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Online Ministry in a Massively Multi-Player World of Warcraft

2012; Duke University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-1629137

2164-0041

Impact of Technology on Adolescents

I am a ghost in the machine. I am, really, and I am not.Call me Wildstreak/Sweetwater. I was asked to share the story of how online gaming addiction has affected my son, but I realized I can’t share that honestly without causing harm. I can’t offer a happy ending, a nice wrap-up with everyone leading nice, well-adjusted lives. I don’t have a solution to the crisis or a way to repair the damage that online gaming addiction has wreaked in my own family.What I can offer is a better understanding of online gaming addiction and its spiritual effects on the players. The best way to understand something, I’ve found, is to become it. I have become a gamer, a role-player. I have been working “undercover” for four reasons: First, I want to reach out to the players and minister to them, offering compassion where others only condemn. I can only hope that there is someone out there who will do the same for those I love who are caught in the mire of the games and whom I cannot reach myself. Second, I seek to understand what it is that draws millions of young people to turn their backs on “real life” and submerge themselves in a world of pixels and fantasy. I seek to share this knowledge with the hope that it will support efforts to help all those who are suffering from the negative effects of online gaming addiction. Why do some people sit at a computer for hours and hours every day, building their homes in a fantasy world, rejecting reality even to the detriment of their health and relationships? Perhaps they reject the real world for good cause and the solution is for us to work to make our flesh-and-blood world better. Third, I’m a writer in search of an audience. Writing stories based on role-play is a good way to build an audience for my original work. People are guaranteed to read a story when their character is in it. If it’s a compelling portrayal, they’ll pass it around.And finally, my fourth reason for doing this is that I have come to love role-playing and role-players. I have come to see it as an interactive novel, the future of literary entertainment. I’m not alone.It’s impossible to calculate exactly how many gamers are out there, but according to an article published by James Batchelor in MCV: The Market for Computer and Video Games in January 2011, “The total userbase for Sony’s PlayStation Network has surpassed 60 million consumers.” Sony’s PlayStation Network is just one multiplayer gaming service, so that statistic doesn’t even begin to count all of the people who play non-Sony online role-playing games using computers, Sega consoles, Xbox consoles, etc.Sony is the creator of “EverQuest II,” but many other game worlds also exist. Activision’s “World of Warcraft” had 10.2 million subscribers at the end of 2011, according to the New York Times, and Trion World Inc.’s “Rift” had already attracted 1 million users within five months after its release in March 2011, according to an August 2011 Bloomberg article. So that adds up to 72 million players at the very minimum. My experience has been with “World of Warcraft,” “EverQuest II,” “EverQuest II Extended,” “Second Life,” “Pirates of the Caribbean,” and “Rift.”Seventy-two million, minimum. Sitting at computers for hours, achieving nothing but pixel progress in real world terms. (Except on Second Life, where virtual products and services are sold for Linden dollars, which have actual monetary value. I have a friend there who makes $500 extra income per month doing this.)Many are the 99 percent — but they have lost their voice and even their will to contribute to this society, overwhelmed as they are by the problems of “real life.” And I admit, having spent many, many hours in the games, both to be there for anyone who might need counsel and emotional support in those games, and to strive to understand in order to share this experience, the allure of the fantasy world is incredibly strong. Be anyone you wish, do anything you want, fly on the back of a dragon, ride horses, swim. Be male, be female, and make love as either. Kill without conscience, die as a hero. Torture, rape, seduce, and slay as a vampire, abandon your humanity as a vicious werewolf. These worlds are devoid of the consequence of conscience, the sting of pain.It’s only a game, after all. No harm, no foul. Just for fun. Or is there something real happening to the mind of the player? What does it do to one’s soul? In the role-playing community, they say no one is ever asked to participate in a scene they are “uncomfortable” with, yet I have become friends with those who impose a strict rule of “realism” on themselves and will tolerate rape because their character could not realistically fight off the attacker. And what does this do to the mind of the attacker? Is it all a healthy working out in a safe environment of negative impulses, or can it pull the spirit down