All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
I haven't written a column about World of Warcraft in several months. That's because, several months ago, I burned out, and I burned out hard.
I remember the exact moment: It was in a raid; we were fighting some boss that I don't even want to look up the name of. It was the big dog that eats zombies, if that means anything to you. We were wiping, and wiping hard, even though nearly all of us had beaten this guy before.
There's a stock scene in movies, where someone has been imprisoned for a long time under inhumane circumstances. The prisoner is a husk of his former self – ragged, dirty, malnourished, with a will that's either broken or on the cusp of breaking. The prison door opens. Light shines on the prisoner, who looks up in fear and confusion. A massive guard in a clean uniform looks down on him.
The guard says, "You're free to go."
I was the prisoner, and the guard was Warcraft. Somewhere around the eighth time we failed to kill that stupid zombie-ingesting dog, the door was opened and I was free to go.
Clearly I had some sort of Stockholm thing going on, because at the time I planned to come back. Not immediately, of course. I thought I'd wait for the next WoW expansion, give the hard-core a couple weeks to play it, avoid the crowds, then log back in and see what's new.
As it turns out, and I am not at all exaggerating here, I now have a physical reaction to Warcraft. A couple months after I quit, I logged in for old times' sake, and found myself in Dalaran. Dalaran, if you're not a current or recovering crafter of wars, is sort of Grand Central Terminal, Times Square and the Macy's on Broadway all rolled into one. For those ignorant of both Warcraft and New York, it's freaking big and freaking crowded, or at least it was at the time.
>I got that same little twinge in my stomach that says I should stop reading in the car.
I felt ill. Just a tiny bit ill, mind you. I wasn't running for a bucket, but I got that same little twinge in my stomach that says I should stop reading Instapaper in the car. It's the feeling you get when you eat too much panang curry, and you get sick, and after that you can't even look at the jar of panang curry sauce in the grocery store without feeling queasy. (If you don't live in Berkeley, substitute "Easy Cheese" for "panang curry.")
So I don't play World of Warcraft any more. I don't even play the card game. I considered downloading Gameloft's iPhone "homage" to World of Warcraft, a game called Order & Chaos Online, but I saw the screenshot and got that panang curry feeling again. I am, in fact, as a result of writing this article, not feeling that great right now.
I don't blame World of Warcraft for this. Do we blame the sky when we leave our car windows open and it rains and our car seats smell like old cats? Do we blame the knife when we try to extract an avocado pit by means of stabbing and we put a nasty gash in our thumb? Do we blame the night when we decide not to turn on the lights when we get up to go to the bathroom at 4 a.m. and as a result we step on our iPad and it slips out from under our foot and we crash down like one of those stupid toys where you push the bottom of the stand and they go all limp – and also we break our iPad? If we are on website comment threads we do, but I'm not on a website comment thread.
The fact is, I got a lot of fun out of World of Warcraft. In the nearly six years that I played, I probably had about two-and-a-half weeks' worth of fun. I also had about three years' worth of blessed escape from the debilitating rigors of reality, and the rest was pretty much tedious grinding.
I did get something out of Warcraft, though, something that still serves me to this day, even as the phrase "Wailing Caverns" makes me want to sip ginger ale and lie down for a bit. I'll tell you about it next week.
Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a dwarf hunter, a troll warrior and a droll writer.
See Also:- Alt Text: The Perils of Elf Overdose
