Even gone and departed, I thought about WoW all the time.
Even before this book and the research that came with it and the inevitable renewal of my subscription, I missed the game’s order, its schedule, the weekly rhythm of clearing and progression. I missed having a crew of friends waiting for me every weeknight and arena partners to pass the rest of the time. At the same time, I knew those pangs represented nostalgia more than any contemporary need. The WoW I had loved so much had changed, was gone and couldn’t return. Only a relative handful of crusty old raiders would even want it to. So while from time to time I found myself missing the bygone days, I was more conscious of the various ways WoW had altered my brain. From everything I can tell, these changes are permanent.
It happened most often while driving—something about the displacement of driving a vehicle, surrounded on all sides by the kind of rushing chaos only gaggles of complete strangers can animate. Everyone operates according to her own peculiar logic. We’re all trying to get somewhere, but not all to the same place and certainly not by the same route. And yet we all coexist in the same space, affecting each other if only by our presence, forced to negotiate the various challenges of our proximity. My fellow drivers feel like “randos” picked up in the Looking for Group menu. I’m handling my own vehicle, but like piloting a WoW avatar, the skill cap of highway driving sits low. Keep going straight, maintain speed, change lanes as appropriate, and check blinds spots as you do. Driving demands perhaps 15 percent of a smart, aware person’s mental bandwidth. Most people devote their remaining brainpower to the appreciation of music, or grumbling assents along with talk radio hosts caught in a permanent stasis of rage, or thumbing through their Twitter feeds. I don’t; instead I watch the other drivers. My inner raid leader can’t help but monitor them as though they might need healing or a quick dispel. Seeing the sudden flare of brake lights I track the propagating red, down the lanes and across them. I see every reaction and I judge by its quickness the soul behind that wheel. The fastest you’d want in your crew. The slowest would stand mired in hazards—bubbling lava or a seething violet miasma of shadow—with their health ticking down and down and down, moving at long last but only quick enough to drop dead a step from the periphery. They represent a massive psychic underclass visible only to those with the refined and misanthropic perspective of an MMORPG veteran.
The phrasing is tongue-in-cheek, not the sentiment. MMOs don’t have the highest individual skill cap, but they teach their players a kind of broad-spectrum awareness most other games don’t. The diversity of classes and their various specializations and the talents attached to those specifications could fill their own informative but crushingly dull book. Playing at a high level demands a complete and intuitive grasp of all that information: what every class does and how they do it. In chapter 6 former WoW arena (and current Hearthstone) star Rumay “Hafu” Wang described her long and granular learning process, dueling every class until she understood them inside and out. Hardcore WoW players know more about the game than many people know about their own jobs. They have to recall, process, and apply that information in a huge variety of conditions and under brutal time constraints. Retaining and quickly calling upon this knowledge to inform decisions becomes, more than anything else, the mark of a quality player. Ideally everyone would be able to handle this, but it’s a lot to ask. A good guild like T K T can expect perhaps three quarters of its players to meet this standard. Even great guilds like Elitist Jerks have weak links here and there, usually among the DPS for whom raw numerical performance can make up for the odd death. It’s hard to attain this level of awareness, harder still to maintain it. WoW teaches players to pay constant attention to their surroundings, to be mindful of their actions, to monitor every branch of the decision tree regardless of circumstance. Any organism on earth can react to stimulus; true intelligence anticipates. To an experienced eye the difference is plain as day.
Which makes it difficult, at times, to exercise patience. I see someone else approaching a circumstance, know exactly what he should do and why, and I know he won’t do it. I see the mistake someone’s about to make (for example, switching lanes neither checking his blind spot nor applying a turn signal) and I know how to avoid it, but she goes ahead and does it anyway and I just want to scream. More than a few fellow WoW-heads can relate. How on earth, wonders the gamer, am I paying more attention to your business than you are? I could remote-control you using half my attention and still make better choices! Of course, nobody says this out loud. Doing so would paint us as irretrievable assholes—tryhards of the worst kind, uptight type-A personalities more suited for cutthroat law firms than decent society. We must settle for expressing it in the pages of books, themselves monuments to ego.
