For me there have been some funny incidents of abashment as a WoW player. Interesting I compare these feelings to those I had when sex first became, well, less theoretical and more applied.* Once I had to go to a computer game store to purchase a WoW “gift card” because my subscription had elapsed. (The bank had changed my card for security reasons but I was unable to get WoW to accept my new card.) I felt very exposed and embarrassed about buying the card — it felt like I was making my first purchase of birth control. I really did have the thought that I might explain to the clerk that the card was not for me (of course) but for someone else. And for some reason after using it I filed the card away in with my other bank and membership cards only to have it accidentally fall out in front of another store clerk and several customers. There it was for them to clearly see — I was MMO-active. Then there was the first time we tried using voice on WoW. It felt like such a leap of intimacy with people with whom I had played with for months already but had only communicated with by text. Our relationship had suddenly changed in a dramatic and irreversible way. The next day I went out to buy a headset and wondered the whole time if the clerk knew that I was buying it for WoW. After all the patch for the built-in voice chat had just come out the day before. How could he not know? But I had to get the headset. My relationship with my guildies had reached a new level. We had finally “done it.”
* For the confused WoW player, “sex” is an activity engaged by two consenting adults that is a physical expression of affection. It usually takes place during auctioneer scans, traversing some of the longer flight paths, or when the servers are offline on Tuesday mornings.
