You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) (15 page)

She was a yar pirate friend. So it was sad when things went off the rails SO BADLY for her.

A new guy, “TreeMaster,” joined the crew a few months in, and he and LadyLee started chatting with each other privately. A LOT. I’d load cannons (in a PINBALL Tetris-like game) and gossip with Ploppyteets about the Lee-Tree relationship.

“Are they on her ship together in
private chat
again?!”

“Uh-huh. Wow, my kid is a crap fountain, how do you plug them up? There’s no manual with this thing.”

Things escalated, LadyLee and TreeMaster bought a ship together (hello, virtual commitment!), and I could sense something was going too far between them. I tried to caution her.

“You and TreeMaster are hanging out a lot, is that a good idea, Lee?”

“Oh, Howard and I just like working together, that’s all.”

I stopped typing in shock. HOWARD? They’d advanced to real names?! This was serious!

But LadyLee seemed so much happier after she met TreeMaster (as much as you can glean emotion from alphabetical letters placed together in a chat interface), and I felt bad about being negative. LadyLee was an adult, she had things under control. Plus, their ship was SO FAST, who was I to judge if they worked that well together?

An acting job took me out of town for two weeks, and when I returned to the game, everything in the crew had collapsed. The only person I could track down online was Ploppyteets. I typed to her, frantic.

“Where is everyone?!”

“New Mead Brewing mini-game just got released. I’m balls at it.”

“Um, ok. Where’s LadyLee and the crew?”

“She dissolved the group. Won’t be online anymore :(”

“Why not?!”

“She left her husband last week for TreeMaster, he found stuff between them on her computer, and I guess she’s losing custody of her kids. She hasn’t logged on since we talked last week.”

“WHAT?!” Because of sailing the pixelated seas, this woman’s whole life had collapsed? “Are you kidding?”

“I wish. Bonus, my baby has a thing called ‘colic.’ I’m looking to trade her in for a Chevy if you know any takers.”

That was the last day I ever played Puzzle Pirates. I was worried
about LadyLee and felt incredibly sorry for her but had no way to contact her outside the game. I didn’t even know her real name. It felt helpless to care about people I’d never meet, who could disappear on a dime. I would miss Ploppy, too (even though I worried about the future of her offspring), but it was too hard to play anymore.

It had gotten too real.

That eight-month “Yo-ho-ho!” sideline made me aware of my personal slippery slope in the online gaming area. It was VERY slippery. But I rationalized that my brother was reaching out to “bond” with this new MMORPG game, and that was something I couldn’t turn down. And if something went wrong, at least I knew how to reach him via phone to say, “Don’t leave your husband and children for a random guy named Howard who’s really good at virtual carpentry!”

I bought World of Warcraft in the summer of 2005, right after I lost a part in a television pilot to a girl who looked EXACTLY LIKE ME. Red hair, pale lumpy face, if you squinted at our head shots we looked identical. And it was depressing. To come in second choice to . . . myself? So I installed the game and created my first character, named? You guessed it. Codex.

In this game, people group themselves in private “guilds” instead of “crews.” My brother was a member of a guild of players called Solaflex, and it was for “little people” only, which sounds offensive, but the fact that everyone had to be a gnome or a dwarf character was funny at the time. Because they’re all short. Other players who were not gnomes or dwarves were tall. So in-game, when you ran around together, it was a tinier group of people than average.

You had to be there.

I created a Rogue (Thief) character, because I enjoy channeling my inner kleptomaniac, and stepped into a world so real, so “graphically advanced,” that as I hopped around in the starting area, clutching my little beginner dagger, I fell in love. Deeply. Unutterably. In love. This probably sounds strange to nongamers. I understand. The best analogy I can make to real life is this:

You know how sometimes you go to another city and, while driving around, you see a house that looks so cute and inviting that you fantasize about what it would be like to drop everything in your life and just move there? Like, you see a cottage while on vacation in Belize, and think,
Prices are dirt cheap, people look chill, let’s DO THIS!
It’s a feeling of new possibility. Of starting fresh. Imagine capturing a kernel of that in your own life
right now
, by sitting at your computer and paying $15.00 a month in subscription fees.

That’s what it’s like to bury yourself in a virtual world.

And it WAS a completely new world. With hundreds of players running around, animals attacking you, different categories of chat rooms, tons of buttons and commands, at first, I was lost. Every two minutes I’d type to my brother for help.

“Which buttons move me?”

“Where is my backpack screen with my clothes in it?”

“What is ‘leveling’ and how does it work?”

“I’m stuck in a wall, can you come get me?”

All these questions are the real-life equivalent of, “What is this thing at the end of my arm, and how do I close it around items to lift them?”

After giving me a brief, thirty-minute crash course of the logistical life of being a gnome, Ryon went to play with his fancy level 60 friends and left me in the baby starting area alone, an innocent level 1, to be killed over and over by virtual spiders and boars. (Classic sibling behavior.)

Thinking back on that introductory experience, I can never blame anyone for saying, “I don’t get video games, they’re too intimidating.” They can be. VERY. And unfortunately, chances are that an anonymous teen gamer on the other side of your monitor will respond to appeals for help with, “It’s easy. Get with it or get out, asscrack.” There’s no easy way of getting into the hobby even if you WANT in, so a lot of people, especially girls, give up. The learning curve is too steep to climb.

