text: Quirky Addiction = Still an Addiction
  
  How my obsessive personality steered me into a twelve-hour-a-day gaming addiction and an alt-life as a level 60 warlock named Codex.
  
  Anal retentiveness is one of my most attractive genetic traits. (I also hit the genome lottery for "The ability to pack a suitcase efficiently.") As a little kid, I filled out index cards on every movie I watched and stuck them in a yellow recipe box. The cards were filled with critical insight and searing analyses. Par exemple:
  
  National Velvet
  
  4 Stars
  
  This made me cry because horses were in it, but the girl had purple eyes. I want purple eyes too.
  
  I tend to obsess over things easily. Like eating oatmeal every morning for a year, wearing a pair of sneakers over and over again until my big toe pokes out, and having an unhealthy fixation on the martial arts personality Jean-Claude Van Damme. (Did you know his real last name is Van Varenberg?) When I travel, I read dozens of books about the locations I'm visiting, to the detriment of SEEING anything. I can't show you many pictures of my trips to Thailand or Vienna, but if you want to discuss the history of Buddhism or secessionist furniture design, I'm ready to dish!
  
  I have been borderline-ready to become addicted to something my whole life. And more common addictions got ruled out because I'm weird. Alcohol, I metabolize too fast (two sips I'm twerking, five sips I'm snoozing). I'm too neurotic to do drugs because they give you meth teeth (not all, but enough to make me concerned), and sex addicts get vagina warts. Or so I read on the side of a bus. What's left that could become a trigger area?
  
  Video games, of course.
  
  At the height of my "auditioning for burger commercials" acting career in late 2005, my brother, Ryon, invited me to join a new online game called World of Warcraft. For nongeeks (Are there any of you out there reading? I like your hair!), it's a "Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game" where millions of people can play together simultaneously. Ryon had been playing for a few months with his friends and thought I would enjoy it.
  
  My brother and I hadn't been close growing up. I know that sounds weird. You'd think, two kids locked in a house together, there should be some great indie-film, Wes Anderson bonding happening, right? Not so much.
  
  I could maybe trace it back to when he was three or four years old, when he ate chocolate ice cream in the messiest way possible, spreading it all over his face, and I'd dry heave and scream, "Mom! Tell Ryon to eat neater!" and then he'd smear it even BIGGER, right up to his eyebrows. Or it might be the time when he was ten, when I wanted to watch a miniseries about Anastasia, the maybe-not-murdered Russian princess, on our only TV. He wanted to watch Monster Truck Racing. My mom wasn't home to arbitrate, so he forced me to try to strangle him with a phone cord.
  
  Either of those incidents could have been what separated us emotionally. I'll talk to a therapist about it and get back to you. We loved gaming together, but that was about it. We kind of just EXISTED with each other. I regret that, because if we'd supported each other more, I think we could have been more secure in our respective weirdness when we finally encountered the real world (which was WAY later than it should have been because we were homeschooled). The fact he was reaching out to me to play an online video game together was flattering. I jumped at the chance.
  
  BUT A TINY CAUTIOUS LITTLE JUMP.
  
  Because I didn't know much about this Warcraft thing, but I did know that anything online with other people in a "game form" could be potentially hazardous to my time-health. The previous year, I'd developed a slight addiction to another online game called Puzzle Pirates. It was brilliant in its design, AND you got to customize your character, who was a pirate. In all categories, it was a four-hour-a-day winner.
  
  The tasks in the game were simple but fun puzzles. There was a carpentry puzzle (like Tetris), there was a sailing puzzle (a variation on Tetris), and about three other puzzles with... Tetris-like qualities.
  
  There were overall goals, too. The better you played, the faster your ship ran. The faster your ship ran, the more stuff you gathered. The more stuff you gathered, the more money you earned. The more money you earned, the cuter the outfit you could buy, and the cuter the outfit... well, that was a basic end goal. The outfits.
  
  I was KILLER at running my pirate ship, particularly with the navigation (quasi-Tetris-like) puzzle. I mean, savant level, guys. And after a few months of playing, I impressed enough people to make a lot of in-game friends, and we banded together to form a regular "crew." It became the people, not the clothes, that kept me logging online day after day as we sailed the virtual seas.
  
