the beginning: if anything, playing the game illustrates how inclination, desire, and purpose can be worn down by a constantly forward-moving experience, one that can be measured by level achieved, time spent, and items and money acquired and lost. It is, in that way, very similar to real life. By the time the player gets his character to level 80, choice is a strange concept, free-will is an anxiety, and decisions take place at the last half-second before they need to be made. It is only in the beginning stages that one can see players give themselves to the game with abandon, when they can croon about the cool things they can do, have seen, will, maybe, experience. It is the childhood hour, full of wonder and excitement, awe and a terrible nameless fear: is this right? Is this okay? Of course, there are always those strong-minded children who never question the plunge, never look back until its too late, who, like hardened criminals, look back and snarl but once, and move forward again. But, nevertheless, it is like a childhood, and though it is your avatar that is the child, the player feels it in his or her head. The colours are bright, the experience is new, and there are all sorts of gewgaws and nifty mechanisms that inspire awe at almost every turn, enough awe and excitement to make you initially forget that real hours are passing by and the real world stops for no one. But, then again, the World of Warcraft stops for no one, too.
I remember the first time I felt a pang of jealousy at another's achievement in the World of Warcraft. My character was level 10, I'd been playing for about a week or so, and a person (or a person's character, to be exact) whom I'd been playing with all of a sudden surpassed me and was level 12. I felt betrayed, for we had been working together for a week. I felt small, for I knew that it was a simple matter to ascend two levels quickly, and the only thing that had gotten between me and that level 12 was a few hours of sleep. I congratulated him on his success (we were both new to the game, successes cropped up every hour or so), and secretly decided to surpass him by the next day. I did, and all it took was a bit more dedication, a bit more concentration on the tasks I was required to perform, and a few hours less sleep. By the next day, I was level 15, and he was level 14. Success!
The Bait
That is one of the initial draws of the game: competition. But, still more tempting is that success, measured on level achieved and items and equipment gathered, is predicated, primarily, on time spent within the world. At the beginning, I know I felt that for every hour that I missed playing in the World of Warcraft, everyone I knew, everyone I had played with, was advancing their characters, was racking up successes, and the simple solution to equal their achievements was to play more of the game, that is, play for a longer time each and every day. It is hard to imagine now, but in the beginning I was playing about 14 hours per day, and gladly. Many in the World of Warcraft admired my dedication. I was, in a way; cool for wiling away so many hours in the virtual world. Indeed, childhood.
And what could be the motivation for the initial plunge? How does one go from a reasonably normal individual who spends the normal amount of hours of a normal day doing the normal things associated with the nominally normal act of living—say, eating, reading, socializing with friends, peeing when the urge arises, sleeping for sleep's sake—to the person who spends 14 painstaking hours in total thrall of a computer screen, a keyboard, and a mouse, skipping meals, peeing only when absolute need forces the body away from the desk, lying to friends, reading only puerile conversations in tiny chat windows on a computer screen, and sleeping only because of animal weakness? For that is the plunge…an almost immediate transformation from a normal state to a game addiction, that, in time, becomes rote experience, the daily fare, a matter not of choice but of habit. And where does this motivation come from, where does the desire to live a life entirely unreal, in a world entirely fake, in a land where emotion, consequence, and life have no meaning, no existence, and no weight?
Given that it is a game, and given that the majority of players are of a newly-adult age, it would be easy to say, as I have said, that the sole drawing power of the game is escape. Thus, pretty colours are nice to behold, and they draw you in; smooth game-play is convenient, and it draws you in; successes measured by the moment in easily discernible increments are satisfying, and they draw you in. But, in the end, that is too easy and unfair, for the game offers something larger, something that cannot be gained by smoking a bowl, drinking a six pack, or zoning out to the tube for endless hours of dull commercialism. Escape is not enough by far to explain the motivation for giving up life in favour of a virtual world, for declining to desire anything that could be defined as material, tangible, or real in any way. What it comes down to, I think, is control.
Absolute control of a character is nothing new. Video games, from Super Mario Bros. on, have used this tool. It allows for an easy transition to the game world. In the game, you're not you; in the game you are Mario, or Luigi, or, in the case of World of Warcraft, you are your avatar, not Sean, not Nate, or Laura, not Kate. What the World of Warcraft offers is control over existence: your character never dies, your character is never hungry or thirsty, and it never needs to sleep, to rest, to pee or defecate, to love. Necessity is, for your character, a fiction and as such when you invest yourself in your character, you are trying for that absence of necessity: you are trying to live in that perfect world. What the World of Warcraft introduces is a species of ordered disorder, and though you may control your deathless and perfect character, the environment is out of your control: other players exist and do what they wish; enemies are at every turn; you can be set upon by any number of animals and creatures in the world; time keeps moving on. Yet, you have, in the virtual world, the option to disregard these things: you can stop responding to people talking to you, and they will assume you are not there; if someone is killing you, you can just give up, wait a few moments, and then continue where you left off; if you have to do something (for a quest, for an item) it can always be put off until you feel like dealing with it. The control the world gives is over a seemingly uncontrollable world, a simulacrum of our real world, though, at any given time, you can order that uncontrollable world with your indifference, inaction, or laziness.
