I first started playing WoW probably around 2008, and although I enjoyed the game quite a lot, especially in terms of mechanics, I ended up having a falling-out with Blizzard. I was always a role-player in these games, living out the lives of women I wished I was because I didn't yet understand that I already was a woman, and could go start living my own actual life any time.
I was on a role-playing server, which means the players are generally expected to play and act, via their characters, as though they are actually IN the World of Warcraft. This extends to "proper" names for the culture of whatever race the player has selected for that character. If you have a character on an RP server named CaptainNutStomper, you will probably be reported and have that character forcibly renamed, at least. But, WoW also has several Non-Player Characters (NPCs) who have names that clearly and unsubtley reference real-world figures, such as Haris Pilton, a fashionable bag vendor. So I made a Night Elf who was a Druid by class, and since Druids can assume the form of a cat, I named her Lolcat.
I'd developed an entire backstory that I wrote out to very logically explain why she had this name in a world without an internet or cat memes. It was essentially a phonemic evolution of a slightly different phrase, and, given the game's use of real-world figures and concepts as gags within the World, I thought this would be well-received, or at the very worst met with an eye-roll and a groan. But someone reported the name as not lore-appropriate, and I got into a back-and-forth with Blizzard's customer service about it. It ended with them saying "sorry, no" over and over, and me saying "I will no longer support your company in any way," before selling or throwing out every Blizzard product I'd collected to that point, which was a fair pile of games and merchandise.
This may seem childish and petty and overreactive, and if you were to say so, while past-me would have gotten even more upset, present-me is right there with you. I'm actually laughing about it, as I write this. Laughing at myself. I still think Blizzard was hypocritical, but I also think that doesn't matter. I wanted to control their behavior, but really, I can only ever control my own, and I behaved poorly. The actual relevant thing here is that this was my mode of interacting with the world for a very long time. I interacted with the world as a child who had had his toys taken away, even when I hadn't. Even when I still had more than I could hold or keep track of.
I was very angry and frustrated with life in general, and I had no idea why. Everything felt wrong, but I could not articulate how or in what way, along what axes. I was, I assumed, a straight white male, and I was bombarded with media messaging about how I was a privileged person, how I had all the power in any social interaction, and yet that felt wrong to me. When the dot-com bubble burst, I was unemployed for a few years. That ended when I enlisted in the Army, and after medically separating, I returned to being unemployed, where I've more or less remained. That was in April of 2009. Within a few years, I was homeless. I'm only not homeless now because of the generosity of a very good friend.
I couldn't reconcile my supposed privilege with the absolute misery of my life. The problem was a semantic one. (I've since concluded that most of the problems around gender and sexuality stem from semantics, but that's another post for another day. It's probably another entire series of posts, to be honest.) I had heard the word "privilege" being applied to me, and I thought something along the lines of "privilege: noun (priv-uh-lij) 1. the presence of substantial advantage." But that's not really what people mean when they are talking about White Privilege, or Male Privilege, or Straight Privilege. That's more like "privilege: noun (priv-uh-lij) 1. the absence of substantial disadvantage."
Having privilege, socially, culturally, doesn't mean that nothing can or ever will go wrong for you. It means that when something does go wrong, your suffering will not be as great, all other things being equal, as that of someone who does not have the same absence of substantial disadvantage that you have. All other things being equal, in any given scenario, the more straight, white, and male you are, the better you will come out compared to anyone else. That can be in a positive sense (maximum earning potential, social recognition and status) or a negative sense (victimization, ostracization, bodily autonomy).
I very intimately get what it feels like to believe that the world is selling you a bill of goods (you have lots of power) when your actual life doesn't jive with that (you are unemployed and ultimately homeless for awhile). When I read about something like Sad Puppies or Gamergate, I know that these guys aren't acting with full understanding. And I also know that they are absolutely convinced that they are.When I left WoW, I searched for a new Massively Multiplayer Online game (MMO) to replace it. I still had a pathological need to have social and cultural spaces in which to be safely and authentically female, although I didn't identify it as that at the time. I ended up in The Lord of the Rings Online, chiefly. And while LotRO is still my preferred game in many ways and for many reasons, one thing that I never liked about it was its singular worldview. This is, to be fair, in keeping with the original source material. But I've always been fascinated by what true evil really looks like. At some point, true evil has to eat. It also has to shit, and it probably needs to reproduce in some way. What does evil cooking look like? Are evil toilets oppressively smelly? Maybe they're oppressively clean, and nobody is allowed to use them. Is evil dating just two people standing each other up for a very long time before they meet up and rage fuck?
The fact is, true, absolute evil is not a thing, because even the most vile and evil person in the world has to do SOME things mundanely. They can do some things ABOUT that thing evilly (leaving the seat up after pissing all over it and on the floor, for example, or dining out and running up a $200 tab, not paying it, and leaving a penny for a tip), but the actual things themselves simply indicate life.
Nazi Germany was capital-E Evil in many ways. But it wasn't built by Satan, it was built by people, who were trying their best, and who made very poor social and cultural decisions based on wrong understandings about other people. Nazi Germany was an example of what happens when a group of people who are in power have a wrong understanding about a group of people who are not, and are left to act on that wrong understanding unchecked. Whether you are dealing with racism, or sexism, or transphobia, the fundamental construction is the same, because in both cases there are two groups, one with power, and one without, and they do not understand each other. If the power balance is nearly equal, that may, in the worst of cases, result in a war. If the power balance is grossly unequal, that may, in the worst of cases, result in a slaughter. And yet in every case, we are still just talking about people.
