Why do you play who you play?
I think this is one of those questions that’s probably been asked and answered many, many times, but it’s something I like to come back to. I look at Elsen, with her never-changed hair style or colour, her body shape I am so used to seeing, her in tree form, occasionally, slightly disturbingly, her in battle chicken form.
Playing her feels like second nature.
It feels like second nature to drop into cat and hit Dash after a wipe and a reentrance into ICC, secretly racing all the other druids back to the boss (I spent two hours wiping on heroic PP last night, bare with me if my mind is a tad squiffy today). How many other druids do that? I bet it’s almost all of you.
Elsen was born on January 1st, 2008.
I don’t know if I’ve told this story before, but I actually played World fo Warcraft for ten days before that, on the trial. I had read about some people playing it on a now-defunct music forum I used to post on, and decided to give it a go.
I downloaded it, I started a human mage – I liked magic, and I liked being a human, and I liked being able to make someome look pretty. I called her “Sophierach” – I had no understanding of character names.
I made my way from Northshire Abbey, pootled around Goldshire, and then I had to log off. Goldshire was busy, and I was having serious problems logging off. How do I save my game??? I was panicking…
I ended up talking to someone sat on the ground with <AFK> above their head. They didn’t respond. I thought they were very rude. Some kind soul eventually said to me – they aren’t at their keyboard. And you don’t need to save – you just log out.
Apprehensively, log out I did.
I ended up making it to level 16 (no talent points spent, no gear upgrades), and one day logging out in Westfall and going to PC World to buy myself the full game. Home I came with the battlechest, and I typed in my code.
Cannot be authorised – incorrect region.
Yes, I had in fact spent the past 10 days playing with the Americans. No wonder there was never anybody online when I was.
So, I started from scratch. I reinstalled the whole game, and in the Battle Chest box my games had come in, there was a game guide. A double page spread on each race, information on all the classes…perfect for me to make an informed decision. So, in the many hours it took the game to install I chose my character.
1. I had just done the first 16 levels as a human. I didn’t want to do them all again – that knocked humans off the list.
2. The horde were dead (forsaken), ugly (orcs), animals! (tauren) and had TUSKS (trolls). Blood elves were an option but that meant I’d have to play with the rest of the horrible crowd. Alliance it was.
3. draenei…wtf? No thanks.
4. Gnomes + Dwarves. Let it be known I have only dated a man shorter than me once. He was only shorter than me by an inch but it caused major problems. I realise at 5ft7 I’m pretty tall for a girl, but seriously – I can’t deal with short things. Gnomes and dwarves – both out.
5. That leaves me with night elves – not too bad, if it wasn’t for the massive fuck-off ears and glowing eyes, they look almost human.
So I knew I had to be a night elf.
How did I choose my class?
My options were a priest, a hunter, a druid, a rogue, or a warrior.
1. I don’t like “fighting” per se. Big swords and stuff…not really me. I liked magic n shit like that. Zelda, that sort of thing. Bye bye warrior, bye bye rogue.
2. the pet mechanic…wtf? totally confused me. bye bye hunter.
3. starts to read up on druids….”I GET TO BE A KITTY CAT? OMFG AWESOME ROLL A DROOD”.
So, I choose a druid.
Elsen was born.
I’m looking at the character creation screen, and thinking – fuck me them ears are big. I need hair that’s going to COVER those as much as possible. Long hair, no ponytails, nice and girly going down her back.
Blue? Green? nah…I need something more person-like – silver/grey. That’ll do.
Now…a name. She looks kinda…vikingy. Let’s give her a vikingy name. *Opens Tamora Pierce book reading at the time. Sees the name Elsren for a boy. Let’s make that a girls name…*
And she’s stayed that way. Elsen is now, as Elsen was on 1st January 2008, when I clicked whatever button it is you start with – Start Game or whathaveyou.
And I watched the starting sequence, and got thrown into killing nightsabers, wandering around Teldrassil et al.
Els levelled as balance, and from roughly 20-45 levelled alongside two feral druids I met in Darkshore. I gave the healz, they did the pewpew.
“Old school levelling” – you know, where you meet people and do stuff together. It was awesome.
I think I’ve said before, Elsen has truly developed a personality as time has passed, but mainly in that she’s become very much like me. Although I have a human character, and a space goat, and others, it’s only when I hear Elsen’s combat noises/vocals/spell not ready yet etc that I really pay attention.
I was levelling my pally through Zul’Drak over the weekend and kept wondering what girly human kept squeaking. Then I realised it was my girly human.
It is when I play Elsen that I play ‘myself’. On Sapph, or the others, I have…a part of me in there somewhere, a little bit of me, but they do, over time, take on their own little mini personalities, own little mini backstories.
I’ve spent so much time with Els ove the past 2 and a half years that she has truly become like me, she is me in many ways and when I log back on to her it’s like coming home.
I don’t think I could ever swap mains. Whatever they do to druid healing, I’ll always be a druid, and I’ll always be a healer. I’ll always be Elsen, with Elsen’s back story, Elsen’s achievements, Elsen’s gear, Elsen’s vanity pets, mounts, bank full of shite, Scepter of the Shifting Sands, eclectic collection of old tier gear, slightly cynical looking stare, very occasionally changing facial tattoos, Elsen’s preference for a horse over a nightsaber, and every other little quirk she/I/we have.
World of Warcraft is a strange thing. It has masses of social stigma attached to it still. I don’t know anybody IRL who games like I do. Friends of friends, occasional other people I have a slight bond with over ‘gaming’, when boys are on that, “would you like me more if I played WoW” thing they pick it up for a bit…but I still feel very much an outcast.
I think throughout my entire life I’ve been/felt like an outcast – at school I hated stereotypes. I hated people that tried to fit in. I hated the fact almost my entire year at school smoked pot just because 6 months earlier we’d had a new kid and he did it and he was cool. I was quite happy spending my lunchtimes and break times working in the library. My mum was the school librarian – I ate with her if I could do in order to avoid my peers. I knew most of the teachers on a first name basis.
I got bullied consistently throughout school for being overweight – Shrek, Fat Mountain amonst other names and whatnot. They really, really hurt. I left school and spent an utterly awful year at university doing a course I didn’t want to do in a subject I didn’t enjoy. I was surrounded by superficiality, nasty people, gossipy, bitchy girls. I made one real friend, who I still know now, and who I hope to see again soon (after having not seen her for like, a year).
But then there was Warcraft. Through Warcraft I have met people who have appeared, and disappeared. I met a man called Dan who I will always look up to and worship as both my temporary psychiatrist and someone who always gave me sound advice.
I saw marriages fail because people used Warcraft to find other partners, I saw guilds fail because people fucked people they shouldn’t have fucked. I made a couple of stupid mistakes myself that’s for sure. I’ve given my all, my whole being to a set of people only to feel totally worthless, and then I’ve moved on. I mean…I miss Nyo, and my other friends from Flames, but there’s not a lot I can do about it.
And of course, I met Zal, who is my best friend, my confidante, my agony uncle, my saviour, my lifeline, someone I can depend on, someone I can trust, someone I adore.
It pains me sometimes to see the friendships that I’ve lost, be it, through moving guilds, through people quitting the game, through personal disagreements, but I also love the new friends I’ve made – my new class leader, Dal, a lovely lady boomkin, Thimian, who is fabulous to talk to. My new GM, of course. The people I interact with throughout the days (although apparently my love for Jeremy Kyle has awarded me the nickname “Chav-Chick”, not too sure if I like that one or not…). They are all lovely, and I hope these friendships continue as well.
Warcraft gives me a release school, university and work never has done. People see me for me – my neuroses, my madness, my quirkiness, my total OCD, but also my reliability, my loyalty, my tendency to give something/someone my all, and all the squishy love I’ve got in my heart that I dedicate to my friends and guildies.
My life is a real rollercoaster of emotions. I recently realised that I’d spent 10 months looking after someone, caring for someone, loving them with all my heart and soul, supporting them through all manner of things, only for them to turn round and reject me straight out, yadda yadda yadda (ie, there is more, but it’s boring and your typical story of someone knowing how strong someone else feels for them and using them for their own ends and then getting bored). I sort of came to this crazy realisation that rather than looking after them I was actually allowed to look after myself, and that I was allowed to be important in my life for a change. They didn’t like that, and have been quite nasty in a way I haven’t seen before.
If it hadn’t been for WoW, and mostly for Zal and Dalmont, I don’t know what state I’d be in. They’ve helped support me through it and looked after me through it, and I’m eternally grateful to them for it.
I want to say thank you to them, thank you to all the lovely peoples on Twitter, thank you to all my lovely guildies. And thank you to my readers for putting up with my squishyness, my inconsistent posting, the fact I can talk for hours about absolute shite, and for carrying on reading.
Here’s to three years of Warcraft for me, nearly 6 years for many of you, and to many more years of WoW to come.
Is there anything anybody else can reflect on that WoW has done for them or changed for them since they started playing? Any friendships or relationships that have been forged and since then broken or unbroken? And most importantly – something to reflect on. We may be “geeks”, we may be “nerds”, we may be weirdos that play a computer game. But does it matter, when we get so much pleasure, so much happiness and so much support from not the game that Blizzard has produced, as such, although that is of course a massive source of enjoyment and one I will be very sad to lose, when it finally does go, but support from the people we’ve met, the community we’re growing, and the lives we’re leading?
I love that fight.

