WoW Shame

It's one thing to tell people, when asked, that you teach at Johns Hopkins University for a living. It's another to tell them that you're a cashier at the local McDonald's. I've done both, and I know the difference. One role seems acceptable, normal, enviable. The other, not so much. When it comes to hobbies or non-paying passions, it's one thing to say "I spend 6-8 hours a week playing in a local sports league." It's another to say "I spend 6-8 hours a week playing a massively multiplayer online role-playing game."

Although I've played WoW for almost two and a half years now, there's still an odd sense of discomfort, if not private humiliation, to admit to friends and family that I spend many, many hours online in a virtual world populated by elves, orcs, and creatures of magic. It's the ghost of elementary school Dungeons and Dragons, the A/V club, the geeks in the computer room. It's the people doing something that's important to them but seen by the rest of our culture as odd, different, outcast. It's WoW Shame.

It's not an uncommon reaction: mention to someone that much of your leisure time is spent playing in a virtual universe, socializing with virtual representations of real people, earning virtual money, and they'll look at you like you're wasting your life. You should be working in a soup kitchen, or playing an outdoor sport, or building things in the garage, not wasting away in front of a damn computer.

The inevitability that they miss, however, is that in a decade (or a little longer), this is how many, many people will be spending their leisure time. Gaming is no basement business focused solely on glasses-wearing geeks holed up in their dark bedrooms. The Activision Blizzard deal, valued at a measly $16.9 billion dollars, has demonstrated that there's money — very serious money — in this industry. First-person shooters may scream acne-infested teenage boy with poor social skills, but the real money, the serious money in gaming is now being made in the casual realm, the virtual realm, the social/creation realm. Sure, Call of Duty 4 is making serious bank, but WoW and Guitar Hero and the casual-focus of the Wii are all fast outstripping what the traditional platform shooter does in terms of business and gaming mindshare. This is where the future of gaming lies and where more and more and more of us will spend our leisure time. The gaming industry is bigger than the entire film industry, and is fast closing in on the television industry.

So those that view the online gaming realm as silly and wasteful may induce in us a sense of shame, the nagging that you may be wasting your life (and, really, learning a new language or helping the homeless or running for public office does more for the social good than does grinding out faction or raiding the Black Temple), we're just where they're going to be, or their children are going to be. WoW is a total time sink and there's no good reason to let it become your life and your only social outlet, and being a player is not really a creative exercise (unlike building mods or building the game itself) — though I suppose that the problem solving that comes with being the first in the game to figure out how to down a boss does require creative thinking — but it's not deserving of shame. It should be thought of as a great pioneering event, and we're part of that exploration.