But don’t worry. I climbed it. The hard way.

Over the next months, I played a few hours a day, but TERRIBLY. I didn’t know I had special skills to kill things faster, so I did the basic “STAB” attack over and over. It took upwards of two minutes to kill each creature. It should have taken ten seconds. And I died a lot. It was not fun. I got frustrated and finally typed to my brother.

“Sorry, but I think I’m done with the game. It’s too hard.”

“What? Twelve-year-olds play this game, what’s too hard about it?”

“It takes too long to kill things. My mouse finger hurts.”

“Did you not level your talent tree? Are you using Sinister Strike followed by Eviscerate?”

“YOU’RE SPEAKING GNOMISH TO ME!!! I’M MAD AT YOU! HELP ME PLAY PLEASE!”

“Okay. Fine. God.”

That night we started brand-new characters together. Gnomes again, of course. My new character was named Keeblerette, and I put tall, white, penile-inspired hair on her. Something I regretted instantly. It was not, at the time, reversible.

Ryon created a warrior girl named Mochi with pink Princess Leia buns, and we were ready to rock the virtual world together!

We advanced our characters to the max level after about two months of playing. We played and played and played, a few hours every night, and I used all the right buttons my brother taught me, and it was awesome. Chatting with each other in the game was so fun, like texting while driving. Except not dangerous and illegal.

“Let’s go to the swamp area.”

“No, let’s do the undead area first! Watch me blow up this slime monster!”

“Wow, so much goo. Dance in it!”

No dungeon could defeat us, no monster best us. Actually, that’s not true, we died about five million times each, but we were stronger together than on our own. (*After school speciaaaal!*)

All the exuberance and sense of purpose rubbed off on my real life. I started walking around feeling . . . happy. A casting director was rude to me, and I thought,
Gosh, she probably had a bad day
, rather than dry-heave sobbing in the car afterward. A part of Hollywood-defeated Felicia Day was “fixed” by my double life as a tiny little penis-haired gnome. Getting the opportunity to know Ryon as an adult through playing the game together was a huge part of that. And why I fell in love with the game so much. It felt empowering to prioritize our time together, rather than living at the beck and call of acting appointments. Even if it was just, “Let’s kill that skeleton boss tonight!,” it felt like I belonged somewhere with him. Finally.

Before you say, “Wow, this chick is on a nerd plane of existence I can’t relate to” , the thing about a computer game character is that a part of you BECOMES that character in an alternative world. That little gnome Keeblerette was an emotional projection of myself. A creature/person who was more powerful, more organized and living in a world where there were exact parameters to becoming successful. “Kill forty wyverns, get points that make you stronger. Check!”

When we graduate from childhood into adulthood, we’re thrown into this confusing, Cthulhu-like miasma of life, filled with social and career problems, all with branching choices and no correct answers. Sometimes gaming feels like going back to that simple kid world. Real-life Felicia wasn’t getting more successful, but I could channel my frustration into making Keeblerette an A-list celebrity warlock, thank you very much!

During those hours of playing, I befriended a lot of the other members of my brother’s guild, just like with my old pirate crew. And even though they could all theoretically disappear on a dime, it was comforting to start up the computer after a day of feeling like an idiot because I had to pretend to drive a car by steering with a fake prop steering wheel, extolling the “Amazing Honda handling!” at a commercial audition. It felt like I could endure any lack of fulfillment in my career as long as I knew my “friends” were online to play with when I got home.

6/7 16:51:26.790 Keeblerette has come online.

6/7 16:52:18.553 YoMamaz: Oh yeah, new helm timez!

6/7 16:52:27.803 YoMamaz: Hey Keeb!

6/7 16:52:41.752 Mochi: Yo Keeb.

6/7 16:52:57.504 Spitball: Keeb wassup?!

6/7 16:53:01.110 Spitball: Finally we can get some fun started!

It was like
Cheers.
But where absolutely no one knew your name.

[
 My Professionally Destructive Gaming Career 
]

The big move in my/Keeblerette’s virtual life was about six months after I started playing. My guild decided to advance to a more complicated part of the game, which moved me from gaming hobbyist to full-time addicted employee of World of Warcraft.

The game has especially challenging areas that require getting large groups together called “raids.” In the early days when I played, these events required forty people logged online AT ONCE for up to
eight to ten hours
at a time. Clearly, the programmers didn’t have
enough real-life social relations, or that basic design concept would never have occurred to them.

It was a nightmare. Have you ever thrown a party and tried to get EXACTLY three dozen
specifically qualified
people to attend? Even if they RSVP, half of them never show up, right? And if enough people don’t show up, you can’t throw the party. So you have to recruit random people at the last minute who you’ve never met before to fill up the roster. And
they
turn out to be greedy eleven-year-olds from Estonia, who you’re FORCED to keep around in order to limp through the evening’s festivities, and . . . yeah. Just typing all that out gave me stress flashbacks.

After attempting it a few times, our guild decided it was too small to attempt one of these fancy raids alone, and we joined forces with a slightly bigger guild named Saints of Fire. These guys took their gaming SERIOUSLY. In order to participate, everyone was required to install voice chat software so the leaders could coordinate everyone’s actions verbally during the fight. Like air traffic controllers. This also meant that we would finally be able to hear one another’s voices for the first time. It was a move that was . . . socially terrifying.