“Oh, Howard and I just like working together, that’s all.”
I stopped typing in shock. HOWARD? They’d advanced to real names?! This was serious!
But LadyLee seemed so much happier after she met TreeMaster (as much as you can glean emotion from alphabetical letters placed together in a chat interface), and I felt bad about being negative. LadyLee was an adult, she had things under control. Plus, their ship was SO FAST, who was I to judge if they worked that well together?
An acting job took me out of town for two weeks, and when I returned to the game, everything in the crew had collapsed. The only person I could track down online was Ploppyteets. I typed to her, frantic.
“Where is everyone?!”
“New Mead Brewing mini-game just got released. I’m balls at it.”
“Um, ok. Where’s LadyLee and the crew?”
“She dissolved the group. Won’t be online anymore :(”
“Why not?!”
“She left her husband last week for TreeMaster, he found stuff between them on her computer, and I guess she’s losing custody of her kids. She hasn’t logged on since we talked last week.”
“WHAT?!” Because of sailing the pixelated seas, this woman’s whole life had collapsed? “Are you kidding?”
“I wish. Bonus, my baby has a thing called ‘colic.’ I’m looking to trade her in for a Chevy if you know any takers.”
That was the last day I ever played Puzzle Pirates. I was worried about LadyLee and felt incredibly sorry for her but had no way to contact her outside the game. I didn’t even know her real name. It felt helpless to care about people I’d never meet, who could disappear on a dime. I would miss Ploppy, too (even though I worried about the future of her offspring), but it was too hard to play anymore.
It had gotten too real.
That eight-month “Yo-ho-ho!” sideline made me aware of my personal slippery slope in the online gaming area. It was VERY slippery. But I rationalized that my brother was reaching out to “bond” with this new MMORPG game, and that was something I couldn’t turn down. And if something went wrong, at least I knew how to reach him via phone to say, “Don’t leave your husband and children for a random guy named Howard who’s really good at virtual carpentry!”
I bought World of Warcraft in the summer of 2005, right after I lost a part in a television pilot to a girl who looked EXACTLY LIKE ME. Red hair, pale lumpy face, if you squinted at our head shots we looked identical. And it was depressing. To come in second choice to . . . myself? So I installed the game and created my first character, named? You guessed it. Codex.
In this game, people group themselves in private “guilds” instead of “crews.” My brother was a member of a guild of players called Solaflex, and it was for “little people” only, which sounds offensive, but the fact that everyone had to be a gnome or a dwarf character was funny at the time. Because they’re all short. Other players who were not gnomes or dwarves were tall. So in-game, when you ran around together, it was a tinier group of people than average.
You had to be there.
I created a Rogue (Thief) character, because I enjoy channeling my inner kleptomaniac, and stepped into a world so real, so “graphically advanced,” that as I hopped around in the starting area, clutching my little beginner dagger, I fell in love. Deeply. Unutterably. In love. This probably sounds strange to nongamers. I understand. The best analogy I can make to real life is this:
You know how sometimes you go to another city and, while driving around, you see a house that looks so cute and inviting that you fantasize about what it would be like to drop everything in your life and just move there? Like, you see a cottage while on vacation in Belize, and think, Prices are dirt cheap, people look chill, let’s DO THIS! It’s a feeling of new possibility. Of starting fresh. Imagine capturing a kernel of that in your own life right now, by sitting at your computer and paying $15.00 a month in subscription fees.
That’s what it’s like to bury yourself in a virtual world.
And it WAS a completely new world. With hundreds of players running around, animals attacking you, different categories of chat rooms, tons of buttons and commands, at first, I was lost. Every two minutes I’d type to my brother for help.
“Which buttons move me?”
“Where is my backpack screen with my clothes in it?”
“What is ‘leveling’ and how does it work?”
“I’m stuck in a wall, can you come get me?”
All these questions are the real-life equivalent of, “What is this thing at the end of my arm, and how do I close it around items to lift them?”