Past the Pixels
As I type this, I’m camped out at a Woodinville house that might be afforded the status of “manor,” while people hover around the bar discussing the Nintendo dress code and admiring a titanium Leatherman. Someone’s looking for the Dominion box set, the bartender is complaining about Pandaren graphics, and the living room, last I checked, is a wine-tasting that should shortly turn into Rock Band. There’s risotto and chili to go with Fiasco and Red Dragon Inn, and when they finish soaking, I’m going to eat vodka gummy worms until I get liver failure for one reason or another.
In other words, it’s Feathermeet, the best justification for a crippling World of Warcraft habit that I can imagine. I’m often horrified to contemplate the hours of my life that that game sucked away, like a latter-day Count Rugen invention; every year, I’m vividly reminded just how much a good online community offers, enough to justify all the hundreds of hours of “alright guys, wipe it down, let’s rez and try again.”*
*Not really.
I jumped into WoW from release in 2004, with a vague impression of orcs, humans, and hit-point pools. Obviously I should have prepared for more of a soul-devouring nightmare from which no light nor hope escapes, but that wasn’t in any of the beta reviews. Without going into great and tedious detail, by the summer of 2005 the idea of a West Coast meetup (“Feathermeet” because we played on the Feathermoon server) was incredibly appealing because it seemed like a great way to have actual friends. So we got together in July, and now it’s July 2013 and we’re doing it for the ninth time in a row, which is both heartwarming and a little terrifying.
Obviously any internet community, from gaming to fandom to Free Republic, runs the risk of bleeding over into real life. Our WoW community is just a bizarre nexus of competing interests; Feathermoon is a roleplay server so our gaming hobby was a weird goulash of creative improv and competitive dragon-slaying. It led, of course, to some hysterical flavors of Internet Drama, but after coming out the other side we ended up with a pretty broad spectrum of personalities & interests. At this point, half of the attendees don’t even play the damn game, and haven’t for years.
I’ve had particular impetus to keep this yearly momentum going since WoW connections are what landed me in Seattle in the first place; even after outgrowing the need for an Internet support system I still have a lot of attachment to it. Beyond that, to get a little more pretentious here, my generation has opportunities to meet people that were really never possible on this scope before. We’ve imported gamers from Sydney & Hong Kong; we’ve married off couples from halfway across the country. Feathermoon didn’t invent “internet groups meet up in real life,” but we’ve had nine years to get pretty dang good at it.
What sort of puts it in perspective for me, curiously enough, is realizing how irrelevant I am in that greater online community. In 2004, as a college student with no responsibilities and few ambitions outside the digital, I had my nonsense plastered all over that server; now, thrilled as I am to get thirty-odd friends circled around the metaphorical hearth, I also realize that Feathermoon is ticking along just fine without us. That in Los Angeles, or Boston, or even down the road in another house in Seattle, thirty other players who share our server could be gathering to drink and game and kick around some names from the good old days. And we’d have no idea that they occupied the same digital space, and possibly vice versa.
And that is, honestly, fantastic. That other people could be mining so much fun and so much connection out of a big, bloated mess of a video game, turning hours of scrolling numbers and exploding graphics into a genuine human experience, is pretty much the best I could hope for. I like to think that there’s something unique about Feathermeet, and of course there is; just as there’s something unique about guild meetups for other WoW servers, or an Unreal clan LAN party, or a Livejournal slash-fic group cookout, or any of the other myriad combinations of the people behind the pixels. Our particular collection of talent is pretty stellar in some very specific ways, but they probably all are. This one’s just mine.
I guess if there’s a greater point to this rumination, it’s wonder at just how much silly things like MMORPGs can do for us if we harness them. Over the past nine years, scores of people have travelled combined hundreds of thousands of miles and spent comical amounts of money because they had so much fun playing Warcraft together, they wanted to see what it’d be like in real life. That justifies a myriad of online dungeon slogs and chat-box blowups. Feathermeet may well outlast the particular game that spawned it, but we’ll probably keep finding excuses to get together every year and be dorks. I had pretty muddled expectations the first time I stared at that WoW character select screen, with its terrible-ass cartoony character design (which seemed so advanced at the time!), but I’m sure I didn’t expect this.
Probably a good thing. I don’t know if I’d have played if I’d known how many people would end up thinking of me as a guy with good ideas. Horrifying, isn’t it?
