Not Much Has Changed

It was 2009 in central New Jersey. I was 13, in 8th grade, with braces on my teeth and hair down to my ass. A usual after-school evening for me, I was sitting alone in my room reading fan-fiction, when an ad popped up on top of the screen. I’d trained myself to ignore them, but this one caught my eye. It was one I hadn’t seen before and it featured a beautiful elf lady.

It was an ad for World of Warcraft, and it was offering a 30-day free trial. The fan-fiction I’d been reading was garbage and I couldn’t get into it, so I said, “Screw it, what do I have to lose?”

That was the night I took a glorious swan dive into the black hole that is online gaming.

I made a character that resembled the elf from the advertisement which had enamored me in the first place, named her Zylanna (for whatever reason), and stumbled into the starter area with all the other new players. After a period of getting killed probably hundreds of times, I felt like I had a pretty good idea of how to play. Around this time, a couple players asked to join up with me.

They had far more experience playing World of Warcraft than I did. They taught me how to run dungeons and gave me tips for solo questing. They taught me how specialize my character’s player class and how to choose armor that had the right stats for my character. Over the following months, the three of us became close friends. I would spend all day anxiously waiting for school to end, and as soon as I came home I’d log into WoW and they’d always be online, ready for a new adventure.

Our conversations eventually turned to the topic of real life. I learned that one of my friends was in college, and the other was a single mom. This new information didn’t really have any effect on our dynamic. We still played together for literally hours on end. Once, I had a five-day weekend because of a snow storm and we played for 42 hours straight. And these habits went on for at least a year. We were crazy. But that game was our life. They were my best friends.

And then one day, they weren’t there.

I never figured out what happened to them. I never knew if it was me, or if coincidence happened that their real lives should catch up to them at the same time. It took me a while to realize that even though they had moved on, I was glad to have had the time I had with them, and that I was thankful for World of Warcraft, which gave me a platform to make friends who had similar interests. In time, I made new friends.

My virtual adventures in World of Warcraft saved me from a real-life world of loneliness and adolescent depression. Playing that game helped me to build real-world communication and teamwork skills. And in addition, it inspired me to follow a career in video games so that I could write stories like the ones I lived in the game.

And yes, I still play World of Warcraft.