You didn’t have to count yourself hardcore to be changed forever by the game. You never forget your first MMO, to mangle an old phrase, and for much of the Internet-native generation, WoW was their first. It layered the game world persistently over their own in a way most had never experienced. I certainly hadn’t, despite a lifetime of playing RPGs and other immersive video games. If some players are motivated by winning, I’m motivated by learning, and WoW offered a wonderfully bottomless well of knowledge to plumb. As I learned Azeroth’s every intricacy I felt a degree of mastery over the real world too. Events in my life made more sense. Dynamics in the large multiteam office where I worked aligned with a realm server’s jostling population, its yammering factions. When I got home, a four-mile run became a daily quest to be ground out no matter the misery attached. The fiction I wrote in a darkened room under an overbright desk lamp was my raid—abrading frustration with a sweet payoff cooked somehow into the process. Which isn’t to say I glimpsed the secret topography of our universe or some marketable shortcut to success. I did find that what I saw made more sense. One event proceeded more logically to another the way the highway turned to a flickering game board.
School and work fall out much the same way. Long-term goals that might otherwise overwhelm can be broken down to small, achievable tasks. If you consistently knock out these tasks, their benefits—slight but not trivial, concrete but not quite tangible—add up like gear upgrades over the course of a long arena season. Life is less predictable in its rewards, but the principle remains the same: focus intently on whatever’s in front of you today, and things will probably work out in the end. If you ever ground a faction reputation to Exalted, you probably have the discipline to better your station in life. Just about everyone I know from WoW enjoys a successful and personally rewarding career despite their diverse backgrounds and circumstances. Kids from the violent Texas border town of Juarez grew up to be engineers. Utterly confused teenagers worked their way through college and law school and the Georgia bar exam. They learned the valuable lesson that organizations are what their members make of them, that hard work won’t necessarily take you to the top of the world but it will get you incrementally closer, and that wherever you find yourself might still make you pretty damn happy.
Ask them what they got from the game and they note the satisfying connection between investment and reward. Playing the game, even when it most resembled work, still felt good. As one says, “Even the grindy, miserable parts of it never dissuaded me from continuing. I was a chronic procrastinator (and a recovering one still) but in Warcraft I never felt the need to put things off, because I enjoyed what I was doing. Even the grinds were worth it because of the payoff . . . I think that the MMO nature of the game—the social interactions and ability to compare oneself [to others]—only adds to that.” The same player demonstrates the value of a persistent game world when he notes that fully instanced RPGs like Blizzard’s own Diablo never held the same appeal. Each day in WoW was populated by the same people, the same cast of characters to share in your successes and failures. “The people,” says another player when asked what kept him playing. “Definitely the people.” Group play binds people together. It affixes strong emotional stakes to any challenge. Play badly and you’ve done worse than lose—you’ve let down your teammates. Even if they don’t blame you, you’ll blame yourself. Fidelity to friends, real or virtual, is the biggest single motivator in WoW. More matches were won and bosses downed for mutual love than ones and zeroes arranged into a piece of epic loot.
Friends learned these precious lessons together, and perfect strangers bonded in the learning. T K T and Elitist Jerks were two of the coolest organizations I’ve ever been associated with, containing brilliant and kind people I will always consider my friends no matter how many years or circumstances come between us. Perhaps it sounds silly to someone outside gaming culture, but it’s absolutely true. Every day I chat with WoW friends as we go through our workdays; we’re part of each other’s lives. The first day I joined Elitist Jerks, I was hanging out on their IRC1 channel and received a message from a stranger: Hello, I hear you will have the privilege of healing me ☺. It was EJ’s main tank, Paches, reaching out to a player he knew had freshly transferred with no social network. I needed a friend and he appeared. We partnered in arenas, whispered constantly during raids, and though we’ve never met in person and haven’t played WoW together for the better part of a decade, I talk with him more often than anyone but my wife. We see the world similarly; we think the same things are funny; we love video games. From what else on earth are friendships built?
