The big move in my/Keeblerette’s virtual life was about six months after I started playing. My guild decided to advance to a more complicated part of the game, which moved me from gaming hobbyist to full-time addicted employee of World of Warcraft.
The game has especially challenging areas that require getting large groups together called “raids.” In the early days when I played, these events required forty people logged online AT ONCE for up to eight to ten hours at a time. Clearly, the programmers didn’t have enough real-life social relations, or that basic design concept would never have occurred to them.
It was a nightmare. Have you ever thrown a party and tried to get EXACTLY three dozen specifically qualified people to attend? Even if they RSVP, half of them never show up, right? And if enough people don’t show up, you can’t throw the party. So you have to recruit random people at the last minute who you’ve never met before to fill up the roster. And they turn out to be greedy eleven-year-olds from Estonia, who you’re FORCED to keep around in order to limp through the evening’s festivities, and . . . yeah. Just typing all that out gave me stress flashbacks.
After attempting it a few times, our guild decided it was too small to attempt one of these fancy raids alone, and we joined forces with a slightly bigger guild named Saints of Fire. These guys took their gaming SERIOUSLY. In order to participate, everyone was required to install voice chat software so the leaders could coordinate everyone’s actions verbally during the fight. Like air traffic controllers. This also meant that we would finally be able to hear one another’s voices for the first time. It was a move that was . . . socially terrifying.
People will finally know I’m really a girl! Half the girl characters are played by guys who PRETEND they are girls, but this is really it, they will hear me and KNOW! What will they think? Will they judge me? Most important, will I get downgraded on the warlock roster?! Anxiety almost made me log off and never log back on again. But I had to keep playing. It made me happy. So I sucked it up and bought a huge pair of gaming headphones with a mic attached to them that jutted out across my mouth and made me look like a 1-800 operator.
The first day of the combined raid, I logged into voice chat, nervous. “Hey, guys, uh, Keeb here. Checking in for warlock duties!”
There was a beat of silence, then a flood. “Oh crap, Keeb’s really a girl?!”
“Yeah, I told you so!”
“Really? I owe you a hundred gold, SacBallzsky.”
“I’m good for it.”
“Hey, Keeb!” “Hi, Keeb!” “Good to hear you, Keeb.” “Nice voice!”
There was a flurry of excitement, but no one seemed to get THAT worked up about my vagina-dom, thank goodness. I’ve heard from a lot of other women that revealing their gender online sometimes invites reactions of “BOOOOONER! Let me throw sexual innuendos at you until you fall for my hot elf self!” But our raid turned out to be more female friendly than that. Probably because the Saints of Fire leader was a girl who could verbally rip your dick off.
Her name was Autumna. I mean, that was her character name. (At this point let’s just agree that they’re indistinguishable.) Autumna sounded young, like she was in college, and had a voice like a hatchet.
“I’m docking you attendance points.”
“Argue with me, you die.”
“Rambo, tranq the hound! I’ll cut you into pieces in your sleep if YOU DON’T WAKE UP, IDIOT!”
To expect gentleness from Autumna was to squeeze a knife and not have your fingers cut off. I loved her.
As we settled into the new gaming hierarchy, I realized that the voice chat just exaggerated what people used to be like in type. They could be outgoing, or quiet, or “people you definitely wouldn’t want to hang out with unless you desperately needed them for the game.”
There was one mage named Gooroo who always logged online with a loud “GOOROOOOOOOO!” When he killed things with a big magic spell, he’d yell “GOOROOOOOOOO!” Pretty much everything was accompanied by a “GOOROOOOOOOO!” He got muted a lot.
There was one druid who always had his mouth full of a meatball Subway sandwich when he talked, and a warrior who never spoke except to quote The Big Lebowski. I found my sweet spot in the societal hierarchy by becoming the resident DJ. I figured out how to connect my music to the voice chat program, and would spin everything from New Order to Snoop Dogg/Lion/Dogg to Lady Gaga while we prepared for fights. Our signature song was “One Night in Bangkok,” a late ’90’s synth song about night life in Thailand, and everyone would stop and make their characters dance when it came on, singing the chorus at the top of our lungs through our headsets:
You’ll find a God in every golden cloister