I figured it out! Sort of!

I've been raiding a lot lately in World of Warcraft. Like, pretty much every night for the past three or four weeks, which is much more than my normal 2-3 times a week.

("Raiding", if you don't know, means that I get online and team up with either 9 or 24 other people to kill an especially hard "boss" monster. These "boss" fights generally involve much more communication, skill, attention to detail, teamwork, and experience than other parts of the game. Generally, people have to perform specific jobs or roles while acting in coordination with everyone else.)

I never used to like the idea of raiding. When I first hit max level in the game, about 2.5 years ago, I pretty much decided I would never raid. I didn't like the idea of having to team up with so many other people, or that you have to sink so much time into raiding (a typical raid night will last about 4 hours). When my friend Kevin made a guild, he cajoled me into raiding. Currently, I am the guild's Main Tank, a role which I'm not going to bother explaining here for those that aren't familiar, but suffice it to say it's extremely important and rather one of a kind.

My guild has three official nights of raiding a week: Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. This is when we get the whole group of 25 people together to do the difficult raids for that week. On top of that, though, a smaller group of us use the non-raid nights to do 10-man raids. So, between the two, my week is pretty booked.

Raiding 4 hours a night for 6 or 7 days a week is tough, and I often wonder why I choose to do it. Granted, sometimes I get really sick of raiding, but on the whole, I really enjoy myself.

The first thing that came to mind was that I really love my other guildies. For a long time, I raided with as many as 6 or 7 other real life friends who also played the game. This has since dwindled - the only ones left in this guild are me and my boyfriend. The other 23 or so people are now "online" friends. But, really, they are more to me than that. As I said above, I really do love all of them. Some I'm closer to than others - I know their names, where they live, details about their lives. Others I don't know quite as well.

No matter what, though - being forced to work together in raids forms a bond between a group of people. I know everyone's play style, I know what they talk about, what they like to do, what roles than can adequetely fill versus what roles I should never assign to them. These people are important to me; when I don't see someone for a while, I'm genuinely concerned, or curious as to what happened. Just last night, a guildie signed online who none of us had seen all summer, and who I, personally, am not very close to, but everyone greeted him warmly and had missed him.

Last night also entailed the end of our over-six-month journey to get our guild leader (and Main Healer) the best weapon currently available in the game. I was honestly surprised that everyone was so happy for him and willing to work so hard to get him this weapon. When we killed the bosses we needed to for it, no one seemed to even care about the loot (usually everyone's favorite part) and instead only cared whether our guild leader had gotten the pieces he needed and quests done to ensure getting the weapon. Everyone jumped up and down, cheered, and stood around admiring him for a while.

The people are, indeed, the main reason I continue to enjoy raiding. But I discovered, while thinking last night, that there's another reason I like it so much, too.

When I first hit max level and started raiding, I slowly began giving up one of my favorite hobbies - lighting design for theater productions. Hangs, focuses, rehersals, tech rehersals, etc, for shows all happen at night around the same time as raids. About the time I started raiding, I was getting jaded with theater anyway, and had decided to quit. Raids filled that empty spot.

Doing Yogg-Saron (one of the hardest bosses in the game) last night made me realize how close to theater raiding can be. Yogg is an extremely difficult fight, requiring nothing less than perfect execution by all 25 people present. If one person fails, we might all very well fail. Everyone has a specific role, has to be in a specific spot at a specific time, do specific things, and act in coordination with everyone else. This is extremely close to what happens in a theater production. I never really recognized it before, but that giddy feeling I get in my stomach and that irresistable desire to smile at the end of a new boss kill or really difficult boss is the same feeling I used to get when the curtain would close on a successful show that I had been in or designed.

I didn't specifically give up theater for raiding -- I was almost out of it even before raiding came along -- but I'm glad I found something to fill its spot, at least a little.

Okay, I know I should be grateful, but...

I'm going to whine just a little. There were people I was disappointed about not hearing from on my birthday. One person, mostly, but others, too.

I was originally going to stop the post there, but laying in bed last night I realized I have very few close friends left. I don't have many people I relate to really deeply. That is depressing. In fact, many of the people I enjoy "hanging out with" the most are people I don't know in real life - they are a few of my guildies in World of Warcraft. A night doing stuff with them is as fun and meaningful to me as a night out with my in-person friends, generally.

I don't really know what happened, and it's not that I'm unhappy right now per se, I just think this is a sad realization. In fact, things are going pretty well - a new/bigger apartment, schoolwork getting completed realtively easily, my car is getting fixed and will hopefully work well, and I'm a millimeter away from a full-time job, as far as I can tell. So yeah. Humbug.