If guildmates held our fiercest affections at the time, passing years have made flame wars and other petty conflicts feel much the same. For all the sparring I did on Blizzard’s message boards (the ups and downs of which are whimsically recounted by an anonymous scribe on Detheroc’s WoW Wiki page), a decade later I feel genuine affection for all my antagonists. In researching this book I got back into contact with the turncoats who left T K T in such an awful lurch years ago, and while I verified the basics of my recollection, never a cross word passed between us. It’s so far from mattering now; the good times we had together are all that remain. We learned the value of persistence, focus, and work, but because we learned them together, we couldn’t help but become acutely aware of how our powers interfaced. Talented as we might have been, we were absolutely great as a team. Not even the fiercest ego could see Ragnaros burst into cinders and his great hammer plummet to the ground and think of himself. There’s only the guild, the comrades who’ve nursed each other through a hundred wipes of heartbreak now screaming themselves hoarse on voice chat. “Fuck the beef,” as Dr. Dre once said of a departed friend. Adults let any good outshine all the bad.
There’s a lesson in that too, about friends and colleagues and how to treat them. A few leaders might have powered their guilds through sheer iron-fisted force of personality, but they were exceptions. Great guilds functioned because their leaders persuaded, cajoled, bribed, and pleaded to pull them through tough times. If folks weren’t having fun on a nightly basis, they wouldn’t play with you. You needed to value your guildmates as people, even online, even when they committed aggravating errors.
We learned so much about ourselves through these virtual challenges, and the game gave those better selves expression. It gave us a venue to be loud and stupid and sometimes cruel, to try new things and make mistakes. I’d argue that WoW’s insistence on consequence-free death led to more personal growth than significant portions of the typical high school curriculum.2 Arriving when it did, at a highly formative period for my age cohort, the game couldn’t help but splice its way into our DNA. Of course it meant the world to us. Of course it still feels like home, when we think back to it or renew our subscriptions for three slow months of the summer.
The infamous Leeroy Jenkins video gained viral traction not because it was terribly funny on its own terms or because it referenced something specific from WoW but because it spoke to a deeper kind of shared experience. It cleverly rendered the goofy mayhem that can ensue when good friends engage in spirited play. One thing goes wrong and someone can’t help but tug at the thread, or perhaps they started the unraveling to begin with. Chaos is the essence of fun—it ensures unpredictability, diversity, possibility. Break a rule and you’ve made the world anew. Leeroy’s guild was called PALS FOR LIFE, and since the video’s release, one can find identically named imitators on every server. That is the ideal of a guild, after all: friends bonded for the duration, not for one game or one expansion or one tier of content. No matter how time passes, anyone who ever played in T K T is my brother or my sister, and I really mean that. I’m thrilled to see them wed and it kills me when their exes won’t let them see their kids. They’re my friends, and we’ll always have our times together. The best guilds become exclusive social clubs where the only members are the only people you’d ever want there. But you don’t need to have fought shoulder to shoulder with someone for WoW to bring you together. Anyone who ever held an active account unwittingly inducted herself into a vast and disparate family.
When I started a new job in April 2008 at a large game developer, my neighboring work station was occupied by a young man named Dante. Dante loved WoW with every fiber of his being. “Hey man, you play WoW?” was the first non-work-related sentence he spoke to me. He played a rogue in a small guild working its way through Karazhan, and we’d chew up slow hours with idle conversation about each and every one of its bosses. In a matter of weeks we’d bonded over the game without any particular effort, though we hailed from totally different backgrounds and had little superficially in common. As tends to happen, things got more personal. I told him about my anxieties over moving in with a girlfriend. He described the spectacular drama engulfing his mother and sister, whose screaming fights kept him up all night. He laid out the predawn bus transfers necessary to get him to his carpool’s meeting spot in the distant East Bay. This was why, he confided, he often struggled to stay awake during the afternoons. It was a problem; our boss hated him for it, suspected him of being high, though I never smelled or saw anything of the sort. It was just a bad circumstance. When he couldn’t sleep any more, Dante would pull his laptop out from under the rickety hide-a-bed and farm gold in deserted zones before embarking for the bus. He’d tell me about his latest ganking exploits (“Alliance is some punks, nigga. Can’t never fight solo.”) and the loot he hoped to get that week. Prince Malchezaar dropped a fabulous dagger he coveted more than anything in the world, but it just refused to drop for him. The man was born with no surfeit of luck. In chaotic circumstances WoW became a refuge, a part of his life he could control while his family life spiraled out of control. It was something he felt good at. It offered comfort, friendship, and the feeling of reward even when nothing else in his life was going right. I don’t know if he ever got his dagger, aptly named Malchazeen. They fired him not long after.