  Both of my closest friends in the game were stay-at-home moms. "Ploppyteets" had just had her first baby, and you could tell from her attitude, she did NOT know what she was getting into with the whole "Shoving a human out of the bio-oven." She'd type things like, "Sorry, have to leave. This baby wants to rip my tits off all day." I never figured out much about her personal life, but I pictured her in a trailer park in Nevada, breast-feeding as she solved puzzles and smoked cigarettes, ashes dripping on the infant's forehead.
  
  The other mom we'll call "LadyLee." She had a newborn and a two-year-old, and her husband traveled a lot. LadyLee seemed like the kind of woman who was pretty and sweet but unhappy in her marriage. She had gained a ton of weight after her last child and was depressed all the time, so she didn't leave the house. Ever. Real American Dream story. Instead of worrying about herself, LadyLee would counsel people in the crew about their love lives, their schoolwork, anything they needed, all through the game's chat interface. She was always there and sweetly comforting, like an AI big sister.
  
  There was one incident where I got a job on Days of Our Lives, and afterwards, the producer called my manager up and said, "We will never hire this girl again." I had exactly five words in the episode, and I couldn't figure out how I screwed them up so badly. I kept having panic attacks in my sleep, reliving the single line, "My princess, how are you?" over and over in my head, as if somehow it could un-ruin my career. LadyLee was the only person in my life who could get me to laugh about how stupid the whole thing was.
  
  "Oh, was that the scene with Sami? She had an affair with her brother-in-law Tom, and then he murdered his own brother, which caused her to be committed to a mental hospital and meet another woman who was MARRIED to Tom, and then they broke out together and got revenge on Tom by ruining his shipping business. They probably didn't like your nose."
  
  Then LadyLee bought me a new Pirate hat in-game, which had a feather in it and REALLY looked good with my character's hair design, and suddenly I was weeping onto the keyboard, typing, "Thank u, life saver. <3."
  
  She was a yar pirate friend. So it was sad when things went off the rails SO BADLY for her.
  
  A new guy, "TreeMaster," joined the crew a few months in, and he and LadyLee started chatting with each other privately. A LOT. I'd load cannons (in a PINBALL Tetris-like game) and gossip with Ploppyteets about the Lee-Tree relationship.
  
  "Are they on her ship together in private chat again?!"
  
  "Uh-huh. Wow, my kid is a crap fountain, how do you plug them up? There's no manual with this thing."
  
  Things escalated, LadyLee and TreeMaster bought a ship together (hello, virtual commitment!), and I could sense something was going too far between them. I tried to caution her.
  
  "You and TreeMaster are hanging out a lot, is that a good idea, Lee?"
  
  "Oh, Howard and I just like working together, that's all."
  
  I stopped typing in shock. HOWARD? They'd advanced to real names?! This was serious!
  
  But LadyLee seemed so much happier after she met TreeMaster (as much as you can glean emotion from alphabetical letters placed together in a chat interface), and I felt bad about being negative. LadyLee was an adult, she had things under control. Plus, their ship was SO FAST, who was I to judge if they worked that well together?
  
  An acting job took me out of town for two weeks, and when I returned to the game, everything in the crew had collapsed. The only person I could track down online was Ploppyteets. I typed to her, frantic.
  
  "Where is everyone?!"
  
  "New Mead Brewing mini-game just got released. I'm balls at it."
  
  "Um, ok. Where's LadyLee and the crew?"
  
  "She dissolved the group. Won't be online anymore :("
  
  "Why not?!"
  
  "She left her husband last week for TreeMaster, he found stuff between them on her computer, and I guess she's losing custody of her kids. She hasn't logged on since we talked last week."
  
  "WHAT?!" Because of sailing the pixelated seas, this woman's whole life had collapsed? "Are you kidding?"
  
  "I wish. Bonus, my baby has a thing called 'colic.' I'm looking to trade her in for a Chevy if you know any takers."
  
  That was the last day I ever played Puzzle Pirates. I was worried about LadyLee and felt incredibly sorry for her but had no way to contact her outside the game. I didn't even know her real name. It felt helpless to care about people I'd never meet, who could disappear on a dime. I would miss Ploppy, too (even though I worried about the future of her offspring), but it was too hard to play anymore.
  
  It had gotten too real.
  
  That eight-month "Yo-ho-ho!" sideline made me aware of my personal slippery slope in the online gaming area. It was VERY slippery. But I rationalized that my brother was reaching out to "bond" with this new MMORPG game, and that was something I couldn't turn down. And if something went wrong, at least I knew how to reach him via phone to say, "Don't leave your husband and children for a random guy named Howard who's really good at virtual carpentry!"
  
