Speak Out with
your Geek Out: Role Playing Games, World of Warcraft, and the Care and Feeding of Souls
WD Robertson
Yeah,
I admit it: I play World of Warcraft.
And,
yeah, I know. There are a lot of
negative tropes associated with the game. I like “World of Warcrack”
the best. Sometimes I do play WoW too much when I should be doing something useful like
the dishes or laundry or mowing what is left of our lawn (which is perhaps the
only good thing about a prolonged drought – there’s just not much grass left
here).
I
thought I’d put this together after commenting on another’s Speak Out with your
Geek Out wall post on Facebook about older geeks (he
used the term “Geekzers”). The oldest geek I know is my mother-in-law,
who started playing World of Warcraft at age 72. She loves it.
Her Draenei Retribution Paladin is a sort of
one-woman Extinction Level Event because she kills pretty much everything she finds
when she’s out and about doing her Daily Quests. J
So,
I’ll ramble a bit.
The Boring Back Story:
I’ve played tabletop RPGs since 1978 or thereabouts, starting with the
TSR “Red Box” Dungeons & Dragons game.
AD&D (first edition), Gamma World, and Boot Hill followed close
on. Twilight: 2000, Skyrealms
of Jorune, and Traveller
were always my favorites, but I ran a Vampire: the Masquerade (first edition) Chronicle
for twelve years or so. Heck, the first
interest my wife and I shared back when we first met was Vampire: the
Masquerade. Despite her favoring the
Camarilla and my preference for Sabbat, we hit it off
pretty well I think.
Several years ago our tabletop gaming group fizzled for a
lot of reasons, all of which were good (moving to take new jobs or finding out
that a baby was coming along and would rightly take up all of the
soon-to-parents’ free time for the next twenty or thirty years). My wife and I were set in our ways and were
never really interested in the scene at the Friendly Local Gaming Stores, so we
focused on 1:1 games (Microlite 20 is great for this)
and board games (I highly recommend Arkham Horror if
you have a few hours to burn). Then two
or three years ago a former coworker, with whom we used to play Vampire: the Masquerade, turned my wife and me on to the World of Warcraft. Gaming
returned!
Stay
with me – I’m going somewhere, I think. Maybe. Okay,
possibly. But definitely
not definitely.
Anyway,
World of Warcraft is cool – sort of like D&D and
sort of like a really twisted and hallucinogenic version of Lord of the
Rings. At any rate, my wife and I enjoy
it and kept playing after our trial memberships. It helped that we joined my former coworker’s
guild, which was a small group composed mostly of couples who all knew at least
one other member offline. We had a lot
of fun with the FasterPussycats* guild on the Whisperwind Realm, Alliance faction. We all eventually joined a larger guild
called Warped Welcome, and FasterPussycats disbanded.
*FasterPussycats was a tribute to
a dreadful Russ Meyers movie from 1965 called “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” Our love of bad movies is what gave the guild
members something in common. We had a
brief memorial service when Tura Satana passed away
in early 2011.
Warped
Welcome is a good guild for my wife and me:
it’s large enough to have regular group events, and it is family friendly. By family friendly I mean that the founding
members made it a priority to discourage bullying, objectionable language and
general asshattery.
After demonstrating some degree of proficiency at organizing successful
raids on Horde capitals with other former members of the FasterPussycats,
I was asked to become a guild officer. Being
a guild officer can be a pain in the butt at times, but I see it as a positive
thing.
A brief aside: Any
group of people can have drama. Not the
good kind of role playing drama, but the bad kind where people disagree with
each other, sometimes seriously. Occasionally
these disagreements can turn to true anger.
As we’re all painfully aware, a big problem with MMORPGs and
the internet in general is lack of face to face communication. This can make disagreement and conflict a lot
harder to resolve constructively. I
have, like you, seen many disagreements in various online venues go much
further and become much more hostile than would have been the case if both
parties were able to sit down, look at each other, and talk things over in
person.
There’s not much to be done for it, unfortunately. Humans are social primates, which means we
have an irresistible urge to gather together to aggravate one another. When we’re online, we do it with our
biological safety switches set to “Off.”
Just saying.
I
spend a lot of my “game” time helping other guild members with quests or giving
sound financial advice on how to earn enough gold in-game to buy that great new
sword. Like many of the other officers,
I act as a sounding board for younger gamers (or just the young at heart) who
are having a bad day, or with anyone who simply needs a sympathetic ear. I also do my best to moderate disputes when
they arise between guild members. We’ve
done what we can to foster an environment where everyone can feel welcome, and,
to the degree that we are able, where bullying and harassment are not
tolerated. This is a good thing.
By the way, the name Warped Welcome is a good example of
fostering geek teamwork. Everyone is
Welcome, and we’re all Warped to some degree, if only
because we’re all running around an online environment as a Night Elf Rogue or
a Dwarf Warrior.
I’ve
always been a teacher in one form or another, whether actually teaching in grad
school or as a Quality Assurance professional advising my colleagues on how
best to comply with federal law for manufacturing, testing and shipping
medicines. Sure, killing murlocs and whatnot is good for escapist fun, but being
able to help someone else solve a problem or deal with an issue much more
important than a game is good for the soul.
When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving
in you, a joy. (Rumi)
So
that’s what I do when I play World of Warcraft. I don’t participate in raids or PUGs very
often (too time-consuming) and I don’t PvP much
anymore (too hectic). But I do try to
help out so that members of the extended community can, hopefully, have more
fun together.
Best,
WD
Robertson
Annoying Post Script:
If you have to watch every penny, or if you are prone to obsessive
behavior, be careful with these sorts of games.
WoW has a monthly fee, and there is so much to
do in the game you could go at it 24 hours a day and never get it all done. Play hard if that’s your gig, but play
responsibly.