The One

This is now the third time I’ve started this post after deleting everything I’ve written before. I think the problem is that I have a very specific idea of what I want to post but as I write it I find myself devolving into a completely different topic. Well, not a completely different topic — they are both about the social aspects of WoW — but they are distinct and both merit their own post.

So I’m only going to talk about one of them here.

(No sooner have I said that than I find myself talking about the other one. It’s so easy to slip, because one is a grander topic than the other, and really I want to focus on the narrower one.)

I’ve played Warcraft for almost five years now. It’s really extraordinary for it to have captured my attention for that long. In the past I have found myself intensely focused on other games: Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, Sim City 2000, and even Yahoo! Bridge just to name a few. But none of them have earned my focus for so long.

Which is extraordinary, because at its very basic level Warcraft can be a terribly dull game. Consider the quests to kill 15 Defias Highwaymen, or gather 8 Gold Dust, or any number of quests that involve mindless repetitive killing of mobs that really aren’t such a challenge to anyone. There’s nothing fun in those quests. They can be tedious. Some quests have a bit of humor value, but most of them are boring.

This sort of leads to a question of how in the world did we get our characters to 80? It takes a fair amount of /played time to get them there. Nadi, for instance, is only at level 53, yet I wouldn’t be surprised if she has at least a couple days playtime in her already. Consider that: 2 hours a day for a month will get you to level 53, provided you have heirloom gear and access to the various addons that tell you where to get the quest goodies for your class.

(And here I find myself drifting toward the second topic. I’ll swing back, I promise.)

I guess what I’m saying is that if you consider only the gameplay aspect of Warcraft, it would have never captured anyone’s attention for as long as, say, Civilization did. Civilization is a more complex game involving multivariate strategic decisions which can be played over and over again and still be entertaining and challenging. By way of comparison, the bulk of World of Warcraft’s activity are nearly Pavlovian tasks — hit this button that’s easy to hit eight times and you’ll get a food pellet.

So why has Warcraft endured?

There’s only one game I can think of that I’ve played that has endured like Warcraft did. It was one of Warcraft’s predecessors, a text based multi-user dungeon way back in the times where such things were cutting edge and we could only dream of blocky graphics representing objects, nothing like the graphics in WoW. It too involved repetitive actions that earned experience and money, and you could gain levels. What held its attention for me were two aspects: 1) I could design the game itself, and 2) I was playing with real people in a social atmosphere.

Obviously I can’t design the game, so it must be the second aspect which has held my attention.

(Now I’m well on my way to talking about the second thing, the broader social impact of the game, and therefore it’s time to pull back and talk about what I really wanted to talk about.)

Warcraft is a social game. When I first started playing, I made friendships. Usually it was because we shared the same struggles. I honestly don’t know how they first formed. I’m sure you could study it if you wanted. In any case, it was not a game I played by myself. I enjoyed it because while I was doing the drudgingly boring tasks to make my character better, I could talk to other people about most anything.

Now, what I really wanted to talk about.

I’m sure there are people who make friendships in groups. They join guilds and are friends with everyone in the guild, or whatnot. I don’t know. I shouldn’t be writing about other people’s experiences.

What I’ve found is that I will often have a strong bond to one particular person. Something about him or her makes the game fun and meaningful. If he or she’s not on, the game is less fun. Usually I see myself as providing that same role for another person. It doesn’t mean that I can’t do anything or can’t enjoy myself. It does make me more likely to just log out and do something else.

Having a singular best friend in the game has its benefits and detriments. When I think back and remember my time, I remember portions of the game where I didn’t have a best friend, and instead had groups of more distant friends. They aren’t as memorable. It’s nice to have one person around to go into instances, run raids with, RP with, or whatever, and know that you bring the same sort of enjoyment of the game to them as they do to you. My happiest memories of the game are those where I was doing something with someone I considered my best friend at the time.

Yet there is always a painful downside.

I remember long ago I felt that I had gotten too invested in one friendship on the game. I liked the other person, but I didn’t know how to back it off. So I left the server for good. It’s a painful thing, most especially for the other person.

People leave the game. For all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they just leave the server. Sometimes it’s because they don’t want to play anymore. Sometimes it’s because they can’t play anymore. Sometimes, most painful of all, they keep playing, but they just aren’t all that into you anymore.

I grew accustomed to that rather early on in the game, perhaps because in the first instance it was me doing the leaving. In some ways, it’s a sad thing, though. I’ve held myself back for some time, knowing that the game I’m playing could at any moment seem empty because the person I enjoy playing it with the most is not there anymore.
I don’t think I’ve ever begrudged a person for it. People do what they have to do and I know firsthand of many reasons to quit the game. But it does hurt, and it does make things feel empty.

Sometimes out of the loss of one friendship, a new one springs. I remember once commemorating the RP death of one of my best friends, who had left the server a couple weeks before. That night I met a person who would become my new best friend. When that friendship ended, another one emerged from that. So it’s not all bad. But I do seem to find myself looking for that strong individual bond.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m awkward in this regard. I’m thinking of other people in my guild right now, and other than those people who are living together and playing the game in the same room, I can’t identify any “best friend” pairs. Am I just unobservant? Or is it something about me that leads me to gravitate toward a single person where others are comfortable in groups?

In any case, that’s how my experience has been. Most of the time I’ve played the game, when I’ve logged in I’ve checked to see whether a specific friend is on. If she or he is, that’s made me happy. If not, it’s made me a little sad. Over time, the friend has changed. But there usually is just one.