I bring up WoW quite a bit with people I meet today, for reasons of professional interest if nothing else. Everyone under the age of forty seems to know someone who played, and if they themselves once held an account I’m guaranteed a warm and friendly conversation. Attend Blizzard’s annual BlizzCon convention some autumn in Anaheim (indistinguishable, it turns out, from any other season in Anaheim) and you’ll be astonished at the good cheer and affection radiating between the thousands of attendees. They might be there to meet guildmates or cluster around cocktail tables emblazoned with the names of realm servers, but everyone shares the same barely restrained glee at being in this celebratory space. In this space no one will snark at the things you love and everyone will always know what you’re talking about. Most gamers hold their gaming lives close to the vest. Professional and family settings attach a time-wasting stigma to MMORPG play, so they don’t get to talk about games nearly so much as they’d like. This is one of the reasons I came to love sports late in life: they represented a kind of game I could discuss in just about any setting without anyone thinking me strange.
This is an underserved need. WoW’s unified, persistent game world provides the kind of universal reference point people can draw on in casual conversation. If I meet someone who plays or played WoW, I can learn a great deal about them simply through their experience with the game. It lets them tell me who they are in a way that’s as personal and private as makes them comfortable. WoW is a great way to make friends and meet people, even if you don’t meet them in the game. A woman I know from the early vanilla days explains, “I can still sit at a bar and look down it and just know who I could impress by saying I raided at the level I did.” Your mileage may vary, of course, but anyone who played the game knows the special thrill of meeting a kindred spirit. The staggering millions who’ve passed through Azeroth make them easy to find. In an increasingly fractured cultural landscape, where tastes in entertainment are badly fractured, the World of Warcraft represents one of precious few touchstones.
If the players were shocked by WoW’s mammoth success erupting seismically beneath their feet, the gaming industry stood no chance. Millions of copies flew off the shelves—literal copies off literal shelves, since digital distribution was still in its infancy.3 The game shipped in a hefty cardboard box adorned with a double front flap that opened like the pages of a book into four gorgeously decorated panels promoting the game. Inside was a sheaf with four CDs containing the game’s basic files, since DVD players weren’t yet common enough to ship in that medium. A glossy-paged product catalog advertised Blizzard’s entire catalog to date, including the upcoming StarCraft: Ghost—a game the studio famously axed before it ever saw the light of day.
Perhaps the biggest anachronism to the modern consumer is the game manual. In 2016 games rarely include physical manuals even if purchased in hard copy. WoW shipped with a manual two hundred pages long. It’s littered with beautiful art and contains some of the best technical writing I’ve ever seen, covering every element of the game in meticulous detail (at least as it existed in 2004) without ever resorting to jargon or becoming condescending to the reader. Relentlessly informative but never didactic, it encourages new players and assures them they need never be overwhelmed. The glossary lays out such common community terms as “mob,” “aggro,” and “kiting” so simply and concisely it makes me feel resentful as a writer. The first week I owned WoW I found myself marooned in an airport for six hours and I passed the time by reading the entire thing cover to cover. It made the unsatisfiable need to play the game almost physically painful. These kinds of manuals have gone the way of the dodo. Not enough players read them, the conventional wisdom goes, to justify the expense of writing, editing, printing, and shipping such things. A game’s official documentation, such as it exists, will generally be thrown up on a website and updated perhaps once a year. Better yet, the community will likely do the work themselves and populate a well-maintained public wiki on their own time and someone else’s web-hosting dollar. That’s how things work in 2016, with sophisticated gaming resources at everyone’s fingertips. Gamers watch YouTube walkthroughs on their phones while playing on their PCs, and WoW has since moved its guides online with the expectation of almost exclusively digital sales.
