Author’s note: This is a highly self-indulgent piece, consider yourself warned.

I’ve played an inordinate amount of World of Warcraft (WoW) in my time, to put it lightly. I fear to mention the actual amount of time, as it is hard for the well adjusted to contemplate such a quantity of hours and days wasted away in front of a screen. Needless to say, it was a number higher than you think possible.

I started around 2007, early in the first expansion to the base game, The Burning Crusade, and I was immediately hooked. The immersion in this virtual world was to such a degree that I’d never experienced anything like it. I could just run off in any direction, fight a monster, or just sit and fish. It was a revelation to me and truly showed what a game could be.

The geography, the story, the atmosphere, the math to get the most out of your characters performance, to the complex social interactions necessitated in it to reach the highest levels of the game, it engrossed me more than my mundane real life. Instead of being rather mediocre as I was in the flesh, in this digital world I was great. I wasn’t socially awkward and isolated, I was deeply enmeshed in a group of others all working together towards a goal, well liked, trusted, and given responsibility. In a place where thousands of others played, people recognized me, I was known and valued in a way I never really felt in the real world. Whatever inadequacy I felt dogged me in the flesh was shed the moment I logged on, it was a complete transformation. I became more confident, witty, irreverent and forthright. It was like I was a completely different person, and I liked him much better than me. While this was also a wholly virtual experience, it felt utterly real, as all good simulacra do.

But, like those plugged into the Matrix, my body experienced the expected, it grew corpulent and broke down, fueling even more discomfort with my real life. So, I fled. I went deeper and deeper into Azeroth to escape my own incarnate existence. Instead, I reveled in what I perceived to be the spirit I felt lived in me but had no place to be expressed, or that I felt it couldn’t be. The cycle deepened until it looked like I’d never escape, drawn inexorably into a place where I’d never return to reality. Thankfully however that wasn’t to be the case, in a story for another day, I came back. Though, I didn’t kick the WoW habit for many years.

(A highly accurate and not at all exaggerated representation of me circa 2007, courtesy of South Park’s acclaimed episode: Make Love not Warcraft)

It wasn’t all bad of course. Strangely, I’ve been left off better from where I started because of WoW. I learned how to apply myself deeply to a form of self-improvement. To compete with others at a high level, research, practice, discipline, and dedication were required. I was even in a position of authority, being in charge on multiple occasions of vetting applicants to our virtual organization, mentoring others, and maintaining an organizational structure as well as calling out strategy on the fly during difficult encounters. This was all in a video game of course, but the principles remained easily transferable. Many of my educational, professional, and personal successes after the most intense period of my WoW addiction were a result of many of the lessons I drew from playing Warcraft. Even so, I find no desire to return.

Where before I felt a consistent tug back to Azeroth, to the familiarity of the login screen, to the comfort of seeing the myriad of characters I’d played for years. This time there’s not even the slightest movement for me towards it. That in itself is an oddity for me, a novelty. The dose of nostalgia I gained from going back seems to be delivered for the most part these days by watching the odd video on the classic iterations of the game, Blizzard Entertainment’s latest cash cow. An enterprise which monetizes the memories of middle-aged men, like me, with the promise of reliving their teenage and early adult experiences in Azeroth, which is of course impossible, but there’s still a hunger for it nonetheless. A desire to go back to where those great times were had when things were new and wonderful. To feel those old emotions again just one more time. It’s always just one more time isn’t it? We deceive ourselves that it would be enough to experience that single instance and no more.

That hunger for nostalgia and the perception, nay the reality, that the current iteration of WoW will never deliver, is part of why I’ve not returned to it as I once had. DragonFlight is the first expansion I’ve missed since 2007. It’s an expansion I had little clue of what it was about. It marked the first point for me where I had let one of the new adventures pass me by, and pass me by more or less unnoticed. The current entry, The War Within, I highly doubt I’ll pick up before the next expansion (Midnight) releases. I have no idea what is ostensibly going on, and I have long since ceased being interested in determining what is going on. The story is so far from what I was invested in as to be absurd. Ret-cons (retrospective continuity) abound to the point where all I knew is no longer true to the current narrative, emptying me of any even tertiary connection to the story.

