but why?

The cravings to play again have dissipated considerably now. I owe a lot of that to starting this blog and, to be honest, rewatching the better part of all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Truthfully, I have a ton of free time on my hands now and an apparent inability to remember exactly what it was I used to do to while away the hours before I began playing WoW a little over a year ago.

So, more about me. It feels a bit like cheating to be writing about all the ways in which WoW can be so eminently playable and addicting without first fessing up to the nature of my own intimacy with the game.

Before the full on descent into WoW I was freakishly overworked and had been so for a few years when I quit working about a year ago (and then quit consulting a few months after that). The over-working was mostly my own fault (though possibly just the steady state of working in technology). I'd moved back to the Bay Area from the east coast, having abandoned a house and life I'd wanted but which hadn't quite worked out for me. And, yes, there was a guy involved in that too. So I threw myself into work and then overworking and then, unsurprisingly, hit a wall. There was stuff to process, realities to face, and a significant amount of cash saved up from all that overworking to allow for months of, well, continued avoidance.

I have a tendency to move locations when I feel a path I've taken hasn't worked out the way I hoped it would. I think moving offers an opportunity to reset priorities and reframe goals, provides breathing room for making personality adjustments and maybe most importantly offers distraction guised as productivity while you deal with the strange newness of undertaking even the most mundane tasks -- shopping for groceries isn't just an errand, it becomes an adventure! Well, this time around I didn't move, instead I just withdrew. Or, rather, I moved into Azeroth. Let's be honest, there's a lot less packing involved.

I'm sure there's a smarter path than the one I chose, but as withdrawl from the world goes, it wasn't particularly ill-timed or overly destructive. It's not as if I was dropping out of school or racking up credit card debt to support my slacker lifestyle. I could have spent the year in a bar for starters. Or, better, moved to Mexico -- which was the runner-up plan -- and, most likely, spent the year in a bar, albeit cheaper bars. Sure, Mexico would have been an experience with the whole capital "e", but my life to date has hardly lacked for experience, education, risk-taking, adventure or accomplishment. You'll need to trust me on that one because I'm not going to entertain you with the details to back it up.

The downside of losing yourself to a MMO should be pretty obvious. It's exactly like losing yourself to anything really -- a relationship, work, drugs, religious cult. Well, perhaps the subsequent extraction from the scene is messier than some of those other avenues for self-loss but at least WoW addiction is inexpensive. A nice $10 per month, self-renewing subscription and you're good to go. No messing with shifty drug dealers or couples therapy. On the other hand, work-addiction has a tendency to result in a financial net gain and while leaving you with some fancy lines to put on your resume that read far better than "2008: played a game". So I guess if you're looking for an addiction to fill your life with, you're probably best off choosing "work". Or maybe "the gym" as a fallback.

It might be worth noting that my inherent laziness, which hinders grocery shopping, and frugality, which curtails ordering in, combined with WoW-addiction prompted me to lose about fifteen pounds despite my dramatic increase in immobility. Though sometimes I suspect it might have less to do with gaming and more to do with not having to eat so many lunches with coworkers, I prefer to blame gaming because I like how that explodes the stereotype that gaming makes you fat. Stock up on soups and whole grains, clear the house of fatty snacks and get a game addiction and I can almost guarantee you'll lose weight. But we digress.

What exactly does anyone *do* with so much logged game time? This blog is partly an attempt to answer that question without diving too deeply into the kinds of specifics which would require a fluency with the game in order to comprehend. On the other hand, they say the devil is in the details, so for anyone brave enough to forge the hell that is game-specific jargon, I'll be descending into that inferno in the next post.