or: How I Justify Gaming As An Author
SO, you guys know that I’m an author (vampires, angels, demons, humans, ghosts, vampire cats, vampire Sheltie dogs…Houston, New Orleans, San Antonio…Marcus, Lilly, Sullivan…cast of thousands…).
That “Fangs & Halos Series” thing.
Ever wonder what I do when I’m not researching history, writing novels, or chasing ancestors on Ancestry?
I play World of Warcraft
Yeah, I’m a girl gamer geek. And my only game (outside of a word game or two and solitaire on the tablet) is World of Warcrack…I mean Warcraft.
There are two factions in the World of Warcraft, the Horde and the Alliance.
I tend to play Alliance.
For those who have no idea what I’m babbling about, you can read all about it here on Wikipedia but that’s just the outline thing. To get the whole picture, I really recommend going up on YouTube and putting in the World of Warcraft title and see how much content there is up there. Stories, how-to-play, history, and everything is up there. I’ve got links at the end of this blog.
I have played since 2008, I started on a blood elf mage named Roseamorte. She is a member of the Horde faction. I still have her and I play her off and on. It was because of her I bought a Dell Horde Edition XPS laptop computer back early on. I got the computer, a kick-ass backpack for it (padded!), copies of all the prior games, and something called a Figure Print of my character. That’s a 3-D model, painted, of Roseamorte. It sits on the mantle over my fireplace.
On Roseamorte, I have spent 123 days (that’s 24 hour days), 11 hours, and 26 minutes playing her through the different expansions. That’s not as much as it seems, it’s in 2-4 hour segments as I play on evenings and weekends most of the time.
My main for the last few years has been a little female gnome mage named Rubyrose. She’s Alliance Faction, which I play most of the time.
I’ve been on her for 344 days, 2 hours, 25 minutes. If you count the other 48 characters, all of which have at least a couple of hours playtime on them, this is a considerable investment in time.
Because the makers of the game, Blizzard Entertainment, decided mages were too strong and weakened their skills, I’ve switched over to my Balance Druid, Rubyaura (Alliance). Balance Druids have risen to one of the top Damage Per Second (DPS) type of characters because they can hit things hard.
Druid can be four different job specializations or specs. Balance is a long-range fighter with earth magic. Rubyaura is a Balance. There are also Guardian spec (tank-or forward attacks), Feral (close up magic slinging) and Restoration (the healer who keeps everyone alive…by theory). I don’t do Restoration, scares me to try to have that many people depending on me not screwing up.
Guardian Tanks are specialists who have to know the fight and they stand right on the bad guy. A good tank can keep the bad guy “boss” from hitting the other players in the group most of the time during a fight. I tend to stay alive if I’m back away from the thing we’re killing so I don’t tank. Feral is a DPS player who hits with claws and bites, they also go under the boss, so…
Funny: Balance are usually owls in that form. I have a glyph that lets me stay elf. The other forms a Druid takes are below. Each race (void elf, human, etc) have some type of these shapes.
There’s a place called Torghast in this new part of the game that gives us a chance to run a 5-floor dungeon either solo or with 4 other people. I ran it on level 6 (out of 12) and I’ve kicked butt in the last fight with the biggest bad guy on that floor for this run. Each run has a different last boss fight and different layouts. I can do level 6 again and get an entirely new experience, which is cool and keeps me from getting bored.
The video below is of Rubyaura beating the end boss of my Torghast run.
The game is so big that you can play for years and things change but yet stay the same. There are millions of players. And if a player gets stuck and wonders how to do something, there’s a fan-run website called Wowhead that has databases of everything. It’s a free site (you can pay to take off the ads, I do) that is built by players for players. It also carries news of the Blizzard changes and up coming new expansions. I have that one bookmarked, I’m on it all the time.
My characters are in various stages of leveling (going up in rank–levels 1-60) on four servers. Our servers have names that are significant to the game. My main is on Argent Dawn. There are more of my favorites on this page as well.
Follow the Red Arrow down past the photos–there’s more story!
