Notes towards a review of World of Warcraft (2004)
#13 - World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft Classic, Sigmund Freud
Hi gang! Sorry I’m late. I’ve been trying to write this review, or something like it, for a zillion years. It’s rather long, so I’ve provided a short version, too. The short version is this: “chill, but also fucked; probably more fucked than chill?” I reserve the right to subject you to further drafts, and you, as always, reserve the right not to open the email. In any case—see you soon!
People never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is beckoning.
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholy”
…the human-built world is not, in fact, built for humans.
L.M. Sacasas, The Convivial Society
You mortals are nothing to my kind! Do you hear me? Nothing!
Lord Nefarian, World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft was made by Blizzard Entertainment, a company based in Irvine, California. I have not been all that many places, but I have, oddly, been to Irvine; in particular, I’ve been to the Irvine Spectrum, a massive shopping mall my father pitched as a substantial Southern California attraction. At the time, this felt like an accurate assessment: while my precocious enthusiasm for various independent rock bands, as well as an early intuition that whatever I’d “earned” in my life I had no part in really earning, had engendered in me a nascent leftism, including a properly skeptical attitude towards the rituals of capitalism, I was apparently not yet averse to the idea that a shopping mall could be a place of wonder, because I remember it slightly more vividly than I remember going to Disneyland earlier that week.
I was in Southern California because my family was moving to Orange County. The healthcare technology company my father started had just been purchased by a company based in Mission Viejo. Though I still haven’t seen it, the television program The O.C. was airing at this time, so my fifth-grade class received the news of my move breathlessly, with envy and awe. I was awed, too, if from a different angle. California, especially Southern California, was the realm of punk music and school surfing clubs—of a certain highly desirable mode of sunshiny aimlessness, extensively documented on television and in movies. I would, I felt, have a good life there, filled with events, surprises, culture, companionship, hijinks, etc.
In any case, I was permitted to purchase two CDs at the Irvine Spectrum: I Am the Movie by Motion City Soundtrack and Give Up by The Postal Service. My family put on Give Up in the car—an unusual move, but it was an unusual time—and we all listened to The Postal Service while we drove up and down the Pacific coast. It was a funny trip. I remember it fondly.
In any case, following a sudden series of final-hour, out-of-left-field maneuvers by the board of directors, or an investor, or whoever it is that controls these things, my family was not, in fact, required to move to Orange County, CA. The company’s main base of operations instead shifted to the office in which my father already worked, in Charlotte, NC, where I continued to attend a private preparatory school on scholarship. The life in which I’d join the junior high surfing club became, permanently, a counterfactual. This is all probably for the best—no offense to all my Orange County heads out there—but I’ll never know for sure.
I misplaced my copy of Give Up a few years later, so I pirated it and burned a copy for myself. It was exactly the same record, although I didn’t like it quite as much.
I have seriously played World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004) twice. The first was from 2005 to 2007—the start of seventh grade to the end of eighth. The second time was from July 2020 through March 2021.
2005: The boys with whom I was friends in middle school fell into roughly two categories: those who were more-or-less nice to me, and those whose friendship was shot through with a more substantial sadistic streak. The nice friends were mostly weirdos and losers; the mean friends were still kind of losers, at least compared to the genuinely cool kids, but they were also very good football players, or competitive skateboarders with heated backyard pools. I’d go over to their houses and we’d shoot each other with airsoft guns or use a lighter to turn a can of Axe body spray into a flamethrower.
I broke my arm in sixth grade. While it was mostly better by the start of seventh, I wasn’t able to play football that season—ultimately a mercy, really, as I did not enjoy anything about playing football, and was very bad at it, the slowest on the team by a dispiriting margin. One of my mean friends told me that I should play this new video game World of Warcraft with him and another friend. Because I wanted him to think I was cool, I obliged. (The irony here is not lost on me.) I created, as I was told to, a male human warrior. They quit around level thirty. I played for thousands of hours.