  I bought World of Warcraft in the summer of 2005, right after I lost a part in a television pilot to a girl who looked EXACTLY LIKE ME. Red hair, pale lumpy face, if you squinted at our head shots we looked identical. And it was depressing. To come in second choice to... myself? So I installed the game and created my first character, named? You guessed it. Codex.
  
  In this game, people group themselves in private "guilds" instead of "crews." My brother was a member of a guild of players called Solaflex, and it was for "little people" only, which sounds offensive, but the fact that everyone had to be a gnome or a dwarf character was funny at the time. Because they're all short. Other players who were not gnomes or dwarves were tall. So in-game, when you ran around together, it was a tinier group of people than average.
  
  You had to be there.
  
  I created a Rogue (Thief) character, because I enjoy channeling my inner kleptomaniac, and stepped into a world so real, so "graphically advanced," that as I hopped around in the starting area, clutching my little beginner dagger, I fell in love. Deeply. Unutterably. In love. This probably sounds strange to nongamers. I understand. The best analogy I can make to real life is this:
  
  You know how sometimes you go to another city and, while driving around, you see a house that looks so cute and inviting that you fantasize about what it would be like to drop everything in your life and just move there? Like, you see a cottage while on vacation in Belize, and think, Prices are dirt cheap, people look chill, let's DO THIS! It's a feeling of new possibility. Of starting fresh. Imagine capturing a kernel of that in your own life right now, by sitting at your computer and paying $15.00 a month in subscription fees.
  
  That's what it's like to bury yourself in a virtual world.
  
  And it WAS a completely new world. With hundreds of players running around, animals attacking you, different categories of chat rooms, tons of buttons and commands, at first, I was lost. Every two minutes I'd type to my brother for help.
  
  "Which buttons move me?"
  
  "Where is my backpack screen with my clothes in it?"
  
  "What is 'leveling' and how does it work?"
  
  "I'm stuck in a wall, can you come get me?"
  
  All these questions are the real-life equivalent of, "What is this thing at the end of my arm, and how do I close it around items to lift them?"
  
  After giving me a brief, thirty-minute crash course of the logistical life of being a gnome, Ryon went to play with his fancy level 60 friends and left me in the baby starting area alone, an innocent level 1, to be killed over and over by virtual spiders and boars. (Classic sibling behavior.)
  
  Thinking back on that introductory experience, I can never blame anyone for saying, "I don't get video games, they're too intimidating." They can be. VERY. And unfortunately, chances are that an anonymous teen gamer on the other side of your monitor will respond to appeals for help with, "It's easy. Get with it or get out, asscrack." There's no easy way of getting into the hobby even if you WANT in, so a lot of people, especially girls, give up. The learning curve is too steep to climb.
  
  But don't worry. I climbed it. The hard way.
  
  Over the next months, I played a few hours a day, but TERRIBLY. I didn't know I had special skills to kill things faster, so I did the basic "STAB" attack over and over. It took upwards of two minutes to kill each creature. It should have taken ten seconds. And I died a lot. It was not fun. I got frustrated and finally typed to my brother.
  
  "Sorry, but I think I'm done with the game. It's too hard."
  
  "What? Twelve-year-olds play this game, what's too hard about it?"
  
  "It takes too long to kill things. My mouse finger hurts."
  
  "Did you not level your talent tree? Are you using Sinister Strike followed by Eviscerate?"
  
  "YOU'RE SPEAKING GNOMISH TO ME!!! I'M MAD AT YOU! HELP ME PLAY PLEASE!"
  
  "Okay. Fine. God."
  
  That night we started brand-new characters together. Gnomes again, of course. My new character was named Keeblerette, and I put tall, white, penile-inspired hair on her. Something I regretted instantly. It was not, at the time, reversible.
  
  Ryon created a warrior girl named Mochi with pink Princess Leia buns, and we were ready to rock the virtual world together!
  
  We advanced our characters to the max level after about two months of playing. We played and played and played, a few hours every night, and I used all the right buttons my brother taught me, and it was awesome. Chatting with each other in the game was so fun, like texting while driving. Except not dangerous and illegal.
  
  "Let's go to the swamp area."
  
  "No, let's do the undead area first! Watch me blow up this slime monster!"
  
  "Wow, so much goo. Dance in it!"
  