WoW’s creators always understood that its goal was to be the MMORPG for people who’d never played an MMORPG. That fabulously hefty manual promised an adventure of endless depth and promise, with adventures made dangerous but never punishing. Death was an inconvenience, so no mistake could ever cost you more than a few gold coins. Bright and colorful continents packed with fun quests limited the tedium of grinding for levels, keeping casual players interested and moving from zone to zone in a logical progression. Even the time they weren’t playing yielded some value, piling up “rest” that was rewarded as double experience from killing monsters. Diverse classes rooted in classic Warcraft lore tempted crossover gamers, the UI was easy to understand (if profoundly limited without add-ons), and it wasn’t too mechanically complex to play. I never played an MMO before WoW and I haven’t played many since, though of course I take a professional interest. Only a highly accessible title from a proven developer like Blizzard could have convinced me to give it a shot. Millions of others felt exactly the same, which is one of the reasons why WoW achieved such penetration across the culture. It’s why I’ve heard from so many players while researching this book, “Literally everyone was playing WoW.” Now, that statement isn’t literally true, but enough people say it that I couldn’t help but notice. Their friends were playing, so they played, and the playing was that much better for it. A social network’s value increases with its population, since each may connect to all the others, and so WoW’s networking effects made it the MMO of choice throughout the Western world (and much of the world beyond).
Competitors appeared. It was inevitable—WoW’s massive commercial success guaranteed more money flowing into Blizzard’s coffers every month than most studios make in a year. The annual figures are a topic for debate, but they’re in the hundreds of millions and WoW has cumulatively generated $12 to $13 billion since the game’s late 2004 launch. Successful MMOs were for many years the best and most reliable sources of continuing revenue a game company could have. So if Blizzard could have ten million concurrent users, its competitors reasoned, there was room in the market. In the two years following WoW’s launch, just about every major publisher undertook its own competing game—sometimes more than one. They sunk massive resources into development. Games are always pricey to make, since they require so many specialized skills attached to highly educated white-collar professionals, but MMORPGs might be the very hardest to get right. To be “massively multiplayer” they must convey tremendous volumes of data between their servers and thousands (or millions) of clients. The engineering work alone lies beyond the means of all but the biggest and richest studios. Then there’s the work of designing hundreds of features across all areas of the game in order to give users a full and functional experience. Combat mechanics, crafting, character progression, user interface, and social systems represent just the tip of the proverbial luxury liner–foundering iceberg. You must also consider character and world design, along with all the art and animation and sound and music. All this and you still haven’t given players anything to actually play. Quest, dungeon, and raid design represent epochal undertakings on their own. MMORPGs are the world’s biggest and most complicated pieces of retail software. Simply getting one to a functional public beta test demands hundreds of workers’ labor over half a decade, at a minimum cost in the tens of millions. Phenomenal talent and hard work are necessary but insufficient. Reaching WoW’s lofty pinnacle is almost impossible and probably miraculous, even considering Blizzard’s considerable advantages.
So the competitors’ failure might have been inevitable. “Failure” is a relative term, of course. Many MMOs have made money and kept hardworking developers employed for years, powered by modest but dedicated fan bases. Hell, there are still a lot of people playing the original EverQuest. But more than a few had been called WoW-killers, had implicitly or explicitly courted the label, and none came close. They had their own flaws in design or endgame content or server stability or marketing, but more important the gaming industry’s moneyed leaders had misread the market. Most games sell like books, in that people consume them serially and move from one title to the next. They’ll buy more games than they have time to play just as they buy more books than they’ll actually read. The point is to have it, to express your taste, to support creators, and so on—you obviously buy books and know what I’m talking about. Traditional MMORPGs are different because of the subscription attached. Rare is the player willing to maintain paid subscriptions on several MMOs at once. Hang the expense; it’s simply bad business. MMOs reward cumulative time investment, and there are only so many hours in a day. Invest yourself in one and you can conquer the world. Invest in several and you’ll be a noob in all of them.