#2 — Six months or so into the COVID-19 pandemic, I was catching up with a dear friend. He told me he was playing World of Warcraft Classic (the then-recently re-released version of World of Warcraft as it originally came out in 2004, before expansion packs dramatically altered the experience) and had joined a raiding guild. The guild was clearing content I’d been curious about for fifteen years, so I made a female undead priest and leveled to sixty (the maximum level) as fast as I could.
My first play-through began, of course, in the human starting zone, the leafy, relatively boilerplate fantasy zone Elwynn Forest. My family did not have a very good computer: in an average low-population area, it eked out, like, fifteen frames per second. Cities (and later, raids) slowed to an illegible crawl.
Still, it is difficult to overstate the sense of wonder I experienced, especially during those first thirty or forty levels. It was, without a doubt—and I am embarrassed to admit this, even here—one of the signal aesthetic events of my life. It perforated the fabric of my experience and patched the tear with something not of my own making. It blew my mind.
No criticism is objective, but this is part of the unique challenge of reviewing a thing like World of Warcraft—how do you take seriously your love for something you also regard as frustrating, bad, and stupid?
One way of dealing with this is by foregrounding the assumption that experience is intrinsically dignified: that there is wisdom, or at least information, in wanting something; that wanting something—or liking something, which is really just another modality of wanting it; wanting in a different tense—reveal more than simply information about the object we want. This critical mode holds—correctly, I think—that our attachments to objects are disproportionate, and tell us things about ourselves worth listening to. If not the method of critical engagement I’ve learned the most from, it’s probably the one I most like reading.
The problem with this approach is that it risks authorizing us to love those who hate us. Blizzard Activision is a massive organization, and I truly believe most of the people who work there are artists sincerely trying to give people the best possible experience they can. But let’s be real: as a corporation, Blizzard Activision wants to suck your brains dry with a straw. World of Warcraft is a subscription-based game. Its designers have knowingly leveraged findings from behavioral psychology in order to make players keep returning to it, against their conscious will. It is a work of art buried in a slot machine. Because I have stopped putting in coins, I routinely receive emails commanding me to return. It is an understatement to say that someone like Bobby Kotick does not have our best interests in mind.
It’s for this reason that I am troubled by the fact—and it is a fact—that I experienced genuine aesthetic sublimity, perhaps for the first time, in a janky computer game made by a corporation loaded with sexual assailants. It was bullies who got me to play it! Anything can be a thing of beauty, and a thing of beauty is a joy forever, but let’s not call bad things good.
What should we call them instead? Is “bad” enough? I can’t seem to leave it there. It’s not that simple, even if it should be. I loved this video game. Couldn’t I have, well, not loved it? What kept me from not loving it? Is this a more interesting question?
There are roughly three senses of the word “freedom” that I think about. The most politically salient definition is fairly straightforward: freedom is the antithesis of chattel slavery. This sense undergirds my understanding of politics. The United States is, and always will be, a country which legally, socially, and philosophically deemed the contractual ownership of human beings both right and good. Freedom, in this sense, is defined as that for which those who destroyed the institution of slavery—which is to say, of course, mainly the enslaved themselves—fought. This sense of freedom, which is fundamentally indebted to Black radical thought and action, infinitely exceeds that which it opposes; it is a tremendous, holy gift, one I attempt, in my pathetic, ridiculous little way, to learn from and do right by.
The second sense takes various forms—the freedom to shoot people who knock on your door; the freedom not to observe rudimentary public health measures; the freedom to amass unlimited wealth, no matter the human expense—but I think that these libertarian ideals are variations on a basic theme, which is that it is better to live in a world unlivably saturated with psychotic cruelty than to bear any responsibility for collective life. This sense of freedom is a nightmarish farce, a nauseous and dangerous growth on the body politic; those who adhere to it are existentially vacuous and spiritually unserious, to be treated with pity and caution, like the wounded, confused creatures they are, and those responsible for theorizing, propagating, and instituting it should not be permitted to bear a role in public life.
