By The Time I Get To Stormwind

“Elf has the potion!”–Gauntlet sound file, 1985.

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Back in the winter of 1985, my buddies and I discovered Gauntlet, a top-down “hack and slash” role-playing video game in one of the few arcades that remained opened throughout the year. We were seniors in high school and had nothing to do over the holiday break, so we loaded our winter coats with rolls of quarters and made the arcade our second home for days on end. For us, Gauntlet was a social thing. Up to four people could play at one time, each person sporting a different character. It didn’t matter that we sucked at the game. We didn’t work well together and we never took the strengths and weaknesses of the characters into consideration. The only plan for each dungeon was to go in with magic spells a’blazing, clear out the dungeon, and find the exit so we could move onto the next level. We never did conquer the whole game, but at least we had fun squandering our hard-earned Burger King paychecks together.

When I moved in with Debbie in the late 80s/early 90s, we somehow acquired an original Nintendo system, mostly to play Super Mario Brothers. I was never good at those platform jumper types of games. My eye-hand coordination sucks big time and I spent way too much time falling into the abyss. While most of my friends were getting to those secret, ultra hard levels, I was having all I could do to conquer the first five. And yet I kept playing the damn thing. Remember, this was around 1990. Playing a well-crafted video game in your own home was still a novelty for some.

I rediscovered the original Nintendo system in 1992 when I married Lynn. She had the console and a stack of cartridges tucked under the television stand, but she never seemed to play with any of them much. So while she was pulling one of her many night shifts at the hospital, I pulled the whole tangled mess out and blew the dust off the cartridges. In the stack, I found the original Legend Of Zelda game. I thought I was going to hate it because of all the fantasy elements, but it turned out to be less nerdy than I thought. On one hand, it was very much like Gauntlet. You went into a dungeon, cleared it out, and then moved on. But you could also trade up your weapons and potions. And you had to stop and figure out little puzzles, too. It wasn’t like anything I had ever played before. After the first play through, the world map changed and you had to stumble across the realm all over again. I dug that. From then on, I looked forward to games that had an element of exploration to them.

The 1990s saw me investing in a few different console systems. I got the Sega Genesis purely for Sonic The Hedgehog, a fast platform jumper that was able to bring a hint of exploration to the game by allowing the linking of cartridges together. From there I went the Playstation and Nintendo 64 systems. I discovered Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Doom, and Quake on these consoles. Doom and Tomb Raider were vastly different, but in each case the game world could change from room to room. I never knew what to expect every time I walked around the corner. I was still dying at a rapid rate, but at least there was something to keep me coming back for more. As long as I could limp to the next room to see what was in there, I was cool with that. I didn’t have that overpowering sense of frustration playing a game like I did when I was into Super Mario Brothers. Games were finally fun for me as long as they offered a change of scenery every few minutes or so.

When the year 2000 rolled around, I was online with my first computer and I discovered the thrill of the death-match through old faves like Doom, Quake, and Half-Life. (There was a WWII mod for Half-Life called “Day Of Defeat” that I especially loved playing and still play from time to time.) Deus Ex was another computer game that took up a lot of my time. It was a first person shooter at heart, but it also had a lot of RPG elements to it. You could upgrade and modify your character as you went along. You could play it stealthy or you could shoot it up like a weird combination of Charles Bronson and the Terminator. It was left up to the player to decide what kind of game it was.

On the console front, I bought the Sega Dreamcast around this time as it was only $99.00 and on its way out of popularity. Mainly, I wanted to play Crazi Taxi, a wild driving game where pedestrians on the virtual streets actually dove for cover. This led to my obsession with Grand Theft Auto 3, which prompted me to buy a Playstation 2. Up until recently, I thought Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had finally satisfied my need for a game world that was forever changing the small details. I stopped buying consoles and new games. I was happy with finding ways to run my old copies of Quake and Kingpin on my Windows XP machine.

Then, almost a year ago, the World Of Warcraft trial disc arrived in the mail. The thing sat in the car’s glove compartment for weeks before I pulled it out of there and installed it. Admittedly, things weren’t going well for me at the time. The stress at work was becoming overbearing and we were just started to go through the cancer scare with Baby Cat. I was looking for some new escapism; something with a little more strategy that would enable me to pick it up and put back down at the drop of a hat. And, at first, that’s how I approached it. Not knowing anything about the game, I created my first character and set about exploring the world of Azeroth. I was blown away. It was like The Legend Of Zelda, only a hundred times more involved. The game world was huge. The amount of customization was exhausting. I spent the first few weeks of playing running aimlessly going from quest to quest, not understanding the combat controls very well and severely underestimating the whole social aspect of the game. There were sections of the game that forced you to play with, or against, other players. As a shitty gamer, I hadn’t planned on that. Somewhere around level twenty-seven (out of eighty), I stalled. I got stuck in one hard place and was ready to give up when somebody playing a female mage rode up like the cavalry and rescued my ass. I had no choice at that point. I had to join that person’s guild.

