Donutta's Blogs

So, as you probably know, there is a competition on at the moment that involves the blogs. This means that there is likely to be an increased audience for them at the moment. I had thought about writing something typically pretentious, and then I thought that perhaps it would be better to take advantage of this larger audience to tell what I hope is a touching tale about the hobby we love.

You hear a lot about how video games are bad for you. A few years ago I was on Test the Nation as part of a group of gamers. The idea behind this was to single us out as unhealthy cretins based on the idea that gaming made you a fat slob with an increased chance of heart disease. Just the other day, Michael Laws claimed that if a mass murder were to happen, it would be by a gamer.

It’s not just the mainstream media either. Mike Fahey, of Kotaku, recently wrote an article about how EverQuest destroyed his life.

Sure, occasionally you hear about the positives of gaming – perhaps how someone with a physical disability has found joy thanks to the Wii – but for the most part gaming generally gets quite a bit of flak. That’s why I thought it was so important to share one of the stories you rarely get to hear: how gaming doesn’t destroy someone’s life but actually saves it.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that if it wasn’t for video games, I might not be here today. Some back-story and insight into my life will be needed for context, so I apologise in advance for any self-indulgence and I hope you will bear with me.

(Actually, I had pages written out before, but I deleted them due to TMI and TL;DR. So this is actually the condensed version.)

My past has been pretty rocky. It’s nothing to do with my parents or upbringing, as both of those were fine. However, there have been events in my past that have meant that I have historically been a very insecure person who has been desperate to fit in. The result is that my past behaviour is for the most part so embarrassing that I don’t even want to think about it. The worst part, excluding what I will talk about, was perhaps my seizure due to my methamphetamine addiction. In itself that is bad enough, but what’s truly awful is that my so-called friends just watched as I nearly bit through my own tongue, and then left me in my room to wake up injured, confused and scared.

Eventually, it would all catch up with me and I became horribly and chronically depressed. Those that have known me for a while will testify to my wild mood swings, frequent temper tantrums, and general reluctance to engage in anything. I ended up turning to the bottle, for the second time in my life, to escape from everything. Naturally, it only made things worse.

Eventually, my fiancée grew tired of my bottle-of-vodka-a-day habit and gave me an ultimatum: her or the booze. I chose the booze. She left and I found myself spending my 26th birthday sitting in a bath full of water, a glass of wine in one hand, a cigarette in the other, preparing to slit my wrists. Without going into details, Fate decided it was not my day to depart.

At this point it was pretty obvious that if I was going to continue down the path I was heading down that I was going to die. If I didn’t see to it myself, my alcohol consumption certainly was. I had also grown extremely obese due to consuming over 3000 calories a day from alcohol, on top of what I was consuming in food. I was a train wreck that had reached rock bottom.

I decided to pull myself together and to focus on turning my life around. However, I obviously needed to overcome my addictions and demons. It’s impossible to explain to someone who isn’t an addict just how difficult that is. The urges never seem to go away and I actually think now that I will probably have to live with them forever. In that sense, it can be a daily struggle to stay sober.

However, these urges often come when the mind is free to wonder, and they tend to be set off by triggers. I accept now that there are some things that I will just never be able to do again, but that’s the price I have to pay for my behaviour. (Despite everything, I still believe in taking responsibility for your own actions. This is my fault, no one else’s.) By that token, though, there are things you can do to make sure that your mind never wanders into those dark places. For me, one of those things is video games. Specifically, I’m talking about World of Warcraft.

In a sense, it should be obvious. I am engrossed in the game so I obviously don’t have the time to think about drinking. If I’m concentrating on the game, I am not overcome by the urge to drive down to the bottle store and purchase copious amounts of alcohol. It’s hardly rocket science. There’s also the fact that WoW is a multiplayer game where you must work as a team. If you are drunk, your motor skills take a nosedive, you can’t play properly, and then everyone thinks you’re a giant d*ck and won’t play with you again.

However, it goes a little deeper than that for me. World of Warcraft truly is a world. I can lose myself in it completely. It's different to other games and I don't think that perhaps other games would have worked as well in helping me quit drinking. It’s everything from the environment to the story to the people than inhabit it. It's impossible to describe it and do it justice, and I can only say that you have to experience it to know what I mean. When I log on, I am transported away and all my problems just dissolve into irrelevancy. In a sense, it’s another form of escapism, just like turning to the bottle was.

However, playing WoW has no serious side effects. Playing it doesn’t destroy my liver. Playing it doesn’t cost me $30 a day and leave me wondering how I am going to pay my bills. Playing it doesn’t cause me to wake up so sick and hungover that I cannot function for the rest of the day. In fact, surprisingly, I find myself getting all my chores out of the way so that I can play it free of guilt. WoW has been nothing but beneficial for me. WoW actually has been the catalyst to turn my whole world around.

It shows too. I am a much more balanced person. People who know me well say how much calmer and friendlier I am. I now shave on a regular basis and I generally try to eat healthy. (I’m still a sucker for soft drinks, however.) When engaged in a debate, I’m far more likely to walk away if needed, and I generally do not let myself get flustered. It’s been nearly a year and the improvement has been significant. All of this has happened because WoW helped me stop drinking.

It’s not all perfect yet. I still have my bad days and they happen more frequently than I would like. I also, as I said before, have that constant nagging voice in my head that frequently tries to convince me to return to my former ways. There is a long way to go. However, it’s always the first steps that are the hardest.

I won’t play WoW forever. Eventually they will shut down the servers and that will be the end of it. I don’t know what will happen then. However, what I do know is that I will look back on my life and see how it has changed, and for me that turning point will always be the day I walked into the peaceful village of Goldshire, soaked in Autumn, listening to the peaceful melodies and realizing that everything was going to be okay after all.