The Game Dame

Ya think?? HAHAHAHAhahahaha… woooo… boy, I crack myself up.

Still, below is a quote from the Battle.net email that Blizzard sent out, and here’s the blog post I wrote after Wrath came out. Your assignment: compare and contrast.

Our goal is to create the premier online gaming destination for Blizzard gamers, with new community and communication features like cross-realm World of Warcraft chat, real-life friends lists, cross-game communication, and much more.

You decide.

I haven’t officially discontinued my WoW account, but I’ll probably do it this week. I realized after looking at SpartanUI that the lovin’ feeling is completely gone. A few months ago, I would’ve absolutely LOVED this UI. It’s clean, stylish, and out of the way. But now I look at it and I think two things:

1. It looks a heck of a lot like Aion’s UI. Wouldn’t surprise me if some add-on developers got some under-the-table “help” from Blizzard to combat the competition.
2. It made my skin crawl to think about playing the game again: leveling, button-pushing, doing dailies, putting up with pugs…

I just got this really depressed feeling like I have let my friends down by having zero interest in playing the game.

It is interesting learning about Aion, but I’m not sure about when I’ll go back to playing that either. It’s also very button-pushy. As in: push button one, wait for cooldown, push button 2, wait again, take a potion if necessary, flash heal, repeat.

The game I’m enjoying most right now is Fallout 3. It’s very immersive. It’s like BioShock meets Oblivion. I’m totally geeking out on it!

What to my wondering eyes did appear, but a magical display at CVS! Click the image to see the delightful details. There’s a Horde box with an Orc, featuring Citrus Cherry flavored Dew, and a blue Alliance box showing a Night Elf who prefers Wild Berry flavored Dew.

On Saturday my desktop’s monitor died. It went kablooey in the morning so I had to stare the rest of the day in the face without the prospect of WoW. I pouted until mid-afternoon.

By dinner time, I had come to the tough realization that I had been very addicted to WoW. I kept wandering around the apartment looking for… what? I don’t know. I was restless. I walked from the bedroom to the living room, into the office — and then made the entire circuit again and again. I petted the cats. One appreciated it, the other asked me, uncivilly, to shove off. I took two naps. My husband did his usual Saturday stuff, keeping an eye on me and wondering what he could do to cheer me up. My primary emotion was sadness. I missed my friends. I missed the automatic mindlessness of cranking up WoW when I didn’t know what else to do. Or, more often, when I didn’t want to face something else I had to do or think about. I felt lonely, having been jerked away from a social circle without my consent. I also felt unexplicably guilt-ridden, like I was letting someone down, but I didn’t know who it was.

Sunday was even harder. The entire day drew out before me like a long shadow at sunset — and felt just as cold. I dusted off Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for the Xbox 360. I hated it. I started a new class 4 or 5 different times. I couldn’t get the hang of the controls. There were too many spells for the D-pad hotkeys (it’s probably a MUCH better game on the PC). The hint book I had bought last year is HORRIBLY written and I wasn’t finding it helpful at all. I kept wondering, “Why am I banging my head against this game??!?” And yet I continued to try. I felt compelled to fill up the brain-space.

Sunday is the one night a week we allow ourselves to splurge on a restaurant for dinner. We went to Panera. I tried making conversation with my husband about truly bizarre topics, mostly centered around facing one’s own limitations. Afterwards we browsed Barnes & Noble, a free pastime we both enjoy. There’s a Best Buy in the same shopping center and I begged for us to window-shop the monitors. “Oooo, pretty.” In the bookstore, I couldn’t get myself interested in anything I touched, fiction or nonfiction. I noted the horribly sad state of the SciFi/Fantasy genre (more on that in a future post). The predominating emotion was loss.