So while some WoW players devoted to the form might dabble in Age of Conan or Star Wars: The Old Republic or Black Desert Online, they’ll eventually pick one or the other, and WoW simply offers more reliable yield for your entertainment dollar. No matter how long you’ve been away, you can come back to WoW knowing it will be accessible and enjoyable. You can join a well-populated server with a bustling economy and plenty of guilds seeking recruits. You know you’re paying for a known commodity. What’s more, even the exciting unknown quantities of the latest expansion feel more or less like WoW. As the first MMORPG for an entire generation, it defined their expectations and set the bar quite high. Challengers were expected to offer the same copious features, and they responded by becoming more like WoW. A tutorial for every system. Instanced player-versus-player combat on demand. A bright yellow exclamation point hovering over every fresh quest giver. Guild chat defaulting to green, whispers to purple. Each game made some novel changes to the formulae, but never enough to wrest away a critical mass of players. Because network effects are so important to an MMO’s success, WoW’s position on top gave it the consistent player base to stay there.
Of course, none of it would have mattered without new players. Most MMOs start out with a base of excited players that gradually withers over years of play—they get burned out or bored and move to other games. And often prospective new players are turned off by the years of established content. They don’t know it the way old players do, and they feel they can never catch up. Blizzard attempted to kill both birds with one proverbial stone: their release schedule. WoW’s success assured them ample resources to develop new content, so they never stopped cranking it out, and players could rely on several major “free” content patches to keep them occupied between expansions. As for the expansions themselves, they went far beyond content. Blizzard used these forty-dollar retail products as opportunities to totally overhaul major game systems. This let the developers get creative, knowing anything they got wrong could be replaced wholesale in two years’ time. Even if some changes proved unpopular, this approach to the expansions kept the game from getting stale for old players. Each expansion also rendered old gear obsolete, so newcomers were never too far behind and could catch up to the competitive endgame in just a few weeks’ time. Most MMOs find a formula and stick to it because their small-yet-dedicated community craves stability. WoW went in the opposite direction, and it’s the single biggest key to its singular success.
One by one the competitors faded into obscurity or died outright, their servers taken offline or converted into free-to-play. The companies that had been so eager to hurl gobs of cash at any credible MMORPG project turned in the opposite direction. MMOs have been tried to death, the wisdom now goes. The only big one is WoW, and you’d be a fool to try to compete.
The end result is odd to contemplate: WoW manages to stand as both exemplar of its genre and the last of its kind. Studios don’t make these kinds of games anymore, nothing so ambitious and certainly nothing with a fifteen-dollar monthly fee atop full retail price. Even if someone tried, the video game market has changed so dramatically it’s hard to imagine such explosive success replicated. Gamers are more fragmented now, balkanized by the Internet into smaller factions. Just as television no longer revolves around the programming on a handful of broadcast networks, game developers seek smaller audiences they can rely on over time to buy sequels and downloadable content. We’ll never again see a game grow monolithic the way WoW did. Nothing will match its primacy in popular culture—though Minecraft’s popularity with children informs a generation of parents alongside. WoW stamped an entire generation with its ambition, with its attention to detail and devotion to games as accessible mass entertainment. Complaints about “epics for casuals” sound like the first wave of MMO players pining for the days of XP loss on death. The WoW generation insists that risk-taking be encouraged rather than punished and work be rewarded on a fair, consistent basis. Nobody ever wanted to wait six months for a purple piece of loot to drop, or to grind for hours making back the losses from every wipe. In keeping with its origins at the dawn of the modern Internet, WoW established a streamlined on-demand culture that can’t be rolled back.
