Leveling Up: My 15-Year World of Warcraft Journey — Was It All Worth It, and What Does It All Mean? (A Sisyphean Meditation)
Way back in 2005 my good friend and former boss, Joe Pierce, introduced me to World of Warcraft. Not having played video games much since the original Nintendo Entertainment System back in the late 1980s, I initially resisted, never having seen anything like what we now know as an “MMORPG,” a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. But I relented, and before I knew it Joe and I were questing away in the fictional land of Azeroth, doing quests and completing dungeons in search of experience points to level our characters and in search of better and better loot—armor, weapons, gear, and mounts.
When I created my first character, I chose a Human female (as opposed to a Gnome, a Dwarf, or a Night Elf on the Alliance side, and opposed to an Orc, a Troll, a Tauren, or an Undead on the Horde side). As I was living in Santa Cruz in the time during my time at University of California, Santa Cruz, and since I went with a human female instead of a human male character, I chose the often-misinterpreted character name of “Scruzchick,” which I intended to be short for “Santa Cruz Chick,” which doesn’t quite have the same ring today as it did in 2005.
Over the next several years, I jumped in and out of playing World of Warcraft, giving it another go with the release of each new expansion pack until I got busy with other projects—teaching, career, podcasting, blogging, and day-to-day life. As the years rolled by, and no matter what ups and downs I endured, my faithful World of Warcraft toon, Scruzchick, was there accompanying me in the virtual journey of the game in lockstep with the journey of real life, with surprisingly parallel, if less literal and more metaphorical, battles and obstacles faced and overcome.
I recently dove back into World of Warcraft in earnest, partly to level Scruzchick up to Level 120 in preparation for the release of the upcoming World of Warcraft: Shadowlands expansion and partly because my soon-to-be stepdaughter expressed some interest in the game and it struck me as something that she and I could enjoy together, in much the same way, albeit more visually, that my own dad and I enjoyed playing the distant ancestor of World of Warcraft, the text-based Colossal Cave Adventure on the Epson QX-10 (driven by the CP/M operating system) that we had in the house when I was a kid in the early 1980s.
It happened just the other day. My original World of Warcraft character, Scruzchick, finally hit the current level cap of the game, Level 120, after fifteen years of dabbling in World of Warcraft. This was at least some sort of achievement, perhaps insignificant to some, especially to those World of Warcraft players who reach the level cap within approximately 24 hours of each new expansion pack. For me, however, this represented 15 years of a journey up the mountainside of achievement, quest after quest, dungeon after dungeon—something to revel in, not something to take lightly or for granted, a moment to pause and reflect on whether this 15-year World of Warcraft journey and the hours and years invested in the game were all worth it, and what, if any, meaning and purpose they contained.
It’s undeniable that World of Warcraft has a Sisyphean quality to it. Just as Sisyphus was condemned to push his stone up the mountain over and over again every day of his life with no end, we World of Warcraft players do quest after quest, dungeon after dungeon, holiday event after holiday event, endlessly leveling our characters expansion after expansion, year after year, seemingly with no end, while the years of our lives tick away like second hands on the in-game clock. (See The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus.)
Arguably every video game has this Sisyphus-like quality, and yet World of Warcraft seems to have it more than others. And we players somehow keep coming back for more, just as we humans in the real world keep waking up, brushing our teeth, taking our showers, going to work, doing our hobbies, having our sex, taking or teaching our classes, building our skyscrapers and our ivory towers, getting our promotions, drinking our wine, writing our blog posts and our philosophical treatises, and the thousand other things both lofty and mundane that we meager humans do every single day of our meager human lives.
I take some pride in having kept my original character going as the World of Warcraft adventure, and the adventure of life, have unfolded. The name “Scruzchick” has become more and more outdated. I no longer live in Santa Cruz, and I never was a chick. (Psychologists would have a field day with my choice of World of Warcraft alter ego!) I’ve thought about changing my character name to something at least more geographically relevant—”Idahochick” or “Ifallschick,” or possibly even “Idahodude” or “Ifallsdude.” But I just can’t bring myself to part with the name “Scruzchick,” just as I could never quite bring myself to part with my amateur radio callsign, KD6DXA, no matter how much I’ve considered requesting my grandmother’s (Velma Fruhling’s) old callsign, WA6TOA, instead. It just wouldn’t feel right.