For the next few months I was a member of Equinox, a small social guild dedicated to leveling. There were no hardcore raiders on number crunchers in the guild at this point; just a bunch of people who enjoyed the game and liked doing stupid stuff together while trying to push their characters to the all important number 80. There was the Gnaked Gnome march across the city of Ironforge. Then came the Gnaked Gnome marathon, which challenged a bunch of level one gnomes to make the perilous journey from Stormwind to Booty Bay. At first, it was just shit like that. I bonded with a small group within the guild and felt quite at home with them. There was Oscar, a 17 year-old girl playing a male rogue. Broily was a thirtysomething redneck from Kentucky who had world views vastly different from my own, but we often found ourselves privately talking about how the government had failed the middle class. Broily had been unemployed for months and couldn’t keep his benefits because nobody in his area was hiring. He was living hand-to-mouth, but he continued to hone his mage skills. And then there was Brewtality, a fairly nice guy around my age, but I started getting the sense he was starting to take the game just a little too seriously. There were a couple of others, but we were the core nighthawks of the guild. When I needed laughter the most, they provided it. Hell, they even gave me in-game gold. For a while there, they were the only people I trusted. They certainly treated me better than most people in “real life”.

But you know how the Internet goes, right? Four months of Internet time is like seven years of real time. Equinox imploded one day, leaving the core of us without a home. We quickly formed a new guild, “Kiss My Aggro”, which I named. (“Agrro” being the term for the level of threat generated in relation to a mob of monsters.) I’d sat there for the better part of an hour listening to them come up with name after name and having nothing stick. Finally, I typed in, “Kiss My Aggro!” To which Broily typed, “That’s it!” Gold was paid, charter signatures gathered, and before you knew it, we had our own home on the server. The feel good vibe lasted exactly one day before the wheels started coming off, though. Broily literally disappeared the next day, leaving one of the hardcore raiders of the old guild to take his place as an officer. The focus of the guild suddenly changed from a casual social thing to a full on raiding group. DPS (damage per second) figures and gear scores became the main topics of conversation, and those were the elements of the game I hated the most. In the end, Oscar was the only one I was talking to on a regular basis, and it didn’t help she had been made an officer. I had named the guild but had received no credit for it. Not even a token position. I tried to press on, business as usual. But things outside the game weren’t going right and suddenly my virtual life was starting to mirror that. The game was no longer fun to play without Broily around, so at level 72 I did the unthinkable. I stripped my character of all gear and gold, and sent what I could salvage to a new toon unknown to the guild. I then deleted that character from the game. I was going to start over after months of dedication to one character. It was heartbreaking, but I couldn’t see any way around it. We had lost Brewtality in a similar fit of drama. I didn’t want to go out that way. It was a game and in the end it was up to me to change my virtual headspace. I could’ve just left the guild, but I still would’ve had to listen to the speeches from Oscar about how close I was to 80. I didn’t care. That’s not why I had got involved in the first place. I wanted that old Gauntlet feeling back. I wanted to just laugh and bullshit. The game had gotten too serious, too demanding. It was time to scale back. With one push of the button, my level 72 human rogue was dead. In his place was a nice level 1 Draenei paladin chick, ready to kick ass. I was ready to move on.

That was a few weeks ago, and since then I’ve been playing the game less; trying to find other ways of coping with all of the stress in my life right now. I’ve been reading more, which always makes me want to write more. I never anticipated being away from OD as long as I have been, but I’ve always condoned sabbaticals. If not for my sanity, then the sanity of my readers. Who really wants to read about my work related problems for days on end anyway? I certainly don’t want to write about them. Why give all that shit the undeserved prominence? But I can’t be hiding out in a virtual world, either. It was fun for a while, but in the end the game is filled with real people with real problems, some of them worse than mine. There are boorish assholes everywhere. I guess I just have to learn to tune or log them out. Otherwise, the goals I want to make for myself won’t be met. There’s no level 80 in real life, after all.

As for life in the game, I still play. An hour here, a couple hours there. It’s better than watching television, I think. I’m still soloing through the world, making my own way. I cross paths with Oscar every now and then, but she doesn’t know it’s me. I do miss the kid. She was always fun. But like a lot of World Of Warcraft players, she hasn’t hit bottom yet. Sooner or later, she’ll see that real life is a little more important. If not, she can always help me gear up when I hit level 80. She’s got until the summer, I think. After all, I’m only at level 45 right now…

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Original Gauntlet arcade game, where all good quarters go to die.

My avatar waves to you from the lovely Booty Bay. Wish you were here!