  No dungeon could defeat us, no monster best us. Actually, that's not true, we died about five million times each, but we were stronger together than on our own. (*After school speciaaaal!*)
  
  All the exuberance and sense of purpose rubbed off on my real life. I started walking around feeling... happy. A casting director was rude to me, and I thought, Gosh, she probably had a bad day, rather than dry-heave sobbing in the car afterward. A part of Hollywood-defeated Felicia Day was "fixed" by my double life as a tiny little penis-haired gnome. Getting the opportunity to know Ryon as an adult through playing the game together was a huge part of that. And why I fell in love with the game so much. It felt empowering to prioritize our time together, rather than living at the beck and call of acting appointments. Even if it was just, "Let's kill that skeleton boss tonight!," it felt like I belonged somewhere with him. Finally.
  
  Before you say, "Wow, this chick is on a nerd plane of existence I can't relate to"—slams her into a locker—the thing about a computer game character is that a part of you BECOMES that character in an alternative world. That little gnome Keeblerette was an emotional projection of myself. A creature/person who was more powerful, more organized and living in a world where there were exact parameters to becoming successful. "Kill forty wyverns, get points that make you stronger. Check!"
  
  When we graduate from childhood into adulthood, we're thrown into this confusing, Cthulhu-like miasma of life, filled with social and career problems, all with branching choices and no correct answers. Sometimes gaming feels like going back to that simple kid world. Real-life Felicia wasn't getting more successful, but I could channel my frustration into making Keeblerette an A-list celebrity warlock, thank you very much!
  
  During those hours of playing, I befriended a lot of the other members of my brother's guild, just like with my old pirate crew. And even though they could all theoretically disappear on a dime, it was comforting to start up the computer after a day of feeling like an idiot because I had to pretend to drive a car by steering with a fake prop steering wheel, extolling the "Amazing Honda handling!" at a commercial audition. It felt like I could endure any lack of fulfillment in my career as long as I knew my "friends" were online to play with when I got home.
  
  6/7 16:51:26.790 Keeblerette has come online.
  
  6/7 16:52:18.553 YoMamaz: Oh yeah, new helm timez!
  
  6/7 16:52:27.803 YoMamaz: Hey Keeb!
  
  6/7 16:52:41.752 Mochi: Yo Keeb.
  
  6/7 16:52:57.504 Spitball: Keeb wassup?!
  
  6/7 16:53:01.110 Spitball: Finally we can get some fun started!
  
  It was like Cheers. But where absolutely no one knew your name.
  
  [ My Professionally Destructive Gaming Career ]
  
  The big move in my/Keeblerette's virtual life was about six months after I started playing. My guild decided to advance to a more complicated part of the game, which moved me from gaming hobbyist to full-time addicted employee of World of Warcraft.
  
  The game has especially challenging areas that require getting large groups together called "raids." In the early days when I played, these events required forty people logged online AT ONCE for up to eight to ten hours at a time. Clearly, the programmers didn't have enough real-life social relations, or that basic design concept would never have occurred to them.
  
  It was a nightmare. Have you ever thrown a party and tried to get EXACTLY three dozen specifically qualified people to attend? Even if they RSVP, half of them never show up, right? And if enough people don't show up, you can't throw the party. So you have to recruit random people at the last minute who you've never met before to fill up the roster. And they turn out to be greedy eleven-year-olds from Estonia, who you're FORCED to keep around in order to limp through the evening's festivities, and... yeah. Just typing all that out gave me stress flashbacks.
  
  After attempting it a few times, our guild decided it was too small to attempt one of these fancy raids alone, and we joined forces with a slightly bigger guild named Saints of Fire. These guys took their gaming SERIOUSLY. In order to participate, everyone was required to install voice chat software so the leaders could coordinate everyone's actions verbally during the fight. Like air traffic controllers. This also meant that we would finally be able to hear one another's voices for the first time. It was a move that was... socially terrifying.
  
  People will finally know I'm really a girl! Half the girl characters are played by guys who PRETEND they are girls, but this is really it, they will hear me and KNOW! What will they think? Will they judge me? Most important, will I get downgraded on the warlock roster?! Anxiety almost made me log off and never log back on again. But I had to keep playing. It made me happy. So I sucked it up and bought a huge pair of gaming headphones with a mic attached to them that jutted out across my mouth and made me look like a 1-800 operator.
  
