The running joke, for as long as I can remember in the MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) world, has been how certain games become, over time, the participative equivalent of the Eagles’ seminal storytelling opus Hotel California. If you don’t know the song, an innocent chap comes across a place to stop and rest on a journey through the desert, only to discover that once he signs in at the front desk, he’s never signing out again and is stuck there forever. For someone who relies on gaming as both a safe space and a place to grow and develop skills and abilities, this has always rung true.
Sim City taught me the value of planning long before any adult was able to make that idea stick. Sid Meier’s Colonization and Civilization simplified the concepts of action and consequence to a point where I began to accept how certain decisions that other people consider trivial I found upsetting and often poleaxing. When I was sick whilst pregnant with my son over 20 years ago, one game kept me sane when unable to be as active as I wanted. Diablo began the obsession with Blizzard Entertainment games.
Nearly nineteen years on, I’m back in a World I swore I’d never return to.
Lots of people over the years have sworn themselves away from World of Warcraft (which I will refer to as WoW from now on because it’s just easier) with a kaleidoscope of reasons and rationales. Many like me can now stand up and admit that they had, for part of their lifespans within the virtual world of Azeroth, at least some kind of an addiction problem. I heard it called compulsion too: the labels were and still are for other people’s rationalisation of circumstance and nothing more.
For a while, more importantly, it was the only place where I felt safe, and that I could truly be myself. That mindset changed very much for the better on my departure, and there are lots of worlds that have been self-built to serve that same purpose in the intervening period. Writing is the main one, and exercise is not far behind. Today, after a particularly brutal session of cardio and weights, an important realization clicked into place.
Back before knowing what it was that was truly wanted, there was no direction, simply existence. Living, sleeping and being were all that was possible. Distraction was the necessary relief from it all, but after a while, the lack of balance would become destructive. An ability to be what I have always truly desired was missing. That’s all changed. With CBT, support from friends and family and a proper game plan, that path to true satisfaction is now possible.
The reasons for leaving Azeroth when I did were manyfold: appalling behaviour by the game’s senior management, some poor decisions by people who’d been considered friends but ended up being anything but, and the acceptance that if my life was going to improve, I needed to address the issues that bought me to hide in a virtual world in the first place. When at the start of this year, poems about that period in my life began to emerge, I was torn. It’s taken the rest of 2023 to make the decision.
The game was resubscribed to at the end of October with the knowledge that I needed to go back.
The plan is to write a collection (which is at least 45 poems, but may end up expanding to 60) covering the period of game time (2006-2009) when I was regularly experiencing suicidal thoughts but could not find the ability to ask anyone for either help or support. It is only recently that I’ve felt able to talk about this freely, and there have been several important events recalled in-game during that time where that space was instrumental in pushing me into a better and more positive mindset.
A lot of this had to do with being in charge of a Guild of people who were only part-time players but who achieved a surprising amount of progress in the End Game environment (the space where players have reached the maximum level for their characters and now are trying to kill challenging virtual enemies in pre-built virtual environments called Raids).
As a result, these poems are already tied together with an inescapably narrative thread.
The newsletter will cover three areas in the next twelve months:
Reflections on my past experiences in-game from 2006 until I left in 2018,
Observations on new adventures as I return after a 5-year absence;
The poetry that Azeroth creates inside me, which will be both narrative and will be inspired by prompts in response to ideas, areas and content that I have encountered during my time in-game.
There’ll be separate spaces for all of these on the Homepage: we’ll be publishing our first weekly newsletter on Wednesday, December 27th and every week afterwards.
There’ll also be poetry, at least weekly too, and details on how the collection is shaping up. Plus, for those of you who need more, we’ll be publishing an occasional series of posts called Welcome to Azeroth, which will be a rough history of every expansion that has existed in the game so far and my place within them all.
Undoubtedly, this is a niche poetry interest that will not be for everyone. I’ll be honest here and state for the record that this isn’t about anything right now except providing myself some much-needed closure on a portion of my life that is still painful.
Sometimes, it’s important to give space for proper healing and reflection.
That’s why this project will always remain so close to my heart.