World of Warcraft is my preferred indulgence. Oh, sure, I could have gone with books. Or music. But those things seem to be necessities for me. Perhaps not entirely on par with food, water and shelter, but they're up there in the top twenty. World of Warcraft is - well - an addiction. If you look Oopsi up in the WoW Armory, you'll see she's still sporting an unimpressive item level (gear in WoW is rated with item level - the higher the level, the better the equipment and the better your chances of surviving certain quests within the game system - in some cases, you can't even attempt to defeat bad guys unless your item level meets a minimum standard.) Her progress through the raid instances is trivial. Writing books on deadline plays hell with raid schedules. But that's okay. Oopsi is first and foremost a character - an alter ego that spills over into this life. My husband calls me a fire mage - as if *I* could start channeling massive bursts of hellfire from my hands. Course, it could be he calls me that to get me to light the fire in the woodstove so he doesn't have to...
My husband and I play the game together on a role-playing server, meaning that when one logs into an RP server, it is with the intent of acting as and in the voice of one's chosen character. It's acting hour, after a fashion. We're in a medium-sized guild with a group of really terrific people, several of whom actually live within driving distance. We've met in person and a bunch of us are good friends in game and out of game. My guildies were some of the first people to celebrate the sale of my first book. When I have a block of time, word goes out and we log into game, group up and go beat down some of the most difficult dungeons in the game. No, I'm not one of the uber-l33t players. Oopsi is about personality. Presence. She is a diminuative, disarming bundle of cute, ambiguous morality who favors Sulferon Slammers - a drink so strong it lights the drinker on fire and does a few points of damage every second for several seconds. She's sweet. She smiles a lot. While she's lighting your socks on fire. 'Living Bomb' is her favorite spell. In a dungeon, when four or five bad guys attack at once, she casts Living Bomb on every single bad. When it goes off, the bomb blows up every bad guy within a certain radius. It tickles Oopsi (and me) to have the mobs blowing up their friends, although, the exploding sheep had some appeal, too...
Yeah. After a long day of flogging my brain for action! adventure! and romance! there's nothing quite like logging into game and reducing some poor critter to charcoal. I leave you with a short my husband filmed for his film class: An Interview with Oopsifizbang. (Filmed pre-cata.)
An Interview with Oopsifizbang from Keith Burnard on Vimeo.