The third sense—by far the least politically important—is most relevant for our present purposes, or at least my present purposes. As I was walking down some little-used sidewalk next to a busy Charlotte road, the carefully-curated rows of trees would cut out for a moment and reveal a long expanse of green, power lines strung along, rolling off into the horizon. This image came to embody this kind of freedom to me. Transcendence, but not too much.
This was a freedom I think about now as a kind of merciful cessation, a momentary oversight on the part of the forces of compulsion. Because I wanted things to stop. Puberty was fucked, and it kept going. High school was weird, and it kept going. It is hard to speak about how bad obsessive-compulsive disorder is without feeling hyperbolic or perversely self-aggrandizing; suffice it to say my experience was suffused with a kind of constant mental activity more painful in its way than the time I snapped my femur in half. I knew, of course, that life didn’t stop until, terrifyingly, it would. But I didn’t want to die. I wanted a break.
The only thing more tedious than kvetching about suburbia is thinking there’s wisdom there, so I’m not going to belabor the point. (I didn’t really grow up in a suburb—Charlotte sprawls; there’s barely a center of gravity—but the point stands.) I had a pretty good time, on balance. Most days, I wouldn’t trade it for something else. Still, I continue, actively, to fight back an irritated envy for the lives of those who grew up amidst the genuinely particular, not adrift a sea of senseless proper nouns masquerading as singular. Other than my house, almost no building I routinely entered in high school existed when I was in sixth grade. I daydream about coming of age somewhere else, somewhere with history and personality, somewhere with more to give—somewhere with a handhold, not somewhere so slick you slide right off.
Possibly more than music, the artistic medium which embodies this whole situation for me—the banal fungibility of the built world; the meager vision of freedom this environment inspired—is the video game. We used to hang out outside of the nearest “Play ’n‘ Trade,” a mediocre, defunct local game store chain. This wasn’t like, a cool thing, really—it wasn’t like some movie where people kick it and shoot the shit at the independent record store, finding meaning in popular art and forming lasting friendships against the odds. I’d get my ass kicked in Super Smash Bros. by some weird kid I didn’t know, and then we’d all go outside, and the worst pathological liar I’ve ever met and this scene kid from my homeroom who mysteriously vanished for months at a time would flip Xbox controllers they stole from Target by the dumpster behind the store, then use the cash to buy cigarettes from the vaguely creepy twenty-something guy who worked there but always wanted to hang out with us—and that was about the extent of the sociality on offer. It never got any deeper or more interesting. There wasn’t even a “there” to say “there was no there there” about.
Still, I thought and thought and thought about it. The first novel I seriously attempted to write was about a massively multiplayer game; it included a scene I labored over for months, attempted from so many angles, in which I recounted the controller-flipping episode. The novel never really got anywhere, but for years afterwards, I thought about it. I loved hanging out there and it never gave me much of anything. I loved the idea of it, I guess. It felt kind of like a TV show.
Let’s say art and entertainment, at their best, allow you to enter an imaginary world which returns you to the real one better, in some sense, than you left it: happier, more comprehending, more open, more fulfilled.
But what if it doesn’t return you, or doesn’t want to? What if a work of art wants you to stay inside of it—forever? The uncanny endlessness of games in particular is famously horrifying: “Come and play with me—forever, and ever, and ever . . .” But what if you want to stay inside, too?
World of Warcraft begins by presenting the player with a finite number of tasks. Complete the quest. Mine the ore. Kill the goblin. (You do so much murder in these games. It’s stylized into oblivion, and it seems as though everything living gets reincarnated—though they later clarified that there was a definitively canonical afterlife, going so far as to set an expansion pack there, which is very funny to me—but the sheer quantity of carnage you leave behind you is wild.) Every game teaches you its terms of engagement, and WoW’s are discrete, specific, and enumerable. You build a checklist, complete it, and then build another. Even the mechanics of fighting take, eventually, the form of a checklist: a “rotation,” or sequence of actions optimized for maximal effectiveness, to be repeated until the enemy is killed or the situation changes.
