The Ineluctable Accrual of Time and Fantastical Experience: A Meditation on the Hills of Mulgore

I have no idea why I signed up for a 10-day trial for World of Warcraft on Friday. I would like to say that I was bored, but the truth is I'm bored all the time at my job, and I usually manage to coax my boredom (or perhaps harness it) by writing (a long email to friends and family), or reading (a novel, or the newest Taibbi), or sometimes even addicting(games.) Maybe it was because I'd had such a good work week - a great forward leap in all my many schemes had taken place. So, in much the same way that I feel good about eating sloppy and drinking nasty after a full week of Whole Foods and 24 Hour Fitness, so perhaps, after a week of such peak efficiency, I saw no reason not to delve into that wide world of personal inefficiency, video games.

Or maybe it was because I visited home last week - briefly. About a year ago, I put away my Playstation 2 and all my video games into a box, and that box was put into our new storage shack out back, which looks a little bit like a gigantic dollhouse, and so full of dust. But I was home, and I was bored, and I realized that I had never beaten the last level of "Kingdom Hearts." Like an addict discovering an unspent hypo, or perhaps more happily like a retired badman coming out of retirement for one last score, I put the fragile CD game (how long can those things last? Are they like fairies, dying away when no one's left to believe in them?) into the even more fragile PS2 (those things used to look so new and chic; now, they look like the wreckage of Manhattan in the background of the "Escape from New York" poster.)

Hooked again, I barely managed to stop myself at 2 in the morning from quitting right before an apt-to-be-hours-long final battle began. But the feeling stuck around. I don't know what that feeling is - I'm talking about why it's so fun to play video games in general, but why it's especially fun to play a gigantic fantasy game, with the bizarre set of reality-dominating rules, the steady build-up of yourself and your abilities and your outfit, and the inevitably horde of dragons.

But maybe that was going through my head, on Friday, when I pulled my desk against the wall and darkened my screen so that no passersby could see when I entered in my screen name and password.

Here's the thing: Warcraft works in a way that's somewhat different from any other game I've ever played. I'm not talking about what's specifically happening, since almost all of the specifics fade from memory almost immediately unless you're a complete mouthbreather, and even mouthbreathers who play Warcraft aren't usually monobrained enough to actually care if you kill Ramshackle Stirling of the attacking Beetlebum Castratos who reside in Tweedlepork Canyon or whoever the fuck was the chief of that tribe of weird man-beasts I killed in hour 4 of my great experiment.

No, the reason Warcraft works - at least at first, and I think also over time - is the steady accrual of spectacle and experience. When you begin, you're in a tiny little village - 4 or 5 little huts. You get sent out to fight annoying little birds and fearsome coyote things. After a little while, you kill enough coyote things to buy a new weapon. You think, "This weapon is the coolest fucking weapon ever." Using that weapon, you go after a new target: humanoid things. Along the way, you run into those birds and coyote things, and you kill them so much easier now, you can't believe they were ever a problem. The humanoid things are harder to kill, though: maybe, at one point, you get attacked by two at a time. You manage to kill them, though. Your village elder tells you: it's time to go to the next village.

You think: Well, what the hell, I get it. But the next village is bigger, and the enemies are fiercer, and slowly, you begin to get a sense for the deeper story. I'm a Minotaur-looking creature residing in a valley of Minotaur creatures - that's just about the whole world that I know now. But the whole valley keeps being attacked from all sides - dwarves to the west, goblins to the east, and I think I ran into a couple of centaurs at one point, appearing in my tiny little world like monstrous giants in Lilliput.

I can remember a similar kind of feeling in one of my favorite games ever, Final Fantasy VII. Early in the game, although for me it was many weeks in, you come upon this gigantic moat. Inside the moat, you can see a gigantic shape moving around. You go into the moat, and the shape comes towards you. You go into battle mode, and you're facing off against the largest creature you've ever seen - a gigantic sea serpent. If you're lucky, it kills your whole party in one move; if you're not lucky, you have long enough to get one hit in, which barely dents him.

Here's the thing: much later in the game, when your party has swelled, when you've gone through any number of new weapons and armor, when you've basically crisscrossed the world seven times and gone to hell and back, you may find yourself back at that little moat. And you step in there, and the shape comes towards you. And there you are again, facing the gigantic sea serpent. And if you strike first, no shit, you kill it completely. In one. And if it strikes first, it barely even dents you. The master become the pupil. The serpent become a lamb.

Here's another picture of my boy: