Welcome to Azeroth
Sometimes a game is more than a game
“After all, a game is still a game. It’s the people that you meet and get to hang out with.” — Studmuffin
One hundred and fifty thousand minutes of playing the same game. Two thousand five hundred hours of staring at a screen. One hundred and four days sitting in one position. Fifteen weeks of my life. These numbers are a way to quantify my commitment to the popular online game World of Warcraft. I have spent about 1/40th of my life so far playing a single video game. When we think about productive or fun things to do with our free time, we don’t usually think of sitting in front of a $1,500 computer to fight imaginary monsters with people we’ve never met. That’s what I did, and I don’t regret a second of it.
Obviously people have their obsessions. Aside from being a journalist, my brother is an avid juggler. My father collects political memorabilia like the newspaper that announced Abraham Lincolns death. Me? I’ve played World of Warcraft for the past 11 years. It seems like I’ve been playing video games for as long as I can remember, but until World of Warcraft, I’ve never been able to play a single video game for more than a few hours total. I always get bored. However, I’ve played World of Warcraft for over 2,000 hours. I played it for for 15 hours straight once. I’m not the only fanatic. World of Warcraft reached a 12-million subscriber peak in 2010 and t now about 5.5 million people play the game. What makes World of Warcraft a game so many are dedicated to? Let’s journey into the computer world of Azeroth and find out.
Siinmorrow heard what the Warlock had to say and took the young player into his group. They were on their way to take down the lord of fire himself, Ragnaros. Swankie, the youngest player in the group by five years was nervous about raiding with them for the first time. His past raiding experiences hadn’t been the best. He’s been yelled at; told he wasn’t good enough and swindled out of thousands of gold. Needless to say, Swankie was terrified. After a few hours of playing, Siinmorrow called it a night. Swankie was relieved that everything went okay and shocked that Siinmorrow invited him back to play again the next week. Fast forward six years and Siinmorrow and Swankie are still playing together. The only difference being Siinmorrow is married and has a child, and Swankie is in his third year of college.
The two still talk to this day, but have never actually met face to face, which is very common with online friendships. The PewResearchCenter surveyed youths aged 13–17 about their online friendships and found that over 55 percent of teenagers had made online friends through their Internet shenanigans, but only 20 percent had actually met in person. Romantic relationships also have some interesting statistics. In another survey, The Huffington Post found that 74 percent of World of Warcraft players are dating someone who also plays WoW, while only 33 percent of dating site users are dating someone they found on their dating site. Some say that you have a better chance of finding love on WoW than you do through matchmakers like E-Harmony.
Swankie and Siinmorrow have played for years together, but have never really gotten to the bottom of why the other one plays. Not until Swankie struck up a conversation with Siinmorrow, or as he goes by in the real world, Kurtis. Swankie met Kurtis online when he was 21 years old, fresh into the grand opening that is legal drinking age. Kurtis is now 27 years old. After years of playing together, I decided to talk with him about his WoW experiences. Six years ago I was young and nervous, playing with people I’ve never known. Now, it feels like I’m talking with someone I’ve known foever.
Kurtis was into video games before WoW. “My earliest memories playing video games was on the original Gameboy as a little kid,” he says. “I had a Mario game and a few others. Not sure why I liked it. Possibly for the challenges of each level.”
This makes sense. For instance, in World of Warcraft, every few months the developers update the game, presenting a new challenge for the player called a Raid. In a WoW Raid, you take anywhere from 10 to 25 people into a giant arena to fight game bosses, which are basically powerful monsters. Kurtis and I happened to first meet and bond in a raid called Firelands, which was released six years ago. In the Firelands Raid, the goal is to travel to six different areas of the map to kill six Raid Bosses. Once you manage to kill all six of them, you unlock the final area where you can square off against the Final Boss. It took us several weeks to finally kill the final boss, Rangaros, and we have been doing those challenges ever since.
