Not letting WoW get the better of me.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I never thought I'd like WoW. After all, I was a huge fan of first person shooters like Doom, Unreal Tournament, Half Life and Halo. I liked nothing more than to blast away at stuff and not really have to think about it.

Over the past year of playing WoW I've gone through several stages of game play. The first, which lasted the longest, was spent exploring and figuring out how to play, where to go and what to do. I didn't really have anyone guiding me -- I just played the way I thought I should play. I didn't care about gear, I didn't care about stats -- I just played.

Once I realized what better gear and better stats meant, I entered the second phase - gear whore. ;-) I was all about finding / buying the best gear I could get. I was getting much better at the game play and wanted to crush whatever was in my way. I dreamed about the game. All I wanted to do was play. It got so bad at one point that I actually had my wife lock down my account using the parental controls found on the Blizzard website. She had it locked down to where I could only play at certain times during the day (and for pretty short periods of time too).

Since I was essentially locked out of the game, I had to do other stuff. In the whole scheme of things, this was definitely a good thing, but at the point I was addicted and I knew it. As silly as it sounds, but the withdrawals were a bitch. I would find myself surfing WoW websites and doing "WoW" stuff when not playing.

After a few weeks, I got over it and entered another stage; playing just to have fun. I stopped worrying about the game so much. I stopped dreaming about it. I played a little bit here and there, but stopped putting in the hours I had been. Granted, I'll occassionally pull the 8-hour session, but that doesn't happen very often anymore.

I think I'm transitioning to another stage now. With all the drama in the guild (more about that later), I find myself wanting to play less. I also have a tough time with how much time people in the guild play. Yea, one guy is retired and he plays 14-16 hours a day. Whatever. If that's how he wants to spend his retirement, so be it. :-) What I struggle with is hearing other people talk about how they dream about the game and the game is all they look forward to (even though they're married and have kids).

I know everyone makes their own choices, but I know the struggle I had with the game and I see other people going through the same stuff. We're all adults, so I don't really feel like I can tell them they need to stop. The most I've said is, "dude, go outside and take a nice, deep breath of fresh air. it's just a game." ;-) They'll have to come to the realization themselves that the game is taking over and do something about it.

I doubt I'll give it up anytime soon, but I've got other things I want/need to do. I have a struggling consulting business that really needs some focus and I have a great family that needs / wants a dad and husband, not a level 60 human rogue with the best gear and an epic mount. :-)