The tasks you are allotted multiply, becoming more complex. You get the ability to do side quests, to choose which of several level-appropriate zones to go to, to pick between branching paths, etc. (For example, you are introduced to the “reputation” mechanic by means of a quest in which you choose, arbitrarily, which of two rival centaur clans to massacre.) Eventually, these tasks become implicit: learn your specialized group role; complete a dungeon with others; acquire the equipment required to do harder dungeons.
These tasks are immediately satisfying, providing a pleasure usually synecdochized in evocative, if technically inaccurate, chemical terms—the dopamine hit. The neurochemical basis for the pleasure of completing a “fetch quest” (go here, get this thing, come back to me) is a bit more complex, but the colloquial impulse to reduce it to a single drip of golden brain juice is revealing. We are, collectively, anxious about how involuntary this particular kind of enjoyment feels. One feels that the pleasure of World of Warcraft is being staged behind the curtain of the unconscious, in some furtive, gooey, primordial gland, with or without the consent of the rest of ourselves.
In the interest of due diligence, I will note here that it’s unfair to World of Warcraft not to recognize that every work of art generates an analogous feedback loop, establishing and sustaining habits in microcosm. An unresolved plot thread triggers the behavior of continuing to read; this continuance is rewarded with a feeling of resolution. (Briefly, for context: the process of habit formation is often divided into three parts. First, there’s a trigger; second, the trigger motivates a behavior; third, the behavior is rewarded. All three parts are essential.) At its best, this process feels automatic: it’s a compliment when a book is itself a “page-turner,” when continuing feels like it arises spontaneously from the book itself.
But isn’t a “dopamine hit” spontaneous-feeling, too? Why does the thing we call a “page-turner” feel good and the thing we call a “dopamine hit” feel bad?
For one, a (good) page-turner is activating. I resist the weirdly defensive cultural valuation of books over other forms of art, but I think it’s extremely safe to say, at least, that some kinds of books activate the mind more fully and generally than some kinds of game. Reading a novel is, in general, a more experientially integrated experience than performing the kinds of tasks in a video game which we call “mindless.” Reading requires conscious attention, and the faculties of visual and aural imagination, and everything else that goes into the mysterious faculty of the human animal to convert written text into experience. It draws you out of yourself.
On the other hand, the kind of pleasure we refer to as a “dopamine hit” is a specifically and particularly disengaged one. It’s not of a piece with anything—not even with the self experiencing it. The reduction to chemical language conveys, I think, this unhappy feeling of abstraction, of disconnection from a broader endeavor or pursuit. A dopamine hit isn’t a piece of the puzzle—it’s a weird, floating, generic, fungible monad of enjoyment.
(Note that we don’t call full games dopamine hits. It’s a term reserved for individual, instantaneous mechanics—gacha pulls, leveling up, etc. On the other hand, a page-turner is, of necessity, a relatively large unit of text: you can’t call a word or sentence a page-turner. I can’t really imagine anything smaller than a chapter being called a page-turner, and even that feels weird. Can a short story be a page-turner? Can a word be a dopamine hit? How about a sentence?)
Another point in favor of the page-turner, though, is that the book ends, and you get to choose another. (Or give up reading entirely.) Dopamine hits, on the other hand, are atemporal, potentially endless.
This feels important to me. Susan Sontag said once that endings are important because they convey the promise that life can be understood. On this interpretation, World of Warcraft provides an experience that can never be understood. The situation might not be as grave as this formulation makes it sound, but I think it’s fundamentally correct. There’s something unsatisfying about all of my attempts to come to terms with the game, with the particular variety of experience it grants. I can’t wrap it up neatly. (You can’t beat WoW—you just quit.)
The world of World of Warcraft is astonishing, dense with detail, narratively and environmentally complex—shouldn’t the parts support this whole? That’s how most good art works. If half the sentences in a book are badly written, and also a few major plot points don’t make sense, and also most of the characters are poorly rendered, I might say I like it (“there’s a great book in there somewhere”), but I probably wouldn’t say it’s unmitigatedly good.
