2005 Was the Year I Lost to World of Warcraft

If I’m going to pick out a specific year of my life within the last two decades, it would be easy to determine that 2005 sticks out in retrospect significantly more prominently than most of them. It was the year that I began attending the University of Illinois, studying for what would become a degree in journalism and cinema studies. It was the year that a scrappy Chicago White Sox team unexpectedly led the division wire-to-wire and went on to win the World Series, upending the defending champion Red Sox and favored Astros. It was the year that my first real relationship ended in a drawn-out, messy breakup. And yeah, it was the year of my life that I simultaneously lost to World of Warcraft. The back half of it, anyway.

So many of the specifics are now lost to the fog of memory, but I can certainly recall that I first encountered WoW before leaving for college, perhaps in the spring or summer leading up to the big move. The game had launched in the fall of 2004, and I was intrigued despite having never played an MMORPG because I was already familiar with the setting–as a longtime Starcraft player I had also delved deeply into Blizzard’s Warcraft III, obsessively following the strategy game’s development on forums at a time when details on game development were perpetually scarce. The idea of getting down onto ground level in that fantasy world was attractive for a kid like me, reared on Tolkien, still giddy from Peter Jackson’s recently concluded and miraculously successful Lord of the Rings trilogy. The lore of the setting hooked me in a way that other properties would never have been able to match.

Because to be honest, I wasn’t in most respects the ideal target demographic for a monthly subscription game like World of Warcraft. I remember feeling disdain for the idea of MMOs, or having joined in on the online hazing of that particular brand of earnest nerd who had been really into first-generation MMOs like Everquest or Asheron’s Call, which I saw as hopelessly chintzy. The roleplaying element of such games had never truly appealed to me in any real way, and I was still years away from participating in a tabletop D&D game for the first time. Moreover, I was an oddly frugal kid, one who clutched tightly to the meager funds he’d made through summers of lifeguarding leading up to going away to college. The idea of committing to a $10 or $15 per month cost (on top of the initial purchase) was no small thing for me at 18 years old, clutching my first-ever debit card. But I think that deep down, I already knew on some level how WoW was going to consume my free time. I figured I’d be getting my money’s worth.

And so, I made the plunge, right around the same time as I moved into my freshman year dorm. Between the introduction to classes and campus life, I was always retreating to my room, so I could plug away at the totally novel level-grinding and gold-grubbing process that was WoW in its early days. I quickly made some of the basic player decisions that would stick through hundreds of hours of playtime: I was going to play Alliance characters, because I liked the Eastern Kingdoms’ classical fantasy geography more than the Horde continent of Kalimdor. My main? A dwarf warrior, with flaming red hair. I won’t embarrass myself further by disclosing his profoundly stupid joke of a username. I dabbled in other classes and races as well, of course, but that warrior was the only one I ever leveled all the way to 60 in the vanilla WoW era. Pretty much all of my World of Warcraft memories revolve around him.

Those memories are increasingly jumbled these days, which probably shouldn’t be any surprise. How much gameplay should one really remember in a process that so often involved just auto-attacking a single enemy for minutes at a time, until you finally loot its body, turn in the quest, and then look for another 5 boars or 10 gnolls to collect? These fetch quests of WoW were often satirized, but rightly so–they made up the meat and potatoes of the experience, as did the gathering of every conceivable random bit of crafting material. Did I ever actually craft anything directly useful to my character? Doubtful, but you could always sell them at the auction house, right? My fondest memories of the game come from this early period, when it was still fresh–when the gibbering sound of a Murloc still promised some shred of exotic novelty.

As I sank into WoW, I was unsurprisingly missing out on some degree of socialization during my first year in college. To be frank, it was an escape during a lonely time, before I had put much effort into making new friends. My roommate had been discarded as a real possibility pretty quickly: He was a Taiwanese international student who may or may not have possessed some kind of ambition to achieve an advanced degree, but I’ll never know. We barely spoke; in truth we were barely ever even awake during the same periods. Every day he slept until after noon, while every night he stayed awake until dawn, obsessively losing money in online poker and playing loud K-Pop standards despite my pleas to turn it down. I’m not sure he ever attended a class. We immediately lost touch after I transferred to a new dorm sophomore year, but I’m fairly certain that he dropped out immediately thereafter. The most lasting memory he left me with was the intense awkwardness I was marinating in on the night that he got drunk and repeatedly wandered up and down the halls of the dorm banging on stranger’s doors, while the occupants of those rooms yelled at me to corral or control this drunk person I barely knew. Is it any wonder that hanging around in Azeroth seemed like the more attractive option?