Because it was by and for and of the Internet, WoW suffered many of its peculiar pathologies. First and foremost among these: anything fun can (and will be) taken too far. WoW became such a cultural phenomenon that after a while we couldn’t play it without being identified with it—without family, friends, and classmates gently jabbing our choice of hobby, insinuating a social invitation was declined “so you could fight the ogres,” thoughtfully forwarding Wall Street Journal articles on gaming addiction. Some people played too much, sacrificing grades or girlfriends or jobs, but that’s true of any time-consuming activity. WoW’s bottomless nature means no end to the potential time investment, and so it held a natural appeal for any soul inclined to intemperance.
I don’t use the word “addiction” with regard to video games. It trivializes the suffering of real addicts, whose bodies and minds are often destroyed by their disease in ways video games can’t manage. It is possible, if one looks hard enough, to find isolated horror stories, like the parents who neglect their children for marathon gaming sessions. I would suggest these incidents stem from broader mental illness and reflect very little on video games. Still, it’s indisputable that many people struggled to balance WoW with the rest of their lives.
It’s more fun than your life; that’s really the problem. Human existence teems with responsibilities of one kind or another, and as a result each of us spends hours of the day doing things we’d rather not. We might enjoy our schooling or our jobs—we might feel very fortunate to be in those spots—but for almost everyone, life is a series of chores broken up by the occasional good meal. We amuse ourselves with TV shows or video games, but in most cases these entertainments include natural stopping points. The credits roll, the lights come up, and we’re treated to a teaser for the sequel. Even the deepest, darkest binge-watching holes (Gilmore Girls, for example—that Rory could never find the right boy!) end once you’re out of episodes. WoW never does. It’s there at two in the afternoon, at three in the morning, rain or shine and independent of federal holidays. It’s there on your best and worst days, filled with friends who’ll commiserate or celebrate as the situation demands. In T K T one of our officers, a beautiful Mexican mom named Laura and one of the kindest people I’ve ever known, religiously maintained a register of guildies’ birthdays. We’d log on to find the Guild Message shouting out our special days, with gift-wrapped mystery presents in our mailboxes. If things in your life weren’t going the way you hoped, WoW offered a reliable source of warmth and joy in your darkest hours. Nothing ever really went wrong in Azeroth—deaths and wipes just meant you were having fun. If sleep wasn’t coming, you could play all night. Years came when you just needed someone else to celebrate your birthday.
But like any coping mechanism, it may become its own unhealthy need. It felt as though any time you invested in WoW was rewarded in one fashion or another, so more than a few players played more than a bit too much. In chapter 4 I discussed the strife that engulfed T K T in the aftermath of our main tank’s resignation—my good friend Chris, who’d made some poor academic choices and compounded them by playing WoW all day and night. It wasn’t pathological. It didn’t persist past his decision to quit. It just offered more fun and better rewards minute to minute and hour to hour than just about anything else he could do. So it consumed his free time, all of it, before encroaching on social time and class time. A mutual friend’s wife recalls making a trip to visit Chris two states away only to find him unwilling to leave his dorm room.
Other players tell eerily parallel stories of leaving and returning, entering Azeroth with an unexpected bolus of free time only to quit months later when old habits returned. It simply feels good to play, and the more you play the better it feels. “I was a chronic procrastinator and am a recovering one still,” one of these serial players explains, “but in Warcraft I never felt the need to put things off, because I enjoyed what I was doing. Even the grinds were worth it because of the payoff . . . some combination of none of it feeling like work, the predictable input to output, and the desire to be the best at things led WoW to consume me in ways that nothing else really has.”