The problem is, the parts of WoW don’t support the whole. It is not an integral work of art. Most of the game’s most addictive systems—what playing the game actually consists of—don’t actually touch the part of the game that’s beautiful. End-game gear’s agonizing scarcity bears no intrinsic relation to the wonder of moving from the lush woodlands of Elwynn Forest to the desiccated plains of Westfall. The pleasure of a perfectly-executed pull in a dungeon has nothing to do with the Auction House. The only force binding these mechanics together is the fact that, if you want to explore the most ambitious and interesting endgame content, you have to get gear and buy stuff. Modern casinos rig their slot machines to pay out more frequently when you first start playing; they make it harder and harder to get that initial high back—on purpose. In a very real sense, someone out there is making you do this shit. Someone chose to bury Azeroth in a slot machine, and now you’re sitting there on your computer, pulling the lever, and it’s four in the morning, and you’re wondering where all that wonder went.
I’m fascinated (and sort of appalled) by the prominence of nostalgia in conversations about older video games. Art and culture obviously affect us intensely when we’re young, and these experiences certainly shape our sense of a given medium; but as someone who’s played and loved a lot of old games for the first time as an adult, it’s surprising to see every discussion of, say, CRT TV filters for emulating old games framed exclusively in terms of, like, “making these games look just like you remember.” Why talk about it like this? People designed these games for a certain kind of television which displayed things differently than current televisions do. The difference between intent and expression, usually so abstract, is very clear here; it’s something like the difference between an oil painting and a glossy-papered reproduction. Nobody sits around talking about how a restored version of Ulysses is better because it’s the version we’re nostalgic for. (Admittedly, everyone who read the Shakespeare and Company version when it came out is probably dead, but I think the point stands.) All of which is to say, perhaps too aggressively, that it is not an intrinsically nostalgic pursuit to recreate those conditions, much as liking the games does not require nostalgia.
But maybe I’m biased: I loathe nostalgia. It feels dangerous to me, like giving up. It is a dangerous feature of psychic life that so many of us would so often rather repeat ourselves than try something new, even if that new thing is literally guaranteed to be better. We can’t help ourselves. We love the things we love, and we get comfortable with the things we don’t. This is all to say I’m by no means above the feeling of nostalgia—I wouldn’t hate it if I weren’t as susceptible as anyone, if not more. I am always homesick for one place or another—wherever I’m not—and I hate this feeling, too.
Most good video games feel better the further along you get. As your character gets stronger, as the plot thickens, as the mechanics are elaborated, it all gets richer and deeper. This may or may not be true of World of Warcraft in some ways, but I think it is interesting and telling that, for so many people, including myself, their most memorable experience of the game was probably their first one. The feeling of freedom, in that third sense—of realizing there’s an order beneath the order of things, a world within the world, where time and space operate differently; a modality of experience where things are enchanted in a way they’re normally not—this feeling was manifestly and abundantly present at first, in the beginning, in those earliest moments in Elwynn Forest. At some point down the line—it is hard to pinpoint where—it vanishes, replaced by a uniquely gnarly mode of compulsion.
It feels related to the experience of enjoying a mode of socializing because it resembles a television program. We live with reference to art, and part of life is experiencing art, which means we experience art with reference to art. This is obvious, but it plays out on every level: each sentence prepares us for the next; the intro prepares us for the verse; the last shot of a movie is reliant on our memory of the first. I wanted the beginning of World of Warcraft from the middle of World of Warcraft, but all I got was the end, forever.
All of which is to say that, even the first time, the game made me nostalgic for it as I played it. This is not to say that the only good moment was the first time I started it, but the first time you accomplish something big in the game is usually the best, no matter what the accomplishment is. That first time you make a character, enter a new zone, clear a dungeon, finish an elaborate quest line, hit level cap, do a forty-person raid, down a difficult boss—it’s such a rush. (The thrill of downing the notoriously difficult Twin Emperors raid encounter, relatively late into my second time playing, was maybe better than the first time I booted up the game in 2005.)
