Last night I experienced something truly bizarre. I was sitting in the pub with my long-suffering RL Friend, talking my usual gibberish about online gaming.
Indeed, I DO sometimes leave the house and see Other People, you know, ‘IRL’. Even in the depths of my obsession there still remains a part of me that periodically throws out images of ‘The Comic Book Guy’ from The Simpsons and whispers, “That’s you, that is…”, so I do try to maintain some kind of tie to the real world; pubs, people, conversations, that sort of thing. ‘Superficially Normal’, I aim for.
Anyway, we’re sat at a table in a pub and I’m yammering on about ‘The Ethics of PvP’, a personal soapbox of mine for many years, ever since my first tour of duty on Rallos Zek (“This takes me back to ‘zek...Johnnie! JOHNNIE!”). My friend, who has heard all this before many times, was pretending to listen like usual.
And then the chap at the next table pipes up:
“Excuse me; I couldn’t help overhearing…you’re talking about online gaming, right? Which game are you on about?”
Next thing I know, I’m reminiscing about Anarchy Online, in the bad old days pre-Notum Wars, when merely stepping out of a Wompa at 2HO was enough to get you instantly hit for more Aimed Shot Damage than you would ever have hit points to cover, with a complete stranger. It’s not something you expect really - that kind of thing is for Football Fans, surely?
I’d always assumed that I was more or less alone in my hobby. Yes, clearly there are other players in these games, but they’d always struck me as being few and far between, an abstract and remote thing, and just as unwilling to open themselves to abuse from ‘cool’ people for pretending to be an elf or whatnot in their spare time. Game shops only have maybe two or three copies of the average MMORPG, and I've never seen anyone else buying any. MMORPGs are something to be hidden, like being in some proscribed cult. You rant about them anonymously online, and maybe tell selected real life friends about, knowing that at least their ridicule is good natured.
But now I wonder if perhaps I’m not alone? Maybe the guy next to you on the bus is also a Tauren Shaman? Perhaps the girl in accounts is a Twi’Lek Bounty Hunter?