  The first day of the combined raid, I logged into voice chat, nervous. "Hey, guys, uh, Keeb here. Checking in for warlock duties!"
  
  There was a beat of silence, then a flood. "Oh crap, Keeb's really a girl?!"
  
  "Yeah, I told you so!"
  
  "Really? I owe you a hundred gold, SacBallzsky."
  
  "I'm good for it."
  
  "Hey, Keeb!" "Hi, Keeb!" "Good to hear you, Keeb." "Nice voice!"
  
  There was a flurry of excitement, but no one seemed to get THAT worked up about my vagina-dom, thank goodness. I've heard from a lot of other women that revealing their gender online sometimes invites reactions of "BOOOOONER! Let me throw sexual innuendos at you until you fall for my hot elf self!" But our raid turned out to be more female friendly than that. Probably because the Saints of Fire leader was a girl who could verbally rip your dick off.
  
  Her name was Autumna. I mean, that was her character name. (At this point let's just agree that they're indistinguishable.) Autumna sounded young, like she was in college, and had a voice like a hatchet.
  
  "I'm docking you attendance points."
  
  "Argue with me, you die."
  
  "Rambo, tranq the hound! I'll cut you into pieces in your sleep if YOU DON'T WAKE UP, IDIOT!"
  
  To expect gentleness from Autumna was to squeeze a knife and not have your fingers cut off. I loved her.
  
  As we settled into the new gaming hierarchy, I realized that the voice chat just exaggerated what people used to be like in type. They could be outgoing, or quiet, or "people you definitely wouldn't want to hang out with unless you desperately needed them for the game."
  
  There was one mage named Gooroo who always logged online with a loud "GOOROOOOOOOO!" When he killed things with a big magic spell, he'd yell "GOOROOOOOOOO!" Pretty much everything was accompanied by a "GOOROOOOOOOO!" He got muted a lot.
  
  There was one druid who always had his mouth full of a meatball Subway sandwich when he talked, and a warrior who never spoke except to quote The Big Lebowski. I found my sweet spot in the societal hierarchy by becoming the resident DJ. I figured out how to connect my music to the voice chat program, and would spin everything from New Order to Snoop Dogg/Lion/Dogg to Lady Gaga while we prepared for fights. Our signature song was "One Night in Bangkok," a late '90's synth song about night life in Thailand, and everyone would stop and make their characters dance when it came on, singing the chorus at the top of our lungs through our headsets:
  
  You'll find a God in every golden cloister
  
  And if you're lucky then the God's a she.
  
  I don't think anyone understood the lyrics. (Or we were all really liberal. Probably both.) At any rate, small things like that made raiding with forty strangers the best thing in the world.
  
  We needed those joyous social highlights, because the game raids required a TON of coordination, not only to assemble the exact number of qualified people, but also to get your character ready for action. "I have to spend three weeks gathering equipment? You're saying I need to do homework to play this video game?!"
  
  Yes. That is what they were saying.
  
  We'd rush the same monster over and over for weeks without succeeding. "Turdburger, you let me die again! Stop eating while we're fighting, I can hear you chewing your Subway!!" It was NOT a casual hobby. We raided together about twenty hours a week, sometimes just to fail the fights again, and again, and again. Sounds incredibly annoying and not like the definition of "game," which is to "play," which in turn means to "engage in activity for enjoyment," right? So why bother going through all this grief? Bottom line (just like in Puzzle Pirates): outfits.
  
  All the best armor and weapons were acquired in the difficult mega-group dungeons. It was the Rodeo Drive of Warcraft. When you got a piece of fancy "epic" purple equipment, your character became more powerful and looked cooler when you danced on mailboxes inside the game. It's the same reason why real-life men buy sports cars and real-life women buy handbags that cost the same as said cars. (Back then, I would have salivated over a "Tier 4 Nemesis Helm" before a Hermès Birkin bag any day of the week.)
  
  In order to win the best stuff, you placed bids according to points you'd earned for raid attendance. Basically, minutes of your life were used as currency. (When I describe it that way, it sounds horrifying.) There were only three to four items auctioned off to the group of forty people each week, so, like debates in British Parliament, things got rough. Because avarice doesn't generally IMPROVE one's character. One time my brother Mochi got reamed because people thought he was hogging equipment, so he posted the following on the forums:
  
  It has come to my attention that there have been bones of contention raised about a few of my raiding bids in Blackwing Lair and in the Molten Core, specifically, with my fellow raiding warriors questioning my bidding demeanor concerning the Helm of Endless Rage, which drops off of Vaelastrasz the Corrupt in the Blackwing Lair zone, and with the Onslaught Girdle, a Ragnaros drop from the Molten Core zone.
  
