[WoW Thing] How Much Is Too Much Already?

No time to put together a Top X this week: work's been frantic. I have, however, had this sitting on the back burner for a few weeks... so I hope it goes some way toward hitting the pinch. What does that even mean?

It's a damned strange thing, this roleplaying that I spend so much of my time doing. One of the earliest posts on the now-defunct GAME OVER was, in essence, an excuse to explore the matter, and to quote Penny Arcade's Tycho on the topic:

“Sitting behind the screen, my notes heaped high with treasure for the virtuous few, it became clear that what I actually liked was telling stories in more or less real time: snaring bits of player conversation in order to make them flesh, confounding people, embroidering every act in an effort to simulate their worthy band at the highest possible resolution. I’d been so terrified of the responsibility for another person’s enjoyment that I’d forgotten what happens when it works: you are inviting other people to inhabit your mind. What a strange use of oneself that is; strange, and rare.” 

This is how Von games have customarily rolled. The players are creating a shared experience, certainly, but the environment which they’re experiencing and populating through their reactions, their decisions and their constant, charming bickering… that environment is me. I’ve played NPCs whose appearances have left me physically shaken, surprised everyone with the intensity of sudden, random events provoked by a player’s interaction with their surroundings, because I sublimate myself into the worlds my players explore.
What I hadn't expected of myself, at the time, is that I'd do the same thing when playing a character in someone else's game, to achieve almost by accident that sense of sublimation - a word, let's not forget, sharing its root with the philosophical and poetic concept of the Sublime, the capacity of nature or artifice to be profoundly moving, to shift consciousness out of the dull grooves of the everyday and into a kind of high gear, turning the mind into a machine of loving grace.

At some point, I shall write 'Confessions of an English Robot Fancier', and really put you all off your tea.

Or - crashing down to Earth again - if I were less charitable, I might call it obsession. The more I play my little WoW-RP character, the more I wander around battle-scarred Azeroth abusing the in-game chat function to talk to other characters like they're actually people, and do things which run parallel to the narrative experience as envisaged by Blizzard and yet frequently run counter to it*... the more I do that, the more I find myself writing fiction, and doing art** and even crossing several different lines at once by writing poetry from the character's point of view. Sure, I can justify it by saying that I'm working through The Ode Less Travelled, that I am in point of fact already a published poet, that it's more legitimate than wallowing in my own angst, but come on; I'm writing poems about being a blood elf. There has to be something a bit mental about that, right?
I'm beginning to understand where Robert E. Howard was coming from, when he described the process of writing Conan stories thus, in a letter to fellow pulpist Clark Ashton Smith:

I’m rather of the opinion myself that widespread myths and legends are based on some fact, though the fact may be distorted out of all recognition in the telling. While I don’t go so far as to believe that stories are inspired by actually existent spirits or powers (though I am rather opposed to flatly denying anything) I have sometimes wondered if it were possible that unrecognized forces of the past or present or even the future work through the thoughts and actions of living men.

This occurred to me when I was writing the first stories of the Conan series especially. I know that for months I had been absolutely barren of ideas, completely unable to work up anything sellable. Then the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immediately a stream of stories flowed off my pen or rather, off my typewriter almost without effort on my part. I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred. Episode crowded on episode so fast that I could scarcely keep up with them.

For weeks I did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan. The character took complete possession of my mind and crowded out everything else in the way of storywriting. When I deliberately tried to write something else, I couldn’t do it. I do not attempt to explain this by esoteric or occult means, but the facts remain. I still write of Conan more powerfully and with more understanding than any of my other characters. But the time will probably come when I will suddenly find myself unable to write convincingly of him at all. That has happened in the past with nearly all my rather numerous characters; suddenly I would find myself out of contact with the conception, as if the man himself had been standing at my shoulder directing my efforts, and had suddenly turned and gone away, leaving me to search for another character.

Don't worry, I'm not about to confess barking madness or anything, not about to hop onto Tumblr and proclaim myself a multiple system with an elf sharing my headspace. I do get where Howard's coming from, though. When I try to write something else, or play something else, there's that nagging sense of a tall woman *** with pointy ears and emerald eyes out there, somewhere, having adventures which are at some point going to need playing out and writing down. Maybe she'll go away, at some point, but I doubt it'll be soon. She seems to be having fun, and people - players and characters alike - seem to like her, despite her well-documented flaws. And there's no denying that the poetry keeps me occupied on the train.

Robert E. Howard, of course, committed suicide when he wasn't much older than I am. I've walked that particular line a few times, in the past; the year before I established GAME OVER and the six or so months around the Settling Series in 2010 were very low points, and I distinctly remember thinking twenty-five would be a good number to go out on, around the time of my birthday that year. Hark deserves much of the credit for pulling me through that, convincing me to quit the job that was driving me to vocal and psychological ruin (to this day I can't raise my voice without cracking something painful in the back of my throat). So, however, do the lads at Dice and Decks; it sounds deeply disturbed now, but at the time, living for the weekly game of Warmachine on a Friday night and the prospect of blogging it up on Saturday morning didn't appear to be too far-out an idea. So, for that matter, does World of Warcraft. It was 2010 when I started up again, started talking to people on the server's Looking For Role Play chat channel properly - I'd always been lurking there but been weirdly shy about getting involved - and finally rolled a character and devised an arc and thought "right, let's see how this is different from Vampire..."

I'm still alive, and you know what? Despite what I suspect to be a profound case of the galloping crazy, I'm not going anywhere. I'm not angst-ridden; I just play someone who is on the Internet, and I seem to be happier for it. That doesn't seem like a bad thing.


* - for example: some of my guildmates, in-character-wise, adamant that there's no such thing as Deathwing; the Cataclysm was a natural disaster, and the thing with the big black dragon was just a scam cooked up to defraud insurers and sell magazines. To be fair, it makes about as much sense as the expansions' actual plot, and has the added bonus of not being a vehicle for Chris Metzen's self-insertion fantasy persona to get his rocks off. To be less fair, these are the same peoplewho've been running their running gag at the expense of 3D TV and films for about three years now...

** - I never sketch, right? I dropped art classes like a hot potato at the age of fifteen and was invited not to come back, so understand the horror I feel whenever I find myself, pencil in hand, trying to capture something resembling humanoid anatomy.

*** - I'm not sure why I prefer to RP female characters in WoW. I'm aware of the creepy heritage surrounding the practice, and equally aware that some of the characters with whom Nivi interacts are played by actual women (for that matter, some of them are very obviously not, and played by men who I suspect have derived their knowledge of women from less-than-reliable sources). The known female players seem to like her, so I must be doing something right. I think, ultimately, I make the effort because I couldn't really play a female character in a tabletop environment; couldn't sustain the armchair-theatre stuff for long enough to have fun with it. The advantage of text-only RP is not having to Do The Voices all the time - and I know you don't have to do that at table, but I like to. Also, all male writers everywhere need more practice at creating and writing female characters. Even if you're good at it, you have to stay good at it. I try my best and it seems to be paying off.