I’ve been aware of this massively popular MMORPG franchise since launch back in the mid 2000s; but I didn’t start playing it myself until this year – 15 years later.
Why?
My personal history with WoW is a bad one: When it launched I was dating a guy – a gamer – who jumped on the hypetrain. I didn’t mind – at first. But after a while, a year or so, the game became increasingly more important to him than anything and anyone else. That included me.
See, I fancy myself a pretty chill chick; I don’t give two shits if you have a hobby or interest you love – I really don’t – in fact, I encourage it. But… If you tell me, like this guy did, that I «just had to tell him whenever I wanted to hang out (just please don’t ask on raid-night)» and then proceed to ignore me, tell me you’re busy with a raid or a dungeon or some shitty rinky-dink sidequest every time I asked to hang out (- and I never asked on raid-night), and this shit goes on for months on end… Sooner or later, I’m just gonna up and leave yo ass.
The final straw was the night (not a raid-night) I was being blatantly explicit in my asking, while buck-nekkid straddling his lap. He picked me up, walked over to the bed, threw me on it and went back to his computer. ‘Cause, you know, he was busy… Big raid. On a non-raid-night. But he just had to help out.
In that moment I went from being annoyed at the game to outright hating it – and I did so for years.
Fast forward 15 years, and I’ve started playing it myself. For two main reasons: I like video games, and especially RPG-type shit; and I live with chronic pain due to illness, and actively use things like video games to distract myself from that pain. Essentially, I wanted to show that guy my #UnicornFist and say «fuck it, and fuck you for ruining what could have been years of fun for me by being a bag of shit who happens to play the game.»
I’ve come to love WoW for what it is – to me. I don’t do raids – yet. I don’t do dungeons – yet. And I definitely don’t squad up with others on purpose (sometimes it happens by accident, though). I just dick around, doing quests’n’shit for fun to distract my brain from the chronic pain. That’s it. That is literally all it is.
I started playing WoW because I knew it is a virtually endless open-world game I can play for literal years, and that’s the sort of game I go for when I need a distraction: Something I can jump in to, play for a little while, do some shit, and then jump out again. It’s great. I don’t have to talk to anyone (something that is physically painful and exhausting on bad days), and I don’t have to show up at given times to do shit with other people involved. Or worse yet, rely on other people to get shit done.
Playing with others has never been my forte, and especially not in video games. There’s only so many times a day I can cope with being called a «dumb whore» and be told «make me a sandwich, slut» by kids literally half my age who apparently cannot heal their dumbass Orc fast enough to save their sorry lives.
That is why I like WoW. A lot. You can do quests’n’shit alone if you want to; you can squad up and raid if you want to; Hell – you can do nothing and just run from place to place in Azeroth if you want to. It’s fun.
And for those wondering: I’m #AllianceScum and proud of it.
The Geeky Saga 