January - March 2006

When I started playing World of Warcraft, way back in January 2006, it was my first introduction to online games. I had loved games since my childhood, and had been nerdishly amazed by the wonders of the Internet since I first encountered the web, but combining the two seemed like lunacy, a recipe for the complete destruction of my social life. It swiftly emerged I was right about that.

Like a lot of people, it was a free trial from a friend - Tom, or Redstripe as he called himself in the game - which suckered me in. Those early days were characterised by a sequence of mini epiphanies: the first dizzying moment of loading up the game and trying to make sense of the deluge of icons and text; the first signs of other people occupying the same digital world, jumping about like idiots in the starting zone; the first time their actions made an impact on our game, as a group of three ploughed through a barrage of enemies which had been killing us for the best part of an hour; the first stranger I chatted to, two hours sitting by a campfire just talking; the first party; the first instance; the first PvP; the first tentative steps at becoming part of the bigger picture and joining up with a guild. As a lifelong player of offline games, each of these experiences simply bowled me over.

Reminiscence for the games of your childhood, for their accompanying feelings of adventure and excitement and compulsion, appears to hit a lot of people in their twenties. Nostalgic those memories may be, but losing yourself in a book or a film or your own imagination comes quite naturally to children. They have no trouble experiencing the Magic. But we seem to lose that ability a little with age. The varying concerns of the twenty-something single male - money, mortality, full- time work and ironing - are so irritatingly difficult to ignore that I ended up too firmly rooted in my feet to give myself completely to something as trivial as a video game.

And with that - poof! The Magic skipped off into the sunset arm in arm with my childhood, leaving nothing behind but a heap of rose-tinted dust. Being grown up, I was pretty much obliged to hoover it up before teatime.

So I was right to be cautious about WoW. The prospect of a game which couldn’t be completed - its hook instead the continual drip feed of in-game rewards and perceived power - was worrying enough. But the real killer is the other people.

Imagine sitting alone in a blank room with no exits and nothing to do. What’s the most interesting thing that could be placed in there with you? A ball? A dog? The Complete Works of Shakespeare? They’d keep you interested for a while, but the most interesting thing, I think, would be another person. You might love them, you might hate them - if you were stuck in that room forever you’d probably have to kill them - but for better or worse, there is simple nothing more dynamic to us than other people.

With 20,000 people on each WoW server, in theory at least, it makes for a very interesting place. And people being what they are, they cannot help but develop a social structure. It’s framed by the parameters of the means governing their communication, and it’s not real life, but sociologically the two have a lot in common. It’s a winning formula.

Take a good game, insert people, and the result is tantamount to the digital equivalent of crack. A few weeks in, without you even noticing, your childhood trots back from the sunset, sneaks up to your desk and tugs at your trouser leg, wearing a sheepish grin, an apologetic look and a bit of a beard grown on its adventures. And floating next to it, looking as vague and opaque as any abstract concept should, is the Magic.

You know they’re going to play havoc with your social life. But you’re so pleased to see them you don’t mind at all. In your heart of hearts, you even find room to overlook the beard.