The way this motivation changes and transforms as you continue to play the game is frightening. I recall many people, and many forum posts on Warcraft forums the Internet round, talking about how playing the game had affected the way they perceive the world. Usually started off with the joke formula of "You know you play too much WoW when…," the game would begin to take on dire implications, such as when a certain player referred to their own child as an "alternate character" (a character you start when you are bored with your main character), or when a person described how he had been stuck in traffic and, instead of cursing his luck or hitting the dashboard, he fantasized about teleporting past the lines of cars, only to find himself revving his engine. There are other examples of the way in which the Warcraft world bleeds into this one, such as the famous example of the child who jumped off a building because he wanted to be like his heroes in the game, or the teenager who stabbed his friend in the chest because of a particularly desired item, but there are even more frightening instances of the substitution of the game world with the real. I remember one day I was standing in a capital city, literally doing nothing but jumping up and down and waiting for something to happen, when a guild-member logged on to the world and stated, in the green, guild-chat text box, that his sister had just died in a car crash. Such realities fare badly in the virtual world: many people in the guild did not know how to respond. I, for my part, quickly logged out. The most frightening thing about the statement was that instead of grieving silently, or turning to his family and friends, he chose to express his sorrow in a virtual world amongst (virtual) friends. Later on that day, when I logged back in, he was in the middle of a complicated dungeon, one that would take hours, and it was clear to me that he was shunting away the real emotions of grief, anger, frustration, and outrage, and in their place was substituting the game. I never expressed my condolences: indeed, I think a majority of people who knew him avoided this simple act of sympathy, as well. Real things do not mix with the World of Warcraft for a very simple reason: to preserve the fiction, to keep up the façade, to bar and deny the light of a real world with consequences entry into the virtual plane.
Perhaps none of this would be important if not for the size of the World of Warcraft population. On December 23rd, 2008, Blizzard Entertainment (World of Warcraft's developer) announced that there were more than 11.5 million subscribers. The population of World of Warcraft, then, exceeds the population of many countries, even if one were to take into account that many World of Warcraft players have multiple accounts. At about £9 per month per subscription, the game is the most profitable video game ever. As such, it has deservedly gotten much press about its business side, and, on the other hand, it has gotten a lot of coverage about the detrimental effects of the game on families and personal relationships. In addition, though, it has also gotten positive press, mainly concerned with gaming as a new form of community building.
If you think you don't know anyone who plays World of Warcraft, the odds are greatly in favour of you being wrong. Some telling signs: red eyes, gaunt faces, hollowed out eye cavities, startling weight changes, a tendency to sit in a hunched position, a guarded look when approached while looking at a computer screen, incredible laziness, weak excuses, absent looks of longing, a predilection to use acronyms (and pronounce them as actual words), and, finally, a general aura of exhaustion. To think of a community, a nation, or a world full of these individuals is almost impossible. You would think that in looking at each other, the community would see the ills affecting each and every member and form some sort of response. But, in the virtual World of Warcraft, you never see the woman playing the Night Elf warrior standing by your side and you never see the man using his Dwarf priest to smile. At most you can hear their weary and exhausted voices over an external voice-over-Internet program, you can notice the pent-up frustration in thinly veiled yet cruel barbs delivered in the chat boxes, or you can accept that the person you're trying to talk to is blatantly ignoring you. You hear these things, you can perceive that all is not right in the perfect world for many of its denizens, yet, you're in the world to play, and everyone continues to play, frustrated, lonely, angry, fed-up, and tired, or not. The World of Warcraft gamer is not only inured to the invasion of external worries and problems, but also to those that are products of the virtual world itself.
Many of the avid gamers that you will encounter have some sort of denial ready at hand to combat even the slightest criticism of World of Warcraft. "At least I'm not spending this time watching TV," is commonly heard. In this denial there is an acknowledgement of guilt (as with all denials), but it is of guilt on two orders. TV has been considered a tacit evil for ages—it's a diversion, it causes laziness, it is escapism—and the criticisms are virtually identical to those of the World of Warcraft. There is a fundamental distinction, though. You do not interact with people on the TV screen; you don't talk to people you've never seen about this TV show's character or that TV show's narrative arc; and TV, at the very least, evokes some very real emotions, like sorrow, loss, happiness, or anger. In World of Warcraft, a community is constructed in which these human emotions have little place, and though they are given some slight nod of acknowledgement, they are not to be dwelt upon for any significant period of time. What is important is progression in the game, to play and play and play, and to think of nothing else. Indeed, that is the reason most people join the community in the first place.
The Trap
What one should take from this common denial is the mindset of the World of Warcraft gamer. If not for this diversion, this community, or this game, there would be another diversion, another game, and, ideally, another community that would make escapism feel less lonely. Social networking websites like Facebook offer a glimpse of what this alternative to the World of Warcraft community would be. But, as is common with people accustomed to living a certain life****(addicted is a word too often employed), the idea of another community that they could join is a fiction, a base alternative that they would never choose to have fully replace the World of Warcraft community. And this community extends far beyond the virtual world. Even when you are not logged into the game, if you are a dedicated player, there are countless ways to keep in touch with the community. While at work, you can research your ****characteristics, determine which items you would like to have most, scan gossip blogs for up-and-coming developments and additions to the world. While at school, you can log into your guild website and communicate with your guild members and organize in-game activities, discuss tactics, or simply talk about the newest fan made movie, or machinima, or, even, the latest game console or video game. The more you play the game and the more you participate within the myriad communities contained within the game, the more you become inextricably linked to the world. In a sense, though the gamer's ultimate goal is escape, it is not only an attempt to escape from the real world, but to escape the real world and enter into a gated community of people with one, unifying interest: the game.
To Be Continued
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