Nine Nights in Azeroth, Chapter 1: Invisible Walls

Chapters: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5

I felt a genuine stab of disappointment when I hit my first invisible wall in Azeroth. Down in a valley with a starter-character dwarf hunter on a starter-world server, on the first night of the ten day free trial my friend had convinced me to download in observance of getting my first new computer in 8 years, I tried to climb out the far side through sparse pine forest. After a couple of virtual meters I found myself uselessly treading water on dry ground, feet still churning but going nowhere.

So the spell of immersion is broken. Math, somewhere in the digital scaffolding I knew spanned under the cartoon skin I was watching and interacting with, telling my character’s motion physics there was a wall there I couldn’t see.

It took me back to an early gaming meta-experience, punching through blind acceptance of the medium to apprehend a glimpse of rules behind the play. I was playing a racing game, probably on a friend’s Atari (my technology-resistant parents managed to keep any significant manifestation of video games out of our 80’s home until I was old enough to earn and save the money for my own NES). I realized that you could drive your car off the road: but not very far. The track’s shoulder, only there really as a speed-eating punishment for blowing turns, terminated in the soon-to-be-proverbial invisible wall.

I wished, then, that the tiny, proscribed, barely representational world of that 8-bit racer could be more like reality. That if I elected to leave the race I could just drive off in the direction I chose, keep going as long as the field before me was clear. Head for those raster pine trees in the background, maybe drive through a forest. Maybe find a city on the other side.

More like reality? To a child’s mind, maybe, and maybe there are more complicated levels of metaphorical connection between the virtual and the real than I reckoned on when I set out to describe this particular mid-life gaming experience.

Whatever: I think I felt a little of that child’s excitement (which I didn’t recognize until it got disappointed later by unscalable asymptote of the far valley wall), the first time I thought to steer my dwarf off the beaten path - and discovered there was actually something there. I suppose as well that it was somewhat of a child’s let down to make the entirely unsurprising discovery that it didn’t actually go on forever. The World of Warcraft being, of course, a “world” only in a strictly virtual sense. Still, I went back in the next night. Walls or not, there was still a whole lot of it.