This morning I woke up cranky and resentful. Nothing pleased me. The weather was bleak, yet the holiday filled the parks and beaches too much for me to enjoy them. Again I tried playing Oblivion, this time finding a bit of enjoyment in it as I solved some of the frustrations (turning up the brightness so I didn’t get lost in caves, pausing the action a lot to switch spells, etc.). At some point in mid-afternoon I started to achieve a little peace. I cleaned off the top of my dresser. I sorted some clothes to take to Goodwill. I came up with the idea for this post and some others. I realized there are a lot of things I want to do around  the house on my I’ve-been-meaning-to list. I even started thinking that losing WoW might turn out to be a good thing for me in the long run.

By the way, thank you all for the kind comments and emails you’ve sent. They have definitely helped take some of the sting out of this whole situation.

Photo by Natalia Romay

This is certainly not how I had planned for it to go down.  I was still in the “bargaining” stage of grief about whether and when I wanted to quit WoW. I wasn’t sure if I would quit, but if I did, I wanted to do it when my heart was clear and my mind was at peace with the decision. Unfortunately, none of those things came to pass before the decision was made for me.

The monitor on my PC decided to go the way of the old ones today. The laptop I’m using to write this post doesn’t have the graphics power to run WoW. The other desktop computer we have is an old Mac which could run TBC but cannot handle Wrath. Even if I could somehow figure out how to use this laptop’s monitor with the desktop, it wouldn’t be able to handle that computer’s Nvidia graphics card output (I did, after all, only pay about $600 for this laptop).

So, abruptly, I am bereft of WoW and everything else that is on the desktop until I can afford to buy a new monitor. Since I’m unemployed at the moment, I have no idea when that kind of money will come our way. As such, it’s probably best for me to cancel my WoW account in the meantime. I can’t even use the network to access the files on that computer because I’d need to set up the sharing.

Even though I know it’s been coming, my leaving the game, I feel heartsore. I don’t get to go online to say goodbye to my guildies. I don’t get to give away any of my valuable items to noobs. I don’t get to have any closure on it whatsoever. It feels like I’m leaving town under cover of darkness, never to see some friends again.

I don’t think I’ll stop writing this blog any time soon. I’ve still got things to say about the game — and goodness knows I probably couldn’t keep my mouth shut even if I tried. I may start writing about other games. That is, if I actually start playing any. (I do have Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for Xbox 360 gathering dust on the shelf.) Who knows, I might even pop-off about non-game stuff here. We’ll see. I do have one post in the works as a result of an email thread with guildies last week, so I know I’ve got at least one more WoW post coming this weekend.

I know I will talk to my best WoW friends (hi, guildies!) in email threads next week, but I want to express my sadness that I couldn’t tell them all this in-game. I’m going to miss playing with you guys, BIG TIME. Hopefully, you’ll welcome me back after I’m able to get a new monitor. Love y’all…

Well, there’s Slig in his Noblegarden outfit. He’s resplendent in all his primitive glory, is he not? And by “resplendent,” I mean “goofy.”

Yesterday I spent about an hour gathering eggs filled with chocolate and other trinkets while I was polymorphed into a bunny. It feels odd doing all this so long after Easter. (Okay, to be fair, it feels odd doing it ANY time; he’s a giant male COW for peetsake!) And indeed I only spent an hour doing it. It’s really a phone-it-in kind of holiday.

Now all the silly eggs and flowers are gone and today we start Children’s Week, where you get to drag around an orphan, exposing him to your violent lifestyle and buying him ice cream whenever he whines. Isn’t it bad enough that he has no parents without adding more bloody trauma to his life? Is the ice cream supposed to make up for that? And why do we do it? So we can get a pet rat or Mr. Wiggles. How is this not exploitation of children?

I think my ambivalent feeling about WoW holidays is a metaphor for how a lot of people are feeling about the game lately: bored and unchallenged. Patches and expansions offer new content that not only people rush through, but only last a few months even if you take your time. I have got to be the slowest leveler on the planet and I’m already yawning about the Wrath expansion and Ulduar. It hasn’t even been six months since Wrath came out!

