World of Warcraft

Boss Fight Books

Los Angeles, CA

bossfightbooks.com

Copyright © 2016 Daniel Lisi

All rights reserved.

ISBN 13: 978-1-940535-12-8

First Printing: 2016

Series Editor: Gabe Durham

Book Design by Ken Baumann

Page Design by Christopher Moyer

For Joe

Contents

1. What I Talk About When I Talk About Warcraft

2. A Portrait of the Raider as a Young Man

3. Love in the Time of Blizzcon

4. Griefers, Trolls, and Other Monsters

5. More Than Our Avatars

6. What Keeps Us Coming Back

Notes

Acknowledgements

PART I:

WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT WARCRAFT

Hooked on a Feeling

In an aggressively hormonal and socially isolated stage of my life, I used World of Warcraft as a means of social connection, romance, entertainment, inspiration, and escape. When WoW came out on November 23, 2004, I was thirteen years old. I had been playing video games since the age of four, starting off my life-long passion with a Nintendo 64 console and all the greats of the time: Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Star Fox 64, Mario Kart 64, and GoldenEye 007. Shortly after its release, World of Warcraft was installed and ready to play on my computer, and I was about to enter a world that would impact me for the rest of my life.

In my nine years of gaming, never before had I seen a single title take such a massive audience by storm. The MMO dominated gaming media, so much so that it merited the creation of news websites dedicated entirely to World of Warcraft. One of the more popular WoW news sources at the time, MMOChampion.com, started in 2007 and during WoW’s prime brought in no fewer than ten million users a month.

The game soon burst out of its niche culture and into the mainstream, making headlines for its enormous financial achievement and its knack for drawing in gamers and non-gamers alike.

I was introduced to World of Warcraft by my stepdad Joe, a Navy man halfway through his two-year deployment in Okinawa, Japan when he met and married my mother. One afternoon, Joe took me to the mall on one of the first few one-on-one outings we had ever had: two strangers who were somehow required to build a parent-child relationship. He was eager to get on my good side, and I, as a manipulative thirteen-year-old, was eager to have him buy me shit.

We ended up in the EB Games store, and there it was: the game I’d been dying to play. I’ve heard so much about this game! I said, picking up the box of EverQuest II. Joe shook his head. No, no, he said, handing me a different box, one with an angry-faced green creature on the front of it, WORLD OF WARCRAFT emblazoned in gold font. Let’s play this instead.

This was the fall of 2004. Joe was on a two-month leave, but he’d soon be returning to Okinawa. It was difficult connecting with Joe when there was such a huge distance between us physically and emotionally. My mother had remained a single parent for nearly twelve years after divorcing my biological father, so my new father figure had to find a way to break down some emotional walls to connect with me. Joe intended to use World of Warcraft as a tool to bond the two of us so that we could play together, chat, and continue the experience even when he was overseas.

And to that end, his plan succeeded. While Joe was overseas, World of Warcraft served as our primary means of communication. We’d log on and literally squat our characters down on a bench somewhere in one of Azeroth’s grand cities and type away to each other. This method of bonding worked for us. We kept each other up to date and explored the fantasy realm quite a bit together, playing the roles of father and son in a virtual world.

But what Joe could not have predicted was that World of Warcraft would soon became a lifestyle for me. I eagerly avoided the eighth grade social world to spend more time in Azeroth, replacing outdoor activities and in-person hangouts with in-game events and dungeon raids. Eventually I joined a guild, a group of players who team up to face the game’s tougher content, and my dedication for WoW only increased from there.

In other words, I’d bought into the full World of Warcraft experience, one that can be broken up into five phases:

Pay Blizzard. After purchasing the game client for $50, you must set up an online subscriber account that charges you a monthly fee of $15 to retain online access to the game.

Early-game. Pick a character faction. You can take sides with the mighty Horde or the honorable Alliance. Pick a character race. If you teamed up with the Horde during the classic unexpanded version of WoW, you could be a brutish Orc, a gangly and stoner-y Troll, a peaceful shamanistic Tauren, or one of the cursed Undead. If you took the Alliance route, you could be a run-of-the-mill xenophobic fantasy Human, a tall stoic Night Elf, a crafty Gnome, or your typical loud bombastic Dwarf. Finally, pick your class. Each faction has the Warrior, Mage, Warlock, Druid, Priest, Rogue, and Hunter to choose from. The Paladin used to be a class specific to the Alliance, and the Shaman used to be specific to the Horde, but Blizzard has since made all classes available to all factions.

Mid-game. The level cap before any of the expansions was 60. If you found yourself between levels 30 and 40, you had a pretty good sense of whether or not you were in it for the long haul. Statistically, players would drop off around this point if the game wasn’t their cup of tea mechanically, or if they didn’t have anyone to play with online. I was not a part of the minority that fell away, which brings us to…

End-game. Once you hit level 60 it was time to venture forth into the game’s top-level dungeons. Dungeons are challenging areas where you take a party, a group of exactly five players, and send them into a dangerous zone to defeat its bosses and earn the dungeon’s coveted rare items. These items are designed to make your character powerful enough to eventually face raid content. Raids are huge dungeons made for 40-player groups to combat against World of Warcraft’s toughest enemies. Nowadays raids only require between 10 and 25 players, but back in the un-expanded World of Warcraft, raids necessitated a group of 40 individuals to team up and not only play