  If, on any of my future bidding, you have any questions or qualms about what I am doing, and would like me to know about your second thoughts or have any ideas/suggestions for me, I invite you to write all your thoughts on the matter in a message/email/forum post for me. Then, print it out, roll it up in a tube, and stick it up your ass.
  
  Sincerely, Mochi
  
  He wasn't one of the more popular members.
  
  I, however, was very popular. I had a charming lack of fulfillment in my life, so I was psyched to be able to work hard and study like I was in college again. "4.0 in Warlock? Sounds like a goal to me!"
  
  But as we started working through harder and harder dungeons, more and more prep was required BEFORE the actual raid time. Making potions, gathering equipment and herbs, rearranging my in-game storage unit. Most people had day jobs or school, but what was I doing during the day? Except for the occasional "Going to audition/class/coffee-with-other-actresses," I had TONS of free time. I figured, "Someone needs to make those Flasks of the Titan, might as well be me!"
  
  That is when my gaming life started tipping out of control.
  
  I started working full-time in World of Warcraft. I'm not exaggerating. Every morning before I left the house (IF I left, which I frequently didn't), I would log online and fly around the game world, harvesting herbs across the virtual globe to make potions. This hunter/gatherer trip would take about an hour or two each day, minimum. (Yes, I spent a large portion of my time inside World of Warcraft commuting.) I invested in a very expensive office chair, for my ass comfort, because I was sitting on it most the time and it was starting to spread. But I didn't care about my booty, 'cause there was looty to be collected! (HAR! Okay, no more puns, I apologize.)
  
  At one point I thought, Hey, I have a few hours of my day that are NOT eaten up by gaming!, so I created an additional character to fill those up. A burly dwarf lady named Sugarz became my "backup date" in case the raid didn't have enough priests to be able to play properly. Between the two characters, I fell into a schedule of raiding six to eight hours every single night.
  
  I stopped going to acting classes. I stopped performing improv. Or doing plays. Or socializing with real-life human beings. Several times I skipped auditions because I didn't have time to prepare after staying up too late gaming the night before. I ate, slept, and lived World of Warcraft.
  
  I guess it's pretty obvious, but it was not great on my personal life.
  
  I disappeared. My friends didn't see me for six months. My boyfriend would place a plate of food next to my mouse pad, and I wouldn't look up. I'd just shove whatever was there into my mouth until my character died, or I had to pee.
  
  "Thanks for the food, honey!" Oh wait. He'd left the room an hour before.
  
  It was easy to ignore how destructive my behavior was becoming because there were SO MANY other people doing the same thing I was doing online. We rationalized it for one another. At the height of my addiction in 2006, I had logged a few thousand hours in World of Warcraft. That's a solid one HUNDRED days of human life. Now I think it's depressing, but at the time it was a point of pride.
  
  I was obsessed. I couldn't stop myself. It was not healthy. But I couldn't stop. It didn't feel like there was anything else in my life to stop for.
  
  We all have periods of our life where we're trapped, doing something we hate, and we develop habits that have nothing to do with our long-term goals to fill the downtime. Right? I hope you identify with that idea; it's the only way I can explain becoming so emotionally invested in a video game that I would get in my car and drive around town sobbing if my internet went out. I knew it was bad. But even living with a constant Gee, something is seriously wrong here... feeling, I wasn't able to make myself STOP and get control of my life.
  
  I'm not blaming the game; I'm blaming my lack of perspective about why I wanted to fill my days with that beautiful, repetitive world. My life was unhappy, and I covered the hurt with a subscription-based Band-Aid. I just couldn't find a good reason NOT to play so much. Dig deeper and take steps to become happier in the long term? Nah, there are monsters to kill. Worry about real life later!
  
  Ultimately, mistakes can be more valuable than victories. Yes, I could have learned the lesson of "Mistakes are good!" with a MONTH of gaming rather than almost two years, but I was the head flask maker. The raid DEPENDED ON MY SKILLS!
  
  And soon after this dark period, I used all the things I learned during those dragon-hunting months of my life to create a web show called The Guild.
  
  So, not a total mistake.