The comparison to certain modes of addiction is too obvious to merit elaboration, but it is worth noting that the high being chased is, all too frequently, an aesthetic one. I was shocked, when I started playing more single-player RPGs, at how fast and frequently I experienced pleasures of a kind I thought were scarce—those moments when narrative and mechanics perfectly intersected, when a certain virtual vista or musical moment gave me chills, when I felt myself deeply immersed in a compelling and fascinating world. World of Warcraft’s relative scarcity of significant aesthetic experience, like the rest of the game’s myriad scarcities, is false. They are a very skilled and wealthy company; they are more than capable of making a game that is more regularly and deeply satisfying. This scarcity, like all the others, is the result of a decision made by a small group of people against the interests of another, larger group of people: us.
No part of the game more clearly reveals its underlying badness, the brick wall it hits again and again, than its social dimension.
Both times I played World of Warcraft, I played with people who were often in a lot of trouble. The first time, the trouble was typically chaotic early-internet niche bullshit. One of two guild masters was sending nude pics back and forth with a newer guild member; she freaked out when she saw a Toys ‘r’ Us bag in the guild master’s background, as she hadn’t known he had kids or was married, and she tracked down and informed his wife. Meanwhile, the other guild master vanished—he’d moved from British Columbia to New Jersey to be with someone who ghosted him within the week.
If this drama felt particularly or uniquely sordid, this might be because I was a literal child. The first guild master, the guy whose wife left him, was in the Army (or claimed to be—who the fuck knows what any of these people actually did, or were), stationed at Fort Bragg; I had mentioned that I lived in North Carolina. One night after a raid, while drunk (and, though I didn’t realize it, going through the divorce triggered earlier), he pulled me into a private voice chat. “I really care about you, man. You’re my boy blue,” he said, mysteriously. “When we get to Nef,” by which he meant Nefarian, the final boss of the then-final raid dungeon of the game, “you’re gonna be our main tank,” he said, meaning I was going to be more central to the raiding operation than I typically was, as an honor of sorts.
“That’s cool. Thanks,” I said.
It wasn’t sexual, I don’t think, but it was definitely fucking goofy. I was twelve years old, but I knew exactly what was going on: some drunk sad guy I played a video game with was way too attached to his fake idea of me. Main tanking was exciting, I guess, but I knew I wasn’t that good at the game, because I was (in case you’ve forgotten) literally twelve years old, and also my computer barely worked. (I was very fortunate that there were two other disillusioned middle-schoolers in the guild, with whom I would frequently commiserate about how crazy this video game seemed to drive all of these adults.)
The second time I played, the sociality on display was much more innovatively and disturbingly bizarre.
I joined this guild about four months after the COVID pandemic began, so nobody in the world was doing particularly well; and for context, ours was practically the only guild on any North American server that explicitly claimed to have left-wing, queer-affirming politics. This was important, if only because seemingly everyone else who played the orc video game was a resolutely antisocial lunatic. (It is a strange, singular experience to live for a decade as an adult in the adult world, striving to comport oneself with a modicum of dignity and decency, deepening one’s understanding of the world and the different people who live in it, working in various professional settings, having and maintaining adult relationships—and then, at the height of a highly isolating global pandemic, enter a video game voice chat on a Tuesday evening in order to kill a big fake dragon, only to hear the voices of a dozen grown men making very personal and sexually charged jokes in front of complete strangers about how their online friends, with whom they are actively collaborating, are extremely bad at the video game everyone is playing. And that was, like, ten orders of magnitude better than the worst shit I saw. Literal Nazi-level racism was not uncommon. For all my guild’s madness, the general madness was more wretched by far.)
Still—it was really fucking wild. The thing which ultimately led me to quit was, surprisingly, not the terrible, real-life crime one guild member did against another, nor the fact that that I, as the “priest class leader,” was forced to help mediate the in-game fallout from this crime, including reading both parties’ detailed testimonies of what happened and how. It was not the awe-inspiringly childish fit a prominent member pitched when we expelled the perpetrator of that (terrible, real-life) crime from the guild, in which he held all of the guild’s resources hostage on the condition that the perpetrator be reinstated. It was not the endless, bizarre proceduralism inspired by what was, in effect, this most rudimentary of privacy and safety measures.
