WoW (or the World of Warcraft for those that have a life the uninitiated) has become the one geeky thing a geek can do that completely defines a geek as a geek. If you tell someone that you play WoW, social ostracism is immediate from the “normal” folk. You are not given the chance to explain or defend yourself. Immediate assumptions are made. You have become, in essence, the Worst Kind of Geek, the kind of geek your mother warned you about.

See, the problem is this – the WoW gamers have really done it to themselves. Everything you’ve heard about them is true. They play for hours and hours and hours, everything else around them is neglected (eating or sleeping or – God forbid – housework), they begin talking in a language you thought could never come out of a 26-year-old man who considered himself “pretty cool” and their social calendar suddenly shrinks to almost nothing. They emerge only to work (if they must), eat (when the discomfort of a growling stomach detracts from the gaming experience), piss and sleep (if they must work). And heaven help you if you even try to converse with them in the middle of a “raid”, if you were not already turned off by the high-octane swearing and verbal abuse only made possible by anonymity.

I know all this and I know it to be true because I am dating one of these WoW gamers.

Now I am not against the world of gaming. I have dabbled in it myself and virtually every guy I know plays games (that’s what you get for joining the IT industry). But WoW is a whole new beast. I thought I had trouble getting my ex to pay attention to me from playing Counter Strike a few years back – that simply has nothing on WoW. The addiction is absolute.

In an effort to discover what is really making these gamers click – and admittedly to exact some revenge – I decided to join the ruckus two months ago. Hey, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right? With my boyfriend (let’s call him Fred) watching over and explaining what exactly a paladin, warlock and night elf was, I ended up creating a cute little Gnome Mage. Here she is at a glorious level 34 after at least two months of play:

After what must possibly be the slowest leveling rate on record, I have found that I do, indeed, Play Like A Girl. But that is alright, my aim was never to match the addictive immersion into WoW that my fellow WoWers have (and I certainly don’t want to), but to observe what it is that makes the game just so damn addictive to them. I have come up with the following conclusions:

• For guys like Fred, who have big egos and nowhere to vent their urge to control a large group of people, leading a WoW guild is just about good enough. It is his personal empire. People suck up to him for the chance to get a better share of the loot. He chooses who goes and who stays. In my opinion, it is his outlet for his inner megalomaniac.
• Blizzard hit jackpot with the idea of “raids”. These have to be done in large groups with a role for each person in the battle and with your fellow raiders depending on you to be there, even if you had a social life, you feel obliged to turn up. If you don’t you get kicked out of the guild. Which leads me to the next point:
• The game is as real as it could be. Raiders are typically plugged into a chat server (like Skype) and when you can hear your fellow gamers’ voices speaking to you, the virtual characters aren’t so unreal anymore. Any sort of ostracism or criticism feels absolutely real. So raiders won’t let their group down by not being there and they will get in lots of practice so they won’t lag behind the group, which of course leads to more gaming time.
• Some people are just idiots – and WoW is a place where they can be completely uncensored idiots and have no repercussions. People who get bullied in real life can bully lower level characters in the game. People who have no balls to be a shitstirrer in real life can do so in the game. And guys who cannot get any girls in real life attempt to be Casanovas in game (I’ve witnessed some – painful, I must say).
• And some people are just addicted to the dramas. In a virtual world where anonymity allows you to be exactly what you feel like without social rules and constraints and armed with weapons and armor fit for a king, there is certainly plenty of drama and if the players deny they love it, they’re lying.

Now, excuse me while I go and play.