A former player with whom I’d crossed paths in T K T always struggled with balance. I knew him as a kind of adorable flake, the sort of player who’d grind for potion materials all night and then sleep through scheduled raiding time. Gabriel “Mew” Gonzalez Ponce tells his story more vividly: “I made a ton of friends that eventually became real-life friends. However, just like many others I let the game take over a lot of my time and effort. I failed two subjects, lost one girlfriend, and was fired from two jobs due to my excessive play time. By December 2009 I was unemployed, failing at my senior year in college, no girlfriend, and broke . . . but I had the biggest achievement score on the server, with the most Exalted in-game reputations and pushing for world-first raid kills. I guess that was the breaking point: if I failed at school I had to go back to Mexico, and that’s no fun. I sold my computer and WoW account, got myself a girlfriend (now married to her), focused in school, and so on.” I asked Mew how he felt about his youthful indiscretions, and given his earlier phrasing I was surprised at the answer. “Do not get me wrong, I do appreciate my time in WoW and by no means regret playing it for the time I did. I firmly believe and can’t emphasize how much I do believe that playing this game helped me at my job. I think it made me smart, I think it made me more analytical. I didn’t know shit about Excel but I taught myself in order to do theorycraft.4 It made me more resourceful and taught me I could be good at something as long as I focused on it. It taught me how to deal with jerks, how to deal with criticism, how to follow and lead and how to strive to be the best.”
At my wedding I asked Chris (who was a banker before becoming a successful professional poker player) whether he missed those days. “Of course!” he said immediately. “All the time. It was great.” Our mutual friend’s wife, also present, took this opportunity to remind everyone of Chris’s old excesses. He flashed his tooth-baring grin back at me: “See, these noobs don’t understand,” he pronounced, “what it takes to be pro.” Even those souls most ostensibly damaged by the game’s all-consuming qualities miss the good times for what they were. None of us would have missed it for the world. We’d get it back now, if we could. For any ups and downs WoW is part of our lives, our youths, and the self-directed formation of our selves. We might not volunteer this to prospective employers, but it’ll always be part of who we are.
Life rarely plays out as scripted. I never planned to play any MMORPG. I bought WoW only due to my friends’ cajoling, and yet it was their desertion that spurred me to embrace it. Five years later I quit to pursue a career in writing, and then it was the writing that washed me back upon Azeroth’s white, sandy shore. I led one of the world’s top Spanish-language raiding guilds without, aside from a few vulgarisms, speaking a lick of Spanish. What was stigmatized ten years ago as an isolating, alienating pursuit now sparks warm and friendly conversations whenever I mention WoW to anyone under the age of forty. It’s an institution, a fixture of the cultural landscape, an unacknowledged public utility along the lines of Google Search. WoW annually makes happy millions of people who play in addition to millions more who take comfort knowing they could resub at any time, that their avatars are waiting just past the horizon.
If a few brought grief upon themselves through intemperance, I suspect (and they seem to agree) that it brought them great joy as well. WoW isn’t a drug or a singularity impelling impressionable college kids down its throat. It’s a group of people brought together by the serendipitous circumstance of play, a group of people who might never exchange a word but are still necessary to a game they all love. Even if I despise someone in-game, that passion provides a kind of psychic framework powering and animating the fictional world of Azeroth. One can’t write a good story without conflict, without characters, and WoW has always been fabulously engineered to provide them. Recently at a party I met a father who never played WoW but whose nine-year-old daughter was obsessed. “All she wants to do,” he told me, “is watch these streamers play. I won’t let her play, but she can watch and she just loves it. The colors and the characters, it’s just a really cool world for her.” A cousin in the sixth grade told me he’d rather watch streamed games than play them himself. A whole new generation is growing up with WoW-as-institution, a game released before their birth, a game they might not have ever played but that they can sense (in the canny but inchoate nature of children’s understanding) informs everything around them. They’re attracted to it because of the people who play and their obvious passion.
It was always about the people. Anything that was ever truly good came from them: the bickering in Barrens General chat, the futile urgency of Tarren Mill and Southshore battles, the late-night gankfests in the Searing Gorge and the high-noon duels outside Ironforge, the comically long traipse to acquire the key to Onyxia’s Lair, the mad kiting of raid bosses with the raid half-wiped until that 1 percent ticked zero and everyone just screaming like you’d won the damn Super Bowl. WoW makes us friends. It can even make us family. It’s part of who I am, and who we all are now, and it was only ever really supposed to be a fun video game. Nobody could have predicted it—predicted success, perhaps, or years of healthy profit, but never this. We took a piece of retail software and made it into a civilization. It’s a hell of a story. It runs as long as we need.