For various reasons, a few weeks back I found myself putting some time into what might be one of the longest running live games, World of Warcraft.  The quick and dirty is that I was looking for a way to engage with my friends who fell down a WoW hole, and I hoped I could brave those depths with them.  It did not work out.

Just to get this out in the open, there is no love lost between us because of this whole situation, it was a long shot and we all knew it.  World of Warcraft has always been the culmination of things I don’t enjoy that much, from its game mechanics down to its fantasy setting, it just was always something I looked at and sneered.  In my eyes, World of Warcraft is just in insanely boring, tedious and cumbersome experience, but my feelings are my own and I realize that.

I’m sure in my youth I would have been phenomenally shittier about playing the game, thus thoroughly ripping it apart for not checking all of my boxes.  But I’m not that idiot anymore, and I know that World of Warcraft brings people a lot of joy and satisfaction and that’s great.

For instance, the friend that I started playing World of Warcraft in a effort to reconnect with and I had a conversation about me bowing out of the game.  I expressed that it just wasn’t my thing and I appreciated him extending the olive branch.  We went on to talk about the guild he had built up and how proud of it he was.  With somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 members that engaged in multiple raid nights per week, he was able to look at this organization he started with pride. He equated it to the satisfaction I felt from leading our Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

I understood exactly how he felt in that moment.  It’s no surprise that people are proud of their creative endeavors especially if they’re successful, but when he equated it to what I do, it clicked in a way that it hadn’t before.

We will never see eye to eye on World of Warcraft or our gaming tastes in general, and that’s okay.  The important part isn’t that we’ve found a game we can actively play, cause while that would be nice, it would probably require us just developing our own game from scratch.  No, the important thing is that we keep trying to reach out to the other.  We want to play games together and we’re going to keep trying to to find that thing that hooks us both, which I can definitively say is not and never will be World of Warcraft.