No—I quit over something much, much dumber. We were struggling with a notoriously difficult late-stage end-game boss when a small group of members wrote and circulated a twenty-page Microsoft Word document arguing that requiring people to pay attention during raids was ableist, and that nobody should be allowed to tell anyone if they did anything wrong, or request anything from anyone, because they might be messing up for reasons outside of their own control, such as ADHD or anxiety. (This paraphrase might seem ungenerous, but I double-checked with my friend who was there.)
To be clear, we were an incredibly gentle and permissive guild already, especially compared to other guilds clearing the content we regularly cleared. Nobody ever yelled at anyone; feedback, kept to a minimum as a matter of policy, was conveyed as sensitively as possible. People got annoyed sometimes, but they were quickly told to shut up. More to the point, nobody had to raid to stay in the guild—you were more than welcome to just hang out, forever. But it seemed, reading the document, as though we were going to people’s houses and threatening them at gunpoint to sign up to die twenty times in a row to Sapphiron.
The only explanation I can think of is that this group was so desperately attached to their vision of the guild as a “community” that they were actively making themselves miserable, and they blamed others, as well as the game itself, for their misery. In any case, I looked at the first page of this document, thought about it for a moment, and then resolved, suddenly and finally, that I had to get myself as far away as I could from whatever the fuck forces were at work here.
To be clear, the World of Warcraft Classic endgame is often miserable. You have to do a lot of stuff to prepare for raids, much of it time-consuming and fragile. (The most effective “griefer” during my tenure—the one who occasioned the most accusations of actual sociopathy—was the dude who stood outside raids and killed people coming in, wiping out literal hours of effort. It is only in the cold light of retrospect that I can assert that, frankly, that dude sort of owned.)
But the guild provided most of these resources to those who needed it—personally, I spent a whole lot of sleepy unemployed mornings farming materials so as to ease the burden on others. The problem is that the complainers were weirdly reluctant to avail themselves of it. They claimed, against the vocal and repeated objections of those of us who actually farmed the materials, that it made them feel ashamed to ask.
It is a peculiarly bruising experience to watch someone on whom the world has piled misery elect to impose upon themselves additional, unnecessary miseries. Why don’t we want to be well? Why do we do things we don’t really want to? The dissenters didn’t want to do the big long dungeons in the stupid orc game. Most people don’t! It is probably a more reasonable position than the alternative. So why was it such a thing? Some said they were worried that we wouldn’t have enough people to do the dungeons, and it’s possible, but again—those in authority said, again and again, not to worry about that. The unwilling raiders were lonely, and it was what the people they knew were doing—but there were lots of other things that the guild did.
What was disturbing about it was not just that people were throwing around very real, very important conceptual tools—tools properly used to collect, understand, and ameliorate pervasive patterns of murderous immiseration—in order to rhetorically corner the people who liked playing the game the guild existed solely in order to play. To be sure, that totally sucked. But more urgently, I was disturbed by the fact that this claim had begun to feel not entirely implausible. It took me a moment to figure out what was so wild about this group’s claims; I was immensely disturbed by the mere existence of that moment.
Subjective life is founded on a series of encounters with the world. The extent and variety of these encounters shape the contours of your world. A claim is only plausible if it reflects a conceivable reality, and a reality can only feel conceivable if it bears some relation to the reality you’re experiencing. The inescapable “material” scarcity and concomitant pleasures and frustrations of accumulation, the generally vicious sociality, the rewards and difficulties of herding forty people through difficult video-game encounters—aspects of World of Warcraft such had these had begun to shift the boundaries of my experience.