In WoW, there are two and only two major factions the player can choose from: Horde, or Alliance. They are engaged in an ongoing world-wide conflict that is invariably bloody. Digitally bloody. But since the player can play on either side, and, within either side, as any of a number of culturally distinct races who don't always get along, there is a larger message that is revealed when the game is played from these many different perspectives: there are no good guys and bad guys; there are only people you understand more, and people you understand less, or not at all. No one is evil or inherently wrong because of who they are. They're just not as apparently you. This point was underscored with the release of an expansion that included a race that starts out neutral, and then, individually, is made to pick a side (usually).Part of realizing that I was trans was very carefully examining gender as construct. But, I'm very binary trans; I know myself as entirely female, and not male at all. There are a lot of things to do with masculinity that I understand intellectually, but can't actually quite get my head around. And if I understand myself as necessarily one-and-not-the-other, that's fine. In my own particular case, as a binary-oriented trans woman, I am woman, so therefore I am also not-man.
But in the course of my research, I learned about non-binary genders, which led me to conclude that in viewing gender as binary, capital-W We have misunderstood "common" to mean "fundamental" or "correct." Or maybe even "real." So, intellectually, I understand that perceiving gender as spectral or continuous is more accurate than perceiving it as 0 or 1. But instinctively (probably due to internalized culture), I have a lot of trouble wrapping my head around it. I constantly catch myself struggling with the ingrained tendency to automatically assign gender to others. If someone says to me, "I'm trans, my pronouns are she, her, hers," I may slip now and then, but I correct myself and move on, because moving someone to the other side of a construct I still intuitively understand as either/or is not that hard. If someone says to me, "I'm non-binary, my pronouns are they, them, theirs," I can get it right about 40% of the time.
So ultimately, I understand that the structures I believe are real based on not having known anything else for the vast majority of my life are not actually real. But I also understand how real they seem, which is why I strive to respond and not react when I am misgendered. I start from the position of assuming that they did not intend to slight me. Even if it turns out they did intend to slight me, I work to remain empathic and not become angry or frustrated. I remind myself that they literally do not understand.
They do not understand that my reality is not their reality, and that beyond each individual person's reality, there exists Actual Reality, where very few people will ever spend much time. I understand "subjective reality" as not a reality at all, but the lens through which we interpret Actual Reality. I understand that what anyone would call "my reality" is an illusion, and that the same is true for every last one of us.
I have these flashes of brilliance where I can see myself through the eyes of someone who hates me, and I understand completely why they do. I understand that they are not attacking me, because they do not actually see me at all. They see what they think I am. And I pity them. Not in a condescending way, but in a compassionate way. I can't hate them. They are me.
Actual Reality is not self because there is no self.
I noticed recently that the more inward my focus shifts, the easier it is for me to feel personally attacked or slighted. As my view becomes more and more narrowly about just me, I become less and less content. Conversely, as I take a wider view, I become more and more content. This is probably most easily illustrated in traffic. When I'm focused on how I have to get somewhere by some time, all of the people around me cease to be people, and become obstacles in my path. It's easy to get angry and frustrated. When I change that narrative perspective from My Story to Our Story, I feel a transcendent sense of peace and contentment. We are all the same, We are all on our way to change the world in whatever ways We can. We are all on our way to make something better, insofar as any of us can understand what "better" is or looks like. We are all in this moment together. And to the extent that a sense of "I" remains, it is so that I can contribute positive thoughts and wishes for every other "I" around me.
I try to let everyone in when I see them signaling. I think about how scary it can sometimes be to try to get over when I realize I'm about to miss my exit, or whatever. I wave people in, I let people make left turns across my lane in front of me if I can. At the more difficult turns, I will often see surprise and then gratitude on the face of the driver I've just helped. They'll smile, with real happiness. Not just the little courtesy wave we all sometimes see. And I feel more connected to everyone, realizing that there is every possibility that that one unexpectedly very positive interaction we had will brighten not just my day and that person's day, but the days of everyone we each go on to touch in any way. And the days of all the people those people go on to touch in any way.
We can spread joy and belonging and inclusion, or we can spread anger and isolation and exclusion. It's not beyond us to make those choices. Sometimes we will fail. I still do, all the time. But we can still keep trying, if we remember that it doesn't stop mattering just because we're having a bad day.
I returned to WoW for a number of reasons.
One, I accepted that my reason for leaving (and in such self-righteous, dramatic fashion) was silly.
Two, I could appreciate where Blizzard was coming from, even while I continue to disagree with their conclusion.
Three, #girlfriend plays, and I wanted to play with her. So we spend some of our free time running around as Goblins, whom we've decided are, predictably, a lesbian couple. When one of us wants to play, she will ask the other, "do you want Gayblins?" And we smile and enjoy the World and its stories together, having more fun than either could alone.
Four, I appreciate the game as a large-scale metaphor for the fallacy of the idea of Being on the Right Side of a conflict.
In my own spare time, I play alone if I'm in the mood for it. I don't have the compulsion to play for 14 straight hours or anything, like I used to. I play until I'm not enjoying it anymore, and when I'm alone, that's usually not more than about an hour in one sitting, probably once or twice a week. And while I still make female characters named Seranine, there is now a Seranine whose life I am much more invested in living.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I've gotta go kill a bunch of dirty, stupid trolls. Because tonight, I'm not playing my troll.
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