Gamer's Guilt

Hi.  My name is Sharon and I'm a gamer.  "Hello Sharon."  I've been gaming most of my life.  I remember vividly in 7th grade math class Gordon Culp brought in these small booklets that had the title Dungeons and Dragon's printed on the front.  Those slim volumes were the original D&D set where halflings were hobbits and there was no such thing as THAC0 (to hit armor class 0).  We didn't get to play then, and long I pined for the chance.  It wasn't until college, actually, that I finally got my chance to play D&D and by then the slim tomes had turned into larger books.  My theatre buds and I would play, staying up late into the night and early into the morning.  We'd lead our band of intrepid heroes into whatever dungeon the Dungeon Master had planned for us.  It was all in our heads, and mabye a little bit on graph paper so we knew where we were standing before we attacked the great grendlackian gundlesnark. 

When I moved to New Jersery I found others that played.  By this time there was not just D&D there were many other Role Playing Gamers (RPGs).  We indulged in playing different ones, Champions - where you were a comic book hero.  Traveler - set in a science fiction universe.

While living in New Jersey I met the future - it was a D&D game that you played on AOL.  Your party was other people who were on AOL.  You didn't have to be in the room with them!  And no more graph paper with x's showing who's who.  You could actually see each other's character and interact with the monsters (although squatty pixelized sprits that they were)

It was then that any first person based supposed RPG paled in comparison to this real life interaction...ok cyber life interaction.  But sadly, AOL didn't keep the D&D game for very long and I fell into a gameless void.  I did play first person RPG's and they were ok.  Wing Commander was my favorite of those, but I never looked up on it as an RPG .. not really.  A true RPG you felt like your actions caused events.  I never really felt that with even Wing Commander.  I mean after all you're given 4 options to reply back to someone and it's pretty clear which reply you want to use.

Time passed and I moved to the Pacific Northwest.  A friend back in NJ told me about a text based roll playing game based on a TV show I liked ..Xena.  It was acutally based on Xena and Hercules and was set in ancient greece - the Golden Age as the shows called it.. when centaurs and humans roamed the land and the gods came down and played. 

I liked the game.  I had a character named Chikara who came from Southern Greece - so of course she talked with a drawl.  I made many good friends. And in fact, after a while, I became a Game Master for the game.  Game Masters are the people that keep on-line games runing.  Mine was a voluntary role, but in it I was able to be creative and write.  I hadn't written in years - a prolonged case of writer's block - so it was nice to write little snippets.  You see in a text based game you don't see anything, you have text on the screen describing what you see.   So you might come into an area and see a small park off to your left with a fountain gurgling.  Tall trees create a nice shaded area in the park...etc.  Then there are mechanisims to allow you to "interact" with say the fountain by typing "Look at fountain" then again you'd be told "The fountain is quite beautiful.  It appears to be made out of a single block of marble.  A carved pan rests ontop of carved stones, water trickles out of his flute.."you get the idea.

But sadly, even though it was a fun job, it was a job that didn't pay.  And I finally had to part ways with it.

Again I was without a game, until World of Warcraft came on the scene 5 years ago.  I'd found that friends at work played it and had a guild and so on.  I joined and played.  This was not really a true RPG since no one REALLY roll played, but the graphics were nice and teh story was good and I was playing with a great bunch of people.

When I took Novel Writing Boot Camp I stopped playing.  I canceled all my subscriptions and I concentrated on writing.  It was odd that since I'd spent so much time playing games that had fantasy or sci-fi components that I would choose to write historical fiction.  But heh, I was actually writing again after about 20 years of not.

So why the guilt?  I missed WoW.  I missed the people.  So the other day I loaded it up on my Mac.  Then I found the RPG game that actually, for the first time, made me feel like I was taking part in a fantasy novel.  It's called Dragon's Age:Origins.  I'm stunned at the detail, the characters, everything about it.  Instead of writing about the civil war I've been fighting dark spawn and trying to stay alive after I was torn from everything I've known and cared for. 

I think I also needed a break from research and writing for a day or three.  Now I'm ready to get back to things and not feel guilty about the occasional trip to Azeroth (world of warcraft) or Fareldin (Dragon's Age).