It’s interesting to see the way in which the successes and failures of Scruzchick in World of Warcraft have paralleled the successes and failures in real life. Perhaps this is why we play games in the first place; games are ultimately metaphors for life, multilayered ones at that. For example:
Dropping a dungeon boss (WoW success)
Wiping a group after pulling a mob (WoW failure)
Earning my Master’s degree (Life success)
Never finishing my dissertation (Life failure)
Winning the in-game trial of style competition (WoW success)
Never obtaining that coveted mount (WoW failure)
Winning a Parsec Award for one of my podcasts (Life success)
My marriage ending in divorce (Life failure)
And so on….
I shudder, a bit, to think about how many hours I’ve actually spent on World of Warcraft. It’s no wonder I didn’t finish my dissertation, even if the time I spent in-game was but a tiny fraction of the time that many World of Warcraft players, including my friend Joe Pierce, have spent. And while it may seem like this was unproductive, wasted, frivolously spent time, in reality those hours were endlessly satisfying and full of joy, spending quality time with one of my dearest friends talking about life, the universe, and everything in our real lives while we slayed the animated dragons of our virtual ones. Granted, social in-game may pale in comparison to real face-to-face time with friends, but this kind of virtual interaction is a charming consequence of our 21st-century digital lives: friendships no longer have any geographic boundaries or barriers. Back in 2005, I was in Santa Cruz, California and Joe was in Seattle, Washington. Now, 15 years later, I’m in Idaho while Joe is back in California, and yet we inhabit the same world of Azeroth with our alter egos still today as we have for fifteen years and counting.
I may yet decide to change my character’s name from “Scruzchick” to something less anachronistic and, frankly, less ridiculous when World of Warcraft: Shadowlands is released—to be determined. But there is little danger of my walking away from World of Warcraft entirely. In fact, I’ve kept an active World of Warcraft account for the entirety of those 15 years, even when there were whole years when I didn’t even log into the game, much less complete any quests or dungeons. Life happens, and life is meant to be lived in reality first and foremost. But in these postmodern, hyperreal, 21st-century times in which we find ourselves, the lines between the real and virtual, the genuine and the artificial, the simulacrum and the simulated, and ultimately the true and the false themselves, have broken down. (See Simulations by Jean Baudrillard.)
My time spent whiling away the hours with my friend Joe in World of Warcraft may seem like a waste of timer to an outsider or from an objective, third-person standpoint. Yet the friendship and the time devoted to it are genuine, no matter the medium or the vehicle of its expression. The ways we humans spend our time in “real life” (in irony quotes—how could it be otherwise in this day and age?) may also seem trivial, meaningless, provincial, arbitrary, and Sisyphus-like to an outsider—to any nonhuman, whether animal or alien, god or goddess. Yet to us humans, our individual, subjective lives are entrenched in meaningfulness, care, and concern for the things that matter, sometimes only to us—time well-spent from our individual or species point of view, no matter how insignificant it all looks from an extraterrestrial or god’s-eye point of view.
In the end, we must all ask the questions with which I titled this post: Was it all worth it, and what does it all mean? Were my 15 years of World of Warcraft worth it, even despite the trade-offs in time spent and of one form of accomplishment for another equally arbitrary one? Absolutely. I’ve maintained one of my dearest friendships and have battled my way through the dungeon-crawls of life, both in-game in and in reality. And I wake up every day and keep fighting, just as I resurrect Scruzchick and begin the quest again after a wipe, sometimes after the long-ass haul from the graveyard to my in-game corpse. If only it were that easy to get a second chance at life in the real world!
Ultimately my answers to the questions with which I began this post are “yes” and “yes.” And I hope, at the end of my life, that my answers are the same about life itself: that it all meant something, at least to me, and that it was all worth it.
In fact, that’s a darn-good epitaph for my, or anyone’s, entire earthly life—as good an epitaph as any: “It was all worth it.”
Related Reading:
The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
Simulations by Jean Baudrillard
