When World of Warcraft: Season of Discovery released over a year ago, I had the pleasure of exploring the Alliance side of the map. Many years ago I only played the Horde, whether to be a hooligan or a contrarian – so nevertheless the days accrued. There was a recent announcement for a refresh of World of Warcraft: Classic. New servers on the 21st. Such news would prompt anyone to reflect for a moment, wouldn’t it?
The first few levels are a tad magical; a feeling of promise, or at least a trajectory toward somewhere. Of course the higher mind knows this is a delusional spell but you’ll gladly bask, whether for a break or for a desperation.
Though what’s particularly unique and, for whatever reason, maybe not so often talked about, is that after enough go-arounds – whatever the game – so the body begins a “lock up” as best described. It usually happens after the first three hours. The chest feels a tad tighter and the throat starts to constrict slowly and surely. And the gut drops deeper until it portals into your skull and floods your mind with its bile.
Bargain you might with each quest turn in and acquisition, the same as bordering the dam to break. That while tapping around and spinning about, feeling as a tourist in a forgotten land, more of a burial grounds, reading dialogues coded up 20 years ago – so one sees the Sun setting everywhere. Wherever you are, and the crowds dissipate in a hunt for nothing. Only some linings of frost.
You can rationalize it all you want. We could talk about how it’s because, of course, there is no objective. That however much time you spend on the hamster wheel, of whatever game, so when you turn off the computer you feel your skin sag as you get out of the chair. One could also just say it’s a curmudgeon evolution. Or just a visceral understanding that the magic spells that worked when you were younger don’t work anymore.
However rationalized, so we sit together in this reflection. And I thought this was only localized to games, though now it’s dawning on me that the “lock up” is everywhere. That the “lock up” is a primordial warning signal: “You are not supposed to be here, what are you doing? What is this?” All those sitting in your blood take turns spreading the dread to – hopefully – prevent later regrets.
They aren’t wrong. Whatever experiences you got out of WoW, you got. It’s done. You have accomplished the task and consumed the experience. There is nothing left, other than huffing as the addict could. But if, instead, we frame each game, or any other experience, as a teacher bestowing a lesson, then perhaps the “lock up” effect becomes all the more clear.
You’d be the absurd gremlin to lurk around Tutorial Island all your time, if you ever played RuneScape. The whole point is to go explore beyond!
Under this lens, it feels like most of modern life – the usual circuits one may be caught in – feels like Tutorial Island. You’ve seen all of this, know their ends, and so one may wonder, when should one leave Tutorial Island? Why does one keep roaming a place they know every corner of? A comfort slowly snatched away, however long you’d fend off the fester.
However longer you stay your welcome, so one only cripples the trek onward. It’s just nice to drown in a warm bile rather than the potential void ahead is all. But the fact persists: if you want to venture beyond Tutorial Island, the boarding station requires you to drop all prior identity and start again.
Which is a little scary, and there’s no promise of warmth anytime soon. Is there surely anything worth it, beyond this island of canned experience? I don’t know, but donning the cloak and exiting the tavern – as the classically portrayed fantasy novel describes – is inevitable it seems. A party of one, out to the fjords, for however long, and wherever their burial shall rest. But at least a chapter to close, rather than to tarnish with expansion pack to pack of the same constricting once more. Sometimes it’s best to pull off the band-aid, before it heals.
Despite how depressing Made In Abyss is, this is probably the best theme out of it. That you can be either the one who keeps trying to form nostalgic sand into castles. Or you can be the one in search of a novelty born, however deep the ravine goes.
As the latter you always got something to lurk ahead for. It seems like a cheat code.
However dark it gets.