Devious Bec

I miss my dream scam artist girlfriend already. We were so great together in the X-Files musical and it was amazing how you scammed our way into it. I hope your dad liked our performance it was a pleasure to meet him.

If dreams can ever become reality, let this one be first.

I'm a dreamer, I dream a lot. Every night in fact, and I remember a fair amount of them. I've never really had recurring dreams however and always thought it sounded like fun. Well, I've started having one recurring dream and I hate it and I'm going to blame Activision Blizzard for it because it's their fault really. But before I talk about any of that, let me give you my life story.

Growing up on Warcraft

Warcraft (and by extension World of Warcraft and Starcraft) was a huge part of my life growing up. Warcraft: Orcs & Humans was the first videogame I ever played for more than a few minutes. In 2001 we got a new PC, running an operating system with a big number for the new millennium, Windows 2000. I was 6 years old. My brother was excited about having a computer at home that we could play games on and when he came back from visiting his dad one time he brought a CD with him. It took a while to install as I recall, and for a long time we hadn't figured out how to enable sound in the game, but there it was, Warcraft. My brother asked me if I liked orcs or humans more, I had no idea what an orc is but said orcs anyway, so he started the human campaign instead. For a few months until he went to visit his dad again the only games we had beside Space Cadet Pinball were Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Croc: Legend of the Gobbos which we got out of a cereal box. Every time he came back from a visit with his dad my brother brought new games: Age of Empires 1 and 2; Starcraft; Command & Conquer: Tiberium Sun and Red Alert, Dark Reign 2 (most of my early videogame exposure was RTS); Spider-Man; Heavy Gear; and then all the demo discs, at some point he got a subscription to PC Powerplay magazine and I got to experience bits and pieces of all sorts of games. Warcraft was the first though, and getting Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos at some point in 2003 really cinched it that these games would be a big part of my life, everyone I was friends with played it and it was like an omnipresent monolith to which everything I did related back to for the next half a decade. Up until the last few years I said that it was my favourite game, there was no contest.

Which brings us to World of Warcraft, that thing. 2008, my dad had finally had enough of the cheap-at-the-time 2003 Acer desktop PC he'd bought and, convinced by their TV advertising, decided to buy a brand new 2008 iMac. I went to the Apple store with him for the purchase because he relied on my wise counsel. I knew we were getting this thing, he'd been talking about it for weeks, and I had a plan: I was going to play World of Warcraft, the time was now. On our way out of the Apple store after my father had just spent $1800 or so as a struggling single parent, I spent my welled up courage asked him if we could go to EB games. I told him I wanted to play World of Warcraft, explained that there was a subscription for it and everything. He seemed a bit apprehensive, but I also told him that my brother plays it, and it's a social game. I didn't hear from my brother much anymore, he left to live with his dad when he was 14 and I was 8 and since I left to live with my own dad we only saw each other when we both were visiting our mother at the same time, which was rarely since he was a teen/young adult with better things to do. Anyway, this was enough to convince my father to buy me the WoW Burning Crusade battlechest. Incidentally I never did play much with my brother, sorry dad.

I took WoW pretty slowly, I never reached max level in Burning Crusade despite having most of a year to get there before the next expansion came out. I really took my time with everything, levelling a blood elf warlock more or less in parallel with one of my friends who had played a bit longer than me and was levelling an undead warlock. At some point I got into roleplaying in WoW and started spending most of my time in game standing around Silvermoon City on the infamous Moonguard RP realm. I played WoW regularly from 2008 to 2013, never doing much in the way of end-game content and just levelling at my own pace between RPing with strangers. Around 2013 life happened because I'd finished highschool to horrible results, I'd also started getting a bit bored with the game and the RP servers experiences a lull in activity. Between 2013 and 2020 I'd resubscribe for a month or two a few times a year, realise not much had changed and quit again. The people around me who had played WoW also ended up in the same cycle of quitting/resubbing for a month/quitting and it kind of became contagious when it happened, even if I didn't really want to play well a couple of my friends are giving it another spin so I might as well.

2021

The cycle repeats again and again. The last time I played WoW was around the time Shadowlands released in late 2020, I wasn't all that impressed with it and only played for 2 weeks before unsubscribing again. At the time I was pretty determined to not resubscribe again, I hadn't enjoyed the game for years prior and the direction it was heading just seemed more than the same. Blizzard would have to do something to reeeeaaaaally appeal to me to win me back. And then the reports of an endemic culture of sexual harassment, workplace bullying and all that other bullshit at Activision Blizzard came out! That was it, I was well and truly done. I stopped playing Starcraft II which I'd been getting back into, I uninstalled the battle.net client, I unsubscribed from everything I followed which profited from covering ABK's franchises, I deleted their games OSTs from my phone. It stung, but only a little and finally severing those things that had shrivelled to a cumbersome, vestigial part of my self felt freeing. I loved a lot of what I cut out of my life (I still think about Warcraft III a lot and it makes me sad that I've cut myself off from the only e-sport I cared about) but to me it was necessary to leave it all behind, as someone who has happily supported Blizzard and spoke highly of their games in the past more than anyone else I knew personally I felt a moral duty to support them in no shape or form. Even if I wasn't paying for a game, even if it was a pirated copy of Warcraft III, the mere act of playing it or listening to the soundtrack was an act of endorsement that I would have no part in.

(Important sidenote for anyone reading this who still reads Harry Potter or watches the films: even if you say you don't agree with J.K. Rowling, argue death of the author or that she's not benefiting from your reading the books again because you bought them 15 years ago, the act of interacting with her works is an endorsement. If somebody sees you reading it, or you tell somebody you're watching the films again or whatever, you risk passing on to other people the desire to interact with those things, of building good will for the author, putting money into her pockets and into the pockets of the reprehensible organisations and people she associates with. The end result is killing trans people. I'm not sure if it's 1:1 equivalent, but if I can cut media franchises I love out of my life so can you and I implore you to do so. And for the love of god don't buy the wizard game, don't even pirate it and don't talk about it if you do pirate it because talking about it you WILL make somebody want to buy it. Anyway, moving on.)

This post was something about dreams, wasn't it?

We've caught up to the modern day now, it was a long hard journey but we got here. Haven't touched WoW or any other ABK games for what? Two and a half years now I think? Awesome. So why am I dreaming about World of Warcraft? A lot, too. These past few months I've had a regular recurring dream where one or a few of my friends decide they're going to resub to WoW and they let me know about it. I don't want to play, but I get peer pressured into it. It's pretty much the same in my dreams as how I remember it, nothing has changed and I feel overcome with the same melancholy boredom I had playing it in the years before I wrote it off. I have these dreams every couple of weeks, sometimes several times a week. They come and go and I'd really like them to stop. It's going to take a lot more than some dreams of being bored and ashamed of myself to make me play that thing again, but I'm afraid of the erosion it might cause if it keeps up. The friends in my dreams who try to encourage me to play again? They're real people and they do that. I haven't been as vocal with them as I should be about not wanting to play these games. I don't want time, encouragement and psychic damage to bring out the nostalgia, even if the end result is pirating a 21 year old game to relive the campaign for the 150th time. It's not going to happen, but the fear is there that somehow something might eventually push me hard enough to compromise my morals in some small way on this thing that I feel it's very important to stay firm on.

I'm giving Guild Wars 2 a try at the moment. It's pretty good so far and I'm hoping it, or something else, can replace those recurring dreams.