You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) (16 page)

People will finally know I’m really a girl! Half the girl characters are played by guys who PRETEND they are girls, but this is really it, they will hear me and KNOW! What will they think? Will they judge me? Most important, will I get downgraded on the warlock roster?!
Anxiety almost made me log off and never log back on again. But I had to keep playing. It made me happy. So I sucked it up and bought a huge pair of gaming headphones with a mic attached to them that jutted out across my mouth and made me look like a 1-800 operator.

The first day of the combined raid, I logged into voice chat, nervous. “Hey, guys, uh, Keeb here. Checking in for warlock duties!”

There was a beat of silence, then a flood. “Oh crap, Keeb’s really a girl?!”

“Yeah, I told you so!”

“Really? I owe you a hundred gold, SacBallzsky.”

“I’m good for it.”

“Hey, Keeb!” “Hi, Keeb!” “Good to hear you, Keeb.” “Nice voice!”

There was a flurry of excitement, but no one seemed to get THAT worked up about my vagina-dom, thank goodness. I’ve heard from a lot of other women that revealing their gender online sometimes invites reactions of “BOOOOONER! Let me throw sexual innuendos at you until you fall for my hot elf self!” But our raid turned out to be more female friendly than that. Probably because the Saints of Fire leader was a girl who could verbally rip your dick off.

Her name was Autumna. I mean, that was her character name. (At this point let’s just agree that they’re indistinguishable.) Autumna sounded young, like she was in college, and had a voice like a hatchet.

“I’m docking you attendance points.”

“Argue with me, you die.”

“Rambo, tranq the hound! I’ll cut you into pieces in your sleep if YOU DON’T WAKE UP, IDIOT!”

To expect gentleness from Autumna was to squeeze a knife and not have your fingers cut off. I loved her.

As we settled into the new gaming hierarchy, I realized that the voice chat just exaggerated what people used to be like in type. They could be outgoing, or quiet, or “people you definitely wouldn’t want to hang out with unless you desperately needed them for the game.”

There was one mage named Gooroo who always logged online with a loud “GOOROOOOOOOO!” When he killed things with a big magic spell, he’d yell “GOOROOOOOOOO!” Pretty much
everything was accompanied by a “GOOROOOOOOOO!” He got muted a lot.

There was one druid who always had his mouth full of a meatball Subway sandwich when he talked, and a warrior who never spoke except to quote
The Big Lebowski
. I found my sweet spot in the societal hierarchy by becoming the resident DJ. I figured out how to connect my music to the voice chat program, and would spin everything from New Order to Snoop Dogg/Lion/Dogg to Lady Gaga while we prepared for fights. Our signature song was “One Night in Bangkok,” a late ’90’s synth song about night life in Thailand, and everyone would stop and make their characters dance when it came on, singing the chorus at the top of our lungs through our headsets:

You’ll find a God in every golden cloister

And if you’re lucky then the God’s a she.

I don’t think anyone understood the lyrics. (Or we were all really liberal. Probably both.) At any rate, small things like that made raiding with forty strangers the best thing in the world.

We needed those joyous social highlights, because the game raids required a TON of coordination, not only to assemble the exact number of qualified people, but also to get your character ready for action. “I have to spend three weeks gathering equipment? You’re saying I need to do
homework
to play this video game?!”

Yes. That is what they were saying.

We’d rush the same monster over and over for weeks without succeeding. “Turdburger, you let me die again! Stop eating while we’re fighting, I can hear you chewing your Subway!!” It was NOT a casual hobby. We raided together about twenty hours a week, sometimes just
to fail the fights again, and again, and again. Sounds incredibly annoying and not like the definition of “game,” which is to “play,” which in turn means to “engage in activity for enjoyment,” right? So why bother going through all this grief? Bottom line (just like in Puzzle Pirates): outfits.

All the best armor and weapons were acquired in the difficult mega-group dungeons. It was the Rodeo Drive of Warcraft. When you got a piece of fancy “epic” purple equipment, your character became more powerful and looked cooler when you danced on mailboxes inside the game. It’s the same reason why real-life men buy sports cars and real-life women buy handbags that cost the same as said cars. (Back then, I would have salivated over a “Tier 4 Nemesis Helm” before a Hermès Birkin bag any day of the week.)

In order to win the best stuff, you placed bids according to points you’d earned for raid attendance. Basically, minutes of your life were used as currency. (When I describe it that way, it sounds horrifying.) There were only three to four items auctioned off to the group of forty people each week, so, like debates in British Parliament, things got rough. Because avarice doesn’t generally IMPROVE one’s character. One time my brother Mochi got reamed because people thought he was hogging equipment, so he posted the following on the forums:

It has come to my attention that there have been bones of contention raised about a few of my raiding bids in Blackwing Lair and in the Molten Core, specifically, with my fellow raiding warriors questioning my bidding demeanor concerning the Helm of Endless Rage, which drops off of Vaelastrasz the Corrupt in the Blackwing Lair zone, and with the Onslaught Girdle, a Ragnaros drop from the Molten Core zone.

If, on any of my future bidding, you have any questions or qualms about what I am doing, and would like me to know about your second thoughts or have any ideas/suggestions for me, I invite you to write all your thoughts on the matter in a message/email/forum post for me. Then, print it out, roll it up in a tube, and stick it up your ass.