It is worth noting, if I wasn’t clear before, that many of those who objected most vociferously to the prospect of allowing others to play the video game had themselves been profoundly affected by real-life political miseries. But this was true of those who wanted to play the video game, too. (For my part, I have been diagnosed with both ADHD and anxiety, and I just wanted to kill the goddamn dragon.)
This group phrased the problem in terms of ableism, but I think the real problem—feeling somehow bound to a video game you hate—is not unique. Take one look at basically any venue for commentary on World of Warcraft—or any “game-as-a-service,” as continually-updated games are called now—and you’ll see that a weirdly high proportion of players, many of whom devote dozens of hours to the game a week, seem to hate it.
This seems bad to me. People, in general, should use their free time to do things they want to do. If they are doing something for hours and hours and hours that they don’t want to do, something should probably change. But you can’t transcend the world—and if your world has shrunk to the size of a video game, you can’t imagine leaving.
You should have the right to imagine leaving a setting that is hurting you, because you should have the right to leave a setting that is hurting you, and, at least a lot of the time, you have to imagine something before you do it. We have to forget about things in order to use them—you can’t write if you’re too focused on your pencil to think about what you’re writing; you can’t play a video game well if you’re concentrating on which button does what. But this comfort, this forgetting, can lead us to forego possibilities we could otherwise easily realize. It is very, very hard to stay alert to the world—harder still to learn the difference between the world and your ideas of it. It is a difference we can never master—just learn, again and again, and there is no end in sight.
I played World of Warcraft when I wanted something. The second time, I wanted something relatively straightforward: to engage in something social from the boundaries of my home; to experience some stuff I had always wanted to experience, but had never quite got to.
What I wanted the first time I played it was much vaguer and more intense. I wanted to impress my mean friends; I wanted a body which was not releasing hormones I experienced as a poisonous imposition; I wanted a social sphere which was capable of something greater than the sum of its parts, or at least was not constantly subtracting itself from itself; I wanted a world which would reciprocate, or at least register, my care and effort.
Culture affords us the opportunity to love, to intertwine ourselves with things not of our making, to open us to the outside and let the outside in. This is a necessary, beautiful, life-sustaining process. It is also arbitrary, hideous, and brutal. The things we care about can save our lives, and it can make them unlivable. One can only imagine the world we would make if we could really cast the scales from our eyes, if we could get down to the bottom of ourselves and salvage our spirits from beneath the rubble—but to say this is to beg the question, because our spirits are the rubble. The rubble is us. The outside is already in, always, and it wants to stay there.
World of Warcraft, like many of Blizzard’s games, is a beautiful video game. It is, in my opinion, a true human accomplishment, a cultural object bearing an aesthetic force great enough to alter the lives of those who encounter it. There are mysteries and pleasures buried in its polygons that have shaped, for better and for worse, my sense of the possible. They charged handsomely for the pleasure.
Blizzard Entertainment accomplished one of the great dreams of the twentieth-century avant-garde: they erased the distinction between world and art. But they did it backwards. Instead of making the world a work of art, they made a work of art into an entire world. This is, in my critical opinion, a fatal mistake.
World of Warcraft is a game which preys on people who want something our world cannot provide. Great art wounds and mends; WoW irritates and compensates. The game gives you an education in being strung along, in running through checklists and taking care of business, and then it sets you free into the chaos of the bizarre social world which arose atop its miserable economy. This is the dungeon, the piece of equipment, the server-wide event that will finally release me from myself, that will return me to reality a better, stronger, more integral person—or will just make playing the game really fun again, like it was in the beginning.
But they don’t want you this to happen: it is against their interests. But nothing in the game motivates you to turn away from it. Satisfaction, completion, the sense of an ending—it’s always just out of reach. In this regard, it is a perfectly American game, one of the most perfectly American cultural objects of the 21st century. Growth without end, activity without ceasing, competition detached from need: these are the means and aims of World of Warcraft, and they hurt, sometimes quite badly, like they do in real life. The worst combat trinket in the game, usually the first item of its kind a player gets, increases your mounted speed by a very small percentage; it’s called the “Carrot on a Stick.”
you should get a pulitzer for this one