I guess raiders are motivated by the desire/need/compulsion to finish the high-end content, which is designed to be purposefully frustrating so they continue to beat their heads against it for several months. How fun is that! As a casual player, I have not even the slightest wish to die a jillion times – and endure the pugs (now with 80% more asshats!) that will allow me that pleasure – or to devote that large a portion of my life and ego to besting a set of pixels. Daily quests don’t get it done for me either. I want the game to be a game, not a job.

From Javã Társis on Flickr

WoW relies heavily on its social component to make it worthwhile to come back to. Most people really do like the folks they play with, but if we’re honest, there’s also a sense of obligation to it sometimes: “I don’t want to let them down so I’d better log on.” To me, I think this feeling of responsibility and loyalty is the thing that makes the game hardest to leave. Blizzard knows this, but instead of making the social interactions more enjoyable and less tedious, they have concentrated on making more content. I mean, the few nods they’ve made to improving the social aspect of the game were (1) adding the calendar, (2) tweaking the still-disastrous LFG system, and (3) implementing a half-assed voice system which no one above Level Noob uses.

To make matters worse, some of my friends are cutting back or outright leaving the game. My ennui grows. Maybe it’s time to spend that money on Xbox Gold instead…

Date of goodbye post: March 30, 2009.

Date of “official” last post: April 8, 2009.

Now, look at BRK’s Achievements listed in the armory. The date of his most recent achievement is April 18, 2009. Also note that Argent Aspiration and Dual Talent Specialization could only be accomplished after the release of 3.1 which came out on April 14, 2009.

I say all this not to be critical; BRK’s life is his own and he owes us nothing by way of explanation. (One obvious explanation is that he gave his account to someone else, like one of his kids or a friend.) However, if it really is BRK himself, I bring it up to ask this question:

How addictive really is WoW?

It’s one thing to become bored with the game or to discover a new hobby to replace it (another game, a different activity, etc.). In those cases, I think addiction to the specific game of WoW is not very difficult to overcome. There are plenty of cases of people transferring their addictions (e.g., smokers or drinkers become overeaters).

However, it’s a completely different ballgame to quit something addictive when you have nothing to replace it. Now, I’m not saying that BRK or anyone else who quits WoW to spend time with their families doesn’t really love their families. Of course they do. And 99.99999% of the time, they love their families WAY more than they love WoW or even their WoW friends. But desire is not enough to overcome addiction, is it? It’s like saying in a marriage “all you need is love” when we know that’s a huge oversimplification and marriage really takes a lot of work and effort on top of the love. Plenty of people desire to quit smoking, narcotics, and alcohol, but cannot do it by willpower alone. Sometimes they can never do it at all, even with help. 

So my big questions are:

1. 1. Is WoW an addiction like the ones used in examples above? 
2. 2. Is gaming itself an addiction? 
3. 3. If no, then why is it so hard to quit, no matter what’s at stake (e.g., your marriage, your job)? 
4. 4. If yes, then how do we address this as gamers (whether we are at risk or our friends are) and as a community of concerned humans?

I’ve been keeping my eye out for Underbelly Elixirs down in the Dalaran sewers. So far I’ve been turned into a Tuskarr and a wasp. Both were very fun to play with, but only lasted 10 minutes.

The Tuskarr waddles around in a fun way and has a nice instant-cast animation (e.g., for casting Water Shield). Unfortunately, he doesn’t dance or sit or sleep or anything else.

The wasp was great fun. It flies like any other mount — except that you ARE the mount. Unfortunately, a lesson to learn is that you cannot be a wasp outside of the sewers or you will be “dismounted”.

Go check it out!

I just realized that in my screenshot meme post, I claimed that you could see my current UI on the epic flyer post. WRONG! I cropped it all out of that photo. So here is the same photo, uncropped, so you can compare and contrast if you like. As I described yesterday, the totem organizer is FloTotem.