Meant to post last night, but the network was down. The big notable from yesterday was that I suddenly, and with great force, developed a class preference. I’d been playing around with a gnome rogue on a server where none of my friends were logged in, and found her range of abilities significantly more interesting — she could pick pockets, sneak around, and use a broader range of attacks than my priestess. All in all, there was simply more to do as a rogue, and I was much more able to play without anyone else logged in.
So I told my friends I was abandoning the priestess character, and went about the task of transferring my wealth to the new character. As I dumped 15 gold into the trade slot, I realized the letter space was empty.
“My darling,” the computer scratched out for me in goofy medieval all-caps, “I am not long for this world. I hereby transfer all my worldly goods to you. Do the guild proud.” I attached the guild tabard — a purple and gold rendition of something suspiciously similar to our college emblem — and sent it along.
While that moment of avatar-mediated self-talk was strangely touching, it was a bit of a relief to leave behind the priestess. I had given her a surprised, innocent face and soft, nurturing powers, and that’s never really been me. (I’d looked at a number of male characters during the avatar creation process, and was surprised to find how little they appealed to me. I’ve been much more accepting of my femaleness over the past year, and the male characters in WoW are all way too musclebound for my taste.) I threw my heart into the new av, a butch-haired, bare-armed human rogue with a shrewder look. Knowing my way around a little better now, I began to level her up with alacrity. Her name is Rozalind, the name I’ve given all my digital characters since I was in third grade, a name which gave her a sort of permanence.
I had to leave behind the priestess’s Cornish Rex cat, my gift from Skirmish. Today I chose a new cat — orange, like so many of mine. (and oh, let me geek out for a second, real hard — orange like Yar’s, at least according to one book.) Cats are basically useless, just a way to take up a slot in your inventory, but I love to watch them race along behind my avatar as she runs. Not something you get to see, in city life — there isn’t that much room for an animal to move. or, well, when Moishe does it, it’s destructive.
Every time I watch the cats gallop, though, I feel a twinge of guilt. My own cat is back at home, unattended, while I’m down there in the dungeon plonking my minutes out on the Alienware’s keys. I can’t really justify it. I can’t justify any of this.
The social time, maybe. Schmata’s pilot was on with a different avatar today, a level 60 gnome with one of the race’s weird ostrichlike steeds. I’ve become an every-night player, I bashfully noted to him. (I didn’t mention I’d cut short time with my soon-to-depart roommate in order to get to the lab to play.) Am I addicted? I asked.
He pooh-poohed me. I’ve got thirty-six days in this character, he told me. And no, I’m not proud of it.
I may be wrong, but my impression is when he says thirty-six days, he doesn’t mean he’s six days into a second month’s subscription. He means thirty-six times twenty-four hours of his life have been spent pressing buttons to move a picture of a gnome around a field too-densely populated with animated wolves, which don’t react to the gnome’s passage and periodically appear in midair due to code errors. (well, not ALL his time is spent in that situation… some moments, like gryphon rides, are less ugly… but if you think about it as a life lived, it seems a little absurd.)
As we bounced along the darkened road back from the Jasperlode Mine, I wanted to get meta on him. Why is he here? This is a guy I haven’t seen much since college; I don’t know what else is going on in his life. Is there something he’s avoiding? Is he lonely? I know these have been my own reasons in the past for losing myself in the undertow of a game.
But this was a roleplaying server, and even though our guild doesn’t seem to go in for the thees and thous, I didn’t want to disrupt playtime with possibly difficult thoughts. I’ll probably bring it up at some point.
Thousands of people logged on to these servers. A lot of them kids, but a good portion vocally annoyed enough with the kids to mark themselves as adults. At some point, everything we do will be deleted or otherwise lost. Think about this generation of humanity, doing this. I can’t tell if it’s better or worse than life has ever been. It’s not as passive as the couch potatoes of the last generation, I don’t think. But we make and move and fight and boast and dance in a world which is ephemeral: the question is how much more fragile is it than human culture has ever been?
Looking at it politically for a moment: we take in more than our share of corn syrup and petroleum and sweatshop clothes, we do our jobs during the day which do nothing to stop the awful things done in our names in other parts of the world, and at night we sit in front of burning tubes and pour our feelings and energies into a place where they’re just about guaranteed not to have an impact on this inequal system of resources.
Why?
just a guess, for now: the virtual world is the only place we have some semblance of control.
just a guess.
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