Sincerely, Mochi

He wasn’t one of the more popular members.

I, however, was very popular. I had a charming lack of fulfillment in my life, so I was psyched to be able to work hard and study like I was in college again. “4.0 in Warlock? Sounds like a goal to me!”

But as we started working through harder and harder dungeons, more and more prep was required BEFORE the actual raid time. Making potions, gathering equipment and herbs, rearranging
my in-game storage unit. Most people had day jobs or school, but what was I doing during the day? Except for the occasional “Going to audition/class/coffee-with-other-actresses,” I had TONS of free time. I figured, “
Someone
needs to make those Flasks of the Titan, might as well be me!”

That is when my gaming life started tipping out of control.

I started working full-time in World of Warcraft. I’m not exaggerating. Every morning before I left the house (IF I left, which I frequently didn’t), I would log online and fly around the game world, harvesting herbs across the virtual globe to make potions. This hunter/gatherer trip would take about an hour or two each day, minimum. (Yes, I spent a large portion of my time inside World of Warcraft commuting.) I invested in a very expensive office chair, for my ass comfort, because I was sitting on it most the time and it was starting to spread. But I didn’t care about my booty, ’cause there was looty to be collected! (HAR! Okay, no more puns, I apologize.)

At one point I thought,
Hey, I have a few hours of my day that are NOT eaten up by gaming!
, so I created an additional character to fill those up. A burly dwarf lady named Sugarz became my “backup date” in case the raid didn’t have enough priests to be able to play properly. Between the two characters, I fell into a schedule of raiding six to eight hours
every single night
.

I stopped going to acting classes. I stopped performing improv. Or doing plays. Or socializing with real-life human beings. Several times I skipped auditions because I didn’t have time to prepare after staying up too late gaming the night before. I ate, slept, and lived World of Warcraft.

I guess it’s pretty obvious, but it was not great on my personal life.

I disappeared. My friends didn’t see me for six months. My
boyfriend would place a plate of food next to my mouse pad, and I wouldn’t look up. I’d just shove whatever was there into my mouth until my character died, or I had to pee.

“Thanks for the food, honey!” Oh wait. He’d left the room an hour before.

It was easy to ignore how destructive my behavior was becoming because there were SO MANY other people doing the same thing I was doing online. We rationalized it for one another. At the height of my addiction in 2006, I had logged a few thousand hours in World of Warcraft. That’s a solid one HUNDRED days of human life. Now I think it’s depressing, but at the time it was a point of pride.

I was obsessed. I couldn’t stop myself. It was not healthy. But I couldn’t stop. It didn’t feel like there was anything else in my life to stop for.

We all have periods of our life where we’re trapped, doing something we hate, and we develop habits that have nothing to do with our long-term goals to fill the downtime. Right? I hope you identify with that idea; it’s the only way I can explain becoming so emotionally invested in a video game that I would get in my car and drive around town sobbing if my internet went out. I knew it was bad. But even living with a constant
Gee, something is seriously wrong here . . .
feeling, I wasn’t able to make myself STOP and get control of my life.

I’m not blaming the game; I’m blaming my lack of perspective about why I wanted to fill my days with that beautiful, repetitive world. My life was unhappy, and I covered the hurt with a subscription-based Band-Aid. I just couldn’t find a good reason NOT to play so much.
Dig deeper and take steps to become happier in the long term? Nah, there are monsters to kill. Worry about real life later!

Ultimately, mistakes can be more valuable than victories. Yes,
I could have learned the lesson of “Mistakes are good!” with a MONTH of gaming rather than almost two years, but I was the head flask maker. The raid DEPENDED ON MY SKILLS!

And soon after this dark period, I used all the things I learned during those dragon-hunting months of my life to create a web show called
The Guild
.

So, not a total mistake.

- 6 -

The Guild
: A Ruthless Beginning

Whereupon I mentally abuse myself into creating something due to depression, peer pressure, and hypochondria. And it turns out way less crappy than you’d think!

The Guild
is a comedy web series I created in 2006 about a group of online gamers and how they interact online and offline. (Not autobiographical
at all
. Nope.) Before I made the show, my writing career consisted of one sketch comedy class, a half-finished movie script, and some creepy fan fiction I wrote as a kid. Yes, even creepier than my video game poetry. Which was pretty damned creepy.

I’d always wanted to write. But in order to try something in life, you probably have to be exposed to someone who makes you think,
Whoa. I want to be cool like them!
Everyone knows “cool” is the ultimate life motivator, for better or worse. “Tattoo around the belly button where my skin stretches a ton eventually? Let’s do it!” When I was growing up, my dad read a ton of science fiction, my aunt was an actor, my brother could fart and burp loudly, and all these things I aspired to do because I felt they’d make me a more bitchin’ human
being. Unfortunately, no one around was like, “I’m writing a short story about unicorns who fly spaceships!” or other brilliant ideas like that, so I didn’t try picking up a pen for a long time.

Even though I didn’t get to practice writing as a kid, I was an expert at consuming OTHER people’s writing and daydreaming about it. The first book that made me think,
I wanna get inside this character’s life like a pod person
was
Anne of Green Gables
. I’d seen the miniseries on the Disney Channel (which I hated most of the time because, MAN, were girls dumb and painted pink on there), and it made me track down every single one of the books in the series and read them a dozen times over.