What got Kurtis playing WoW in the first place? Kurtis says he played first- generation Massively Multiplayer Online (MMOs)games before WoW came out. He started with a game called Everquest, and when he found out WoW was a better Everquest, he was in. He says the thing he enjoys most is the exploration of a large world, large being an understatement. World of Warcraft is split into 4 main playable areas: Azeroth, The Outlands, Draenor, and the Broken Isles. Azeroth encompasses about 80-square miles, which is about four times the size of Manhattan. The game is huge, and that’s one main draws for players like Kurtis.
When the World of Warcraft Reddit forum asked the question, Why do you play WoW?, one response how the expansive world is one “you can’t get lost in, but can if you try.” Another user loved the storytelling involved in the game. Multiple users posted on the forum about how the game offers an escape from reality. World of Warcraft takes time to play. It’s not like Call of Duty or Halo where you can just plug it in and play for 20 minutes before work. You need time and dedication to play it, and that provides some people an escape from their real lives. Why go to work and get yelled at by your boss when you can be an all-powerful Druid who can turn into a bear and take on countless enemies at once? World of Warcraft can offer relief from stresses and anxieties. Some studies posit that video games can actually teach your brain how to fight depression. An article in Slate on the subject takes cues from renowned play researcher and psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith to proffer that, “Video game play is literally the neurological opposite of depression.” As many dedicated gamers will attest, even if they feel unimportant in their lives, they know who they are in game.
Players commenting on the forum also said they feel a sense of accomplishment when playing. In World of Warcraft, one of the basic aspects of the game is the reward system. You get rewarded with gold for completing a quest. You get rewarded for completing a dungeon with new weapons. You get rewarded for completing a raid with powerful new gear. You get rewarded for almost everything, and it makes you feel good. The rewards can range from a slightly better piece of gear, to a giant dragon that you can ride on. This reward system can be summed up succinctly: it’s addicting.
The way addiction works is that your brain’s pleasure center is opened and stimulated when something good happens. (See above article.) When you find something that opens the pleasure center, you want to do that again. And again. And again. When you get rewarded in WoW, you want to do something like that again, and so you do. People spend months to years trying to obtain in-game items that serve no purpose other than to make your character look cool. They don’t make you stronger or anything, they just make your character look badass. This reward system has been known to cause problems in the World of Warcraft community. Two years after WoW hit the shelves, it was estimated by Dr. Orzack, the founder and coordinator of the Computer Addiction Service, that about 40 percent of players are at some level addicted to the game.
Kurtis’ brother, Remadon was there when Swankie was introduced to the group. Remadon and Swankie had been friends for six years as well. Remadon, who asked that his real name not be revealed, is 22 — five years younger than his brother. He’s been playing video games since he was six. When Remadon was younger, he said that video games took over his free time. He stopped watching television and devoted his time to games. Remadon started his adventure in Azeroth when he was around 15 years old, playing on his brothers World of Warcraft account. Family also plays a huge role into why people play video games. Remember, family doesn’t need to be blood related.
In the summer of 2016, Remadon, Siinmorrow and Swankie started their own guild. A guild is a group of people who actively play and talk with each other, much like a school club. In this guild, there is an avid player who would get on almost every day. His name is Studmuffin. Studmuffin, also known as Kevin, is a pretty laid-back guy. He started playing video games when he was five years old and World of Warcraft when he was 17 — five years after his parents passed away within a year of each other. His dad died of pancreatic cancer and his mother passed away a few months later of meningitis. Kevin was put into foster care when he was 12, right in the middle of his childhood. Kevin started his first job when he was 15 years old as a chef. He stayed in foster care until he was 16 years old and was never adopted. Kevin officially became independent at 16 and moved into a new place with his friends.
Kevin took up the game while living independently in his new apartment. His roommates all played, so he thought he would give it a shot. He started playing and met some really cool people with whom he became friends. Ten years later, Kevin is still playing with the people he first met in World of Warcraft. Kevin really enjoys the aspect of raiding. When asked why he raids, which arguably takes up the most time in the game, he said it’s because he likes to learn new things and to rise to new challenges.
Ultimately, though, Kevin says he found some of what he lost before he was even a teenager — a surrogate family of sorts. “After all, a game is still a game,” he says. “It’s the people that you meet and get to hang out with.”
