Narrative Essay: W-A-R-C-R-A-F-T -- Find out what it means to me!

    I didn’t have many friends growing up.  My brother enjoyed more social privileges than I did because my parents tried too hard to protect me.  They allowed him to roam the neighborhood on his bike for as long as he could ride without training wheels.  I finally won that ability after an argument with my mom at thirteen.  As a result of my parents' excessive concern, my interests focused on activities I could enjoy alone: video games chief among them.  I met my best friend Oscar in fourth grade through our mutual love of video games.  Eventually, World of Warcraft became the sacred direct link between my interests and friends and it served as the foundation of my social life both as a teenager and a young adult.

     At the start of my teenage years and shortly after moving to North Carolina I maintained contact with my Virginian friends over Xbox Live, Microsoft's online gaming platform.  While playing Call of Duty on my brother's account, Oscar told me that he and some friends of ours started playing World of Warcraft.  Warcraft had existed for at least a decade as a strategy game where the player controls entire armies, and I felt excited to try it from the more intimate perspective of a role-playing game where the player controls only one character.

     Later, in the second half of my freshman year of high school, I met my friend Jordan in gym class.  We often had to choose between participating in a team sport or walking around the running track, and we met because we both frequently chose the latter.  One day he revealed to me that he had started playing Warcraft with his cousin about the same time I did.  I introduced Jordan to Oscar and the others and we all became fast friends.

     Playing religiously with friends was critical for the game to hold my interest.  It has been simplified now that Activision (the publisher of Call of Duty) bought Blizzard (the developer of Warcraft) and wanted to appeal to a more casual audience, but when I started playing it was incredibly complex with a steep learning curve.  The subtle clues given by non-player characters made quest objectives elusive.  When players did find that cruel bandit, they found him surrounded by weaker minions and not everyone could fight them all without help.

     Alone, I would likely have given up and played something more accessible, but the excitement of triumphing against the odds with my friends made it all worthwhile.  I would come home from school and one of them would message me saying they found some cool new place or got some powerful new weapon.  The excitement of experiencing the game from several perspectives at once kept it fresh.  It also served as something Jordan and I could talk about at school.

     We all played together for my entire high school career, but after graduation I had an important question to answer:  what now?  College was always my goal but I never really thought about how to pay for it.  I looked at my brother’s slowly growing mountain of debt and decided that was not what I wanted for myself.  I took a page from my dad's book and decided to join the military so that I could pay for school. 

     After seven months of training and a few weeks of leave I found myself in Alaska.  I was farther than ever from my high school friends and family.  I made a few friends in the dormitory while I lived there, but few as strong as the ones from high school.  The inability to see Jordan in person made me sad, but I had already gone through that with Oscar.  We could all still hang out in-game and it felt like little had changed.

     As time passed, it became less common that all of us played simultaneously.  Real life obligations came up for each of us and we all started playing off-and-on.  Occasionally our lives would sync up so that we could all play together again like the good old days.  It always felt like a high school reunion minus the regret.  We’d explore new game content together and talk about our lives and then we’d slowly log in less and less until the next cycle.

     The cycle continued as Blizzard released new content for the game until January of this year.  On the seventeenth of January, I received the tragic news that my childhood friend Oscar had passed away.  His brother wrote me on Facebook, “Hello Jeffrey, as you may or may not know…there has been a tragedy in our family. Oscar passed away on Monday.” My grief was immense and still haunts me almost a year later.  At first I thought I’d never play Warcraft again because of all the memories tied to it, but now I find that I continue to play for precisely that reason.

     I take a bittersweet, nostalgic trip down memory lane every time I log in.  I still see him in my friends list with his status set to away.  Seeing that makes me sad, but it helps keep his memory alive. Blizzard announced some time ago that they planned to release a version of Warcraft similar to how it was when we all first started playing.  Jordan and I decided that we’d play it for at least little bit in his honor.

     World of Warcraft means more to me than a simple game.  It serves as my mall, my hair salon, my race track, my sports arena: the place my friends and I all meet up to hang out and have fun. Now it also serves as a living memorial to the greatest friend I’ve ever had.  Thanks to Warcraft I know that no matter where I live in the real world, my best friends are only a log-in away.