These latest offerings just feel like content, whose only purpose is to keep me paying the absurdly high subscription price, as well as enticing me to buy the ultimate expression of consumer indulgence, digital cosmetics (because your very real labour earned you your currency to buy the most ethereal and useless thing imaginable). This isn’t to say the previous iterations weren’t commercial in nature, but for some reason they felt more natural, more innocent in their premises, and frankly more gripping. There was less of the stink of rank greed on them than what has come afterwards.

This change from art to content is made most readily apparent in that which we first encounter in a game, aesthetics. Where before it seemed like the game was made by, and for, people like me, guys who like The Lord of the Rings or The Wheel of Time, it has since ceased to be the case. Whoever is making these titles now is not interested in those like me playing their games. Their art direction has veered into what is the gaming equivalent of the dystopian corporate art one sees everywhere from Google to your local government office. The denatured quality it displays repels me. The soul of Warcraft is long gone, as can be demonstrated below by whatever this is supposed to be:

As compared to this:

Or this:

Whatever merit the first of these images has, it’s not for me, nor does it occupy my thoughts as these two others do. I can hear the associated voices with each of the latter pictures with such vividness that it beggars’ belief (and likely sanity). The second picture whispers Arthas, the name of the fallen hero turned villain who dominated the narrative of the third Warcraft game and its legendary expansion, The Frozen Throne. So iconic was he that the expansion focused on him, The Wrath of the Lich King, represented the peak of WoW’s player numbers, as everyone wanted to be in on Arthas’s final moments.

You are not prepared, rings out from the last in particular, echoing his appearance in the release trailer for The Burning Crusade where I first delved into the game all those years ago.

For the first image however, there is no desire to know who that person is, the place they occupy in the story, and certainly no immediate, “damn, that’s cool” factor to it as far as I am concerned. No amount of hectoring can make me gravitate towards the first of these, if anything it makes it more repugnant to me, far beyond what my first reaction was. Above all though, there’s no connection to my own past, and so that comforting nostalgia is lacking.

Warcraft has fallen into the same malaise as most of the other popular franchises which I grew up with. Star Trek, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Marvel. They are all sapped of strength and trotted out by ravenous goblins with ghoulish smiles begging us to spend, spend, spend our hard-earned coin on whatever drivel they’ve put out and be thankful they even put together that.

The game is so far from what it was when I enjoyed it, to the point where it feels like a walking skin suit of its former self, an appearance of similarity remains, but the substance is gone, a reverse transubstantiation if you will. And even the “classic” version, while retaining many of the parts of the originals, is now extant in such a different time, that the possibility of having similar experiences to what one had during the original releases is just not possible. The people are gone, the friends grown and myself much too busy for it anyway. Moreover, the game is “solved” as they say, we’ve all done it before. The principal difficulty lies in applying handicaps, such as committing to deleting your character upon your first in-game death, which I must admit has a degree of interest to me in a masochistic fashion, but it’s more likely to be nothing but frustrating in the long run and inauthentic. Like playing checkers while doing a handstand. Sure, it increases the difficulty, but does it make it all that much more fun? I’d dare say not. Nor will it solve that problem that the past is somewhere we are barred from ever returning, and it is that past we most wish, the game is merely a way of circumventing this reality.

Parting thoughts

Finally, in a meandering way, I’m circling back to where I started, why Warcraft really did grip me so forcefully, that in it I felt much more alive in the virtual realm than real life. I can thankfully say that has changed. Slowly over time, but the progress is there. I no longer desire to lose myself in a false fantasy, but to live my life, to build it and cherish what has been given me. Being married, having children, owning a house, having a career, coming to faith. All of this is so much more engrossing and real than what I ever had before. I want to live my life and live it well. I want to struggle and achieve with all the dedication I used to commit to the shadow of a life I used to pretend to live. It’s that which gives me a positive spin on why I’ve sworn off Warcraft probably for good.

More than anything I’ve said here, despite its truth, this is the crux. All that internal defeat I felt has long since been banished. Not to say that I don’t have problems or self doubt, far from it. Rather, what I’ve come to appreciate is that the great quests of life aren’t for a time and a place far off, but right here and right now. There’s an adventure out there, but it doesn’t require crossing Westfall or Durotar, nor delving Ice Crown Citadel or the Black Temple. Rather, it really is just like Bilbo Baggins remarked, “it’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”