At some point in my life, I had to make a solemn pledge to myself. There came a time when I had to hold myself to a certain promise, no matter how painful it became. You see, there was a time when I said:

Ian William Drinkwater, you will not, I repeat WILL NOT play World of Warcraft instead of hanging out with your friends, or your girlfriend, and so help me God, if you turn down sex to make a raid on time, I will kill you. Which is sort of like killing yourself.

That I even had to have this conversation with myself is indicative of how addicted a player can become to World of Warcraft. If you don’t play the game, you won’t understand it. And if you do play the game, you’re probably thinking: No way bro, no way you’ll hold yourself to that standard.

And sometimes, sometimes it gets hard.

All of this is rummaging through my head as news trickles out that Blizzard’s COO wants us idiots to play their new MMO on top of WoW. The delicate balance that socially functioning nerds have between their crack and their lives always threatens to tilt and sway towards the darkness of empty soda cans and baggy eyelids.

There’s been this shitty fake bow that I had been sweating forever in Ulduar, the latest virtual weapon that means nothing in real life that has no impact on my existence. And yet it does. Week after week it eluded me.   I swore and swore and found new exciting ways to chain together vulgar words like a fucking Ultra Combo in Killer Instinct.

And that’s what kept me coming back. Despite the monotony of the same fucking dungeon every week, despite the knowledge that I was squandering my life not writing, sitting in front of a computer screen, eating too much and staying up too late.

I needed that fucking bow. So I could shoot bad guys bigger, faster, more pwningly.

I had always defended my raiding life through various skillful rationalizations. You see, my guild raids at 10 p.m. It is the blessing/curse of my friend Brian choosing a West Coast server four years ago. So my rationalization always went like this:

Well, it’s a week night. And my girlfriend, being a functioning human being, who contributes to society, has to go to bed. She must sleep, because she isn’t a worthless parasite like myself. And so if she has to sleep, then I’ll be fine.

And to an extent, that’s true. If I lived on the West Coast, I couldn’t be raiding. In some ways, having to raid into the early morning is the only way it could work for me. There’s no way that I could spend every night from 7 p.m. until 10 p.m. in front of a computer. I’d miss dinner; I’d miss quality time with my girlfriend and friends.

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