Op-Ed

A Day in the Life of a WoW Addict

About a month into the relationship, I came over to his apartment for dinner one night, and he led me straight into the bedroom. Sitting on the bed was his laptop, withNo One Lives Forever loaded up and ready to go. I sat and played the game as he cooked.

After dinner, I lie there learning the ins and outs of Cate Archer and the H.A.R.M. Organization as he watched - something he's gotten used to; I really don't like sharing control of the keyboard.

It comes down to our play styles. I don't have the patience for his. I'm a guns- blazing kind of girl; he is more the logical, size up the situation for 10 minutes kind of guy. In the time it takes him to figure out a puzzle on paper, I will have clicked enough buttons that I can brute force my way to the solution. While he's planning his stealth attack, I run in with my grenade launcher and machine guns. When it comes to gaming, I take the dumb jock route, and he's on the debate team.

So, he's content to take the passenger seat. Our relationship, when it comes to gaming, ended up being the best of both worlds. He's just happy he's found someone who he can share it with, even if it means only having actual control of the game 5 percent of the time. I found someone who helped me see that something I'd enjoyed so much over the years was actually something I could pursue and enjoy in my own right.

Ever since then, gaming has become an integral part of both of our lives. Over the years, we'd tear through a new game every few weeks – FPS, sim, RPG, RTS, point and click adventures - you name it, we've played it. Most of the time we'd play on one computer, the occasional sim we'd play separate, but competitively. Until Warcraft. For the past three years, we probably have finished only a handful of other games. WoW keeps calling us back.

I still occasionally wrestle with the twinge that we've spent too much time in one game. I think of the games that have passed us by. I think of the opportunities we may have missed outside the game. Maybe down the road I'll slap my palm to my head for the time we sunk in trying to get an epic mount or in getting geared up to be raid-ready. But for now, we'll continue on in our adventures hand-in-hand, each in control of our own game.

And for now, I'll still find any excuse to log into the game when I should be working. Speaking of which, I wonder if my [Captured Firefly] sold.

When she is not battling beasties as a mage, skinning Azeroth's endangered species as a hunter, or pretending to be one of those endangered animals as a druid, Stacey Allen is a freelance writer based in upstate New York.