At one point I thought, Hey, I have a few hours of my day that are NOT eaten up by gaming!, so I created an additional character to fill those up. A burly dwarf lady named Sugarz became my “backup date” in case the raid didn’t have enough priests to be able to play properly. Between the two characters, I fell into a schedule of raiding six to eight hours every single night.
I stopped going to acting classes. I stopped performing improv. Or doing plays. Or socializing with real-life human beings. Several times I skipped auditions because I didn’t have time to prepare after staying up too late gaming the night before. I ate, slept, and lived World of Warcraft.
I guess it’s pretty obvious, but it was not great on my personal life.
I disappeared. My friends didn’t see me for six months. My boyfriend would place a plate of food next to my mouse pad, and I wouldn’t look up. I’d just shove whatever was there into my mouth until my character died, or I had to pee.
“Thanks for the food, honey!” Oh wait. He’d left the room an hour before.
It was easy to ignore how destructive my behavior was becoming because there were SO MANY other people doing the same thing I was doing online. We rationalized it for one another. At the height of my addiction in 2006, I had logged a few thousand hours in World of Warcraft. That’s a solid one HUNDRED days of human life. Now I think it’s depressing, but at the time it was a point of pride.
I was obsessed. I couldn’t stop myself. It was not healthy. But I couldn’t stop. It didn’t feel like there was anything else in my life to stop for.
We all have periods of our life where we’re trapped, doing something we hate, and we develop habits that have nothing to do with our long-term goals to fill the downtime. Right? I hope you identify with that idea; it’s the only way I can explain becoming so emotionally invested in a video game that I would get in my car and drive around town sobbing if my internet went out. I knew it was bad. But even living with a constant Gee, something is seriously wrong here . . . feeling, I wasn’t able to make myself STOP and get control of my life.
I’m not blaming the game; I’m blaming my lack of perspective about why I wanted to fill my days with that beautiful, repetitive world. My life was unhappy, and I covered the hurt with a subscription-based Band-Aid. I just couldn’t find a good reason NOT to play so much. Dig deeper and take steps to become happier in the long term? Nah, there are monsters to kill. Worry about real life later!
Ultimately, mistakes can be more valuable than victories. Yes, I could have learned the lesson of “Mistakes are good!” with a MONTH of gaming rather than almost two years, but I was the head flask maker. The raid DEPENDED ON MY SKILLS!
And soon after this dark period, I used all the things I learned during those dragon-hunting months of my life to create a web show called The Guild.
So, not a total mistake.
-?6?-
The Guild: A Ruthless Beginning
Whereupon I mentally abuse myself into creating something due to depression, peer pressure, and hypochondria. And it turns out way less crappy than you’d think!
The Guild is a comedy web series I created in 2006 about a group of online gamers and how they interact online and offline. (Not autobiographical at all. Nope.) Before I made the show, my writing career consisted of one sketch comedy class, a half-finished movie script, and some creepy fan fiction I wrote as a kid. Yes, even creepier than my video game poetry. Which was pretty damned creepy.
I’d always wanted to write. But in order to try something in life, you probably have to be exposed to someone who makes you think, Whoa. I want to be cool like them! Everyone knows “cool” is the ultimate life motivator, for better or worse. “Tattoo around the belly button where my skin stretches a ton eventually? Let’s do it!” When I was growing up, my dad read a ton of science fiction, my aunt was an actor, my brother could fart and burp loudly, and all these things I aspired to do because I felt they’d make me a more bitchin’ human being. Unfortunately, no one around was like, “I’m writing a short story about unicorns who fly spaceships!” or other brilliant ideas like that, so I didn’t try picking up a pen for a long time.