So, Where Is All This Going?
Yes, I’m addicted. Of sorts.
I play pretty much every night a couple of hours. It is, for me, creativity.
As I see it, it’s story telling with quests and toys. I’m there for the story and how it goes together.
It’s creativity, the life-blood of an author is staying tapped in that well of the creative.
I tend to analyze stories that I see. I watch a show on TV, I start looking at how it goes together. A series is a whole bunch of story arcs strung together. If you go back and look at some television series, like Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, or Supernatural, you will see the story arcs of characters.
For a television show, a story arc is the tale told in episodes that tell the whole story if you watch/read all of the material. You see that in many of the better TV shows. The 2004-2009 Battlestar Galactica is one, the whole series from one end to the other was planned out on a story board. The writers and producers know where the story is going, even if the actors don’t.
Sure, there were some episodes that slipped out of the arc, those little quirky shows that are sometimes designed to break up intense stories and let the watcher catch their breath. But the entire series, looked at the whole, was one very large story about humanity and what we do and don’t believe.
Staying with science fiction, one of my favorite shows was Babylon 5. Each season was a complete arc and the next season built on the last. The characters were 3-dimentional, they made you get invested in their stories. The acting was great and, well, that is one show I will watch over again. That’s the true mark of a great story, in my opinion.
One of the greatest story arcs is a show that started way back in 1963 and has had episodes up to this last year (with more coming). Dr. Who is honestly one long series of story arcs with the same character in different guises. There are different actors (and now actress!) playing the Doctor, but you have a continuity between all of them. The stories build on each other and even their companions, people who travel with them in the adventures, sometimes carry over between different “doctors”.
My favorite is out of the new “revived” series doctors: David Tennent. His 10th incarnation of the Doctor had a lot of heart and it was sad when he regenerated into the 11th doctor, played by Matt Smith. Matt’s portrayal, along with the 12th doctor’s version, Peter Capaldi, who I actually disliked at first, were still the Doctor, just not “the doctor” that I loved. Both Smith and Capaldi grew on me by the end as well. Each doctor is his own person and personality. They stepped into a new realm in 2017 when the BBC announced that Jodie Whittaker would be the 13th Doctor, the world now has its female Doctor Who.
And, if you read Book 5 of my Fangs & Halos series (coming along nicely), look for a reference to a Dr. Who episode. (no spoilers, I promise).
So story arch is very important to what I like to do and watch.
This is why I LOVE the World of Warcraft—the story arc has been long and complicated all along. I sat down today and watched several YouTube videos about the story going on now, the newest installment is called “Chains of Domination.”
And while watching, the story arc actually became very vivid and I could see the beginnings of the Sylvanas story, I began to see that she’s been doing things that would lead up to this newest content expansion. I’m blown away to see that I’ve been unaware all this time about who she was and how she was working, and with whom she was working. It’s amazing that she started in the 2002 Warcraft III release and is STILL going and making trouble in 2021.
The video below is one of the cut scenes from the previous expansion, Battle for Azeroth. This shows Sylvanas in all her…honor. The blue troll is Zekhan, a young shaman. The blond kid is King Anduin Wrynn of the Alliance (my favorite), the green orc is Thrall, former Warchief of the Horde, and the brown orc is Varok Saurfang, who has been the Supreme Commander of the Horde forces for seems like forever. The entire Battle for Azeroth expansion was a fight between the Horde and the Alliance and it appears that Sylvanas is… well, put it this way, in this clip, she is on her way to being a former Warchief and the leader of the Horde army is standing with the Alliance against her.
So, this is my hobby, some say obsession. It’s how I keep the creative juices flowing.
And…there’s just something cathartic to throwing red-hot fireballs at some baddie who royally deserves it. 
Reference Websites:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=world+of+warcraft
https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Dell_XPS_M1730_World_of_Warcraft_Edition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_arc
https://www.pastemagazine.com/tv/best-tv-dramas-for-marathon-viewing/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who
https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/genealogy-fan-chart/