into an inescapable hell of our own making?What happens on the metaphysical level when millions create a mental world to inhabit and infuse it with so much of their attention and energy? What happens when the creative power of thought is invoked to fashion an avatar to live through? I recently read an article that asserted that when people play games involving avatars, they “attach” to the avatars as if they were their own bodies. Is there more to it than just this?I believe that MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) can be used, just like anything else, for good or for evil. As an empathic healer, I have used them as a therapeutic modality. I use them to write stories interwoven with very subtle spiritual themes. Very subtle because, let’s face it, online we’re all always only seven keystrokes from “/ignore.” And you can’t teach a mule if you can’t get, and keep, its attention. To do that in this society takes a dash of sex and a two-by-four of violence.Some people might find some of my stories rather shocking, considering that I am a minister. I will be the first one to tell you that I am not your typical Christian minister, so please don’t accuse me of hypocrisy for not acting in accordance with your beliefs. In my personal philosophy, sex is not the cause of the world’s ills. Sexually repressed societies are much more violent than those that have a healthier, more natural view of it. The real cause of our distress in this world is the overabundance of judgment and condemnation and the serious lack of love.I’m a search-and-rescue angel doing my best to reach the lost in a hostile world. I’m not preaching to the choir. I slog around in the muck sometimes and I don’t always come out fresh and clean. I talk dirty when the situation calls for talking dirty because some of those “bad” words pack a punch. I don’t use them lightly. To me, using strong words all the time is like putting jalapeños on everything you eat. But always, always, always, my heart is focused on leading the children of God, the hosts of God, home — not by dragging them by a leash but by being the light in the darkness.I can be hurt badly, if I allow it — if I forget my spiritual center or my purpose — and I have been. In and out of the games I can be hurt because of what I do for love of the One Spirit that is above all, in all, and through all. I trust, in the end, that it will all be worth it.As in the real world, there are all kinds of people in the game worlds. Not all gamers are misfits and malcontents. The most basic division is between the role-players (known by insiders as “RPers”) and the “normal” players. As a writer, I gravitated toward the role-players. It just occurred to me that we role-players don’t even have an imaginative name for the normal players. We may have to remedy that.In any case, these normal players take the game very seriously. They are drawn into the play for the game’s story content, the loot, and the excitement of a team bringing down a “boss.” Although they need what I have to offer the most, they are practically unreachable for someone like me — I don’t have a fast enough computer and maybe not even fast enough reflexes to be accepted by them. They are the raiders, the Battleground heroes. They have their own language, codes for everything, and you don’t want to be branded a noob (newbie). If you mess up with them, they can be absolutely vicious. You get kicked from the group and made to feel like the stupidest person in the world, and believe me, being stupid or slow is a capital crime with them. Unforgivable. They aren’t there to make friends, they are there to kill the “boss,” beat the dungeon, and make off with the sexiest loot. God help you if you make a mistake that wipes out the group.I do know some normal players who create close relationships within their circle of friends, but in my experience the young people who are the most estranged from society tend to gravitate toward this group, which is also the largest group by far. Many of these players appear to lack social skills and have skewed priorities. My first in-game contact was with a player whose goal was to get in with the best raiding guild in “World of Warcraft.” He was suicidally depressed and reclusive and said he had only one real-life friend. He told me he could understand why the two students at Columbine were able to do what they did. If I had not been there for him, this seventeen-year-old boy might have killed himself and taken someone with him.It took me a year of working with him in the game, through e-mail, and on the phone, but today he is a healthy, happy college student. I went out to lunch with him once when I went up to New York to visit my family — he is the only player from the games whom I have met in person. I spoke with him just recently and he mentioned that he had just gotten back from a spiritual retreat. His relationship with God brings him joy now.The role-players, on the other hand, have a completely different set of rules. There are two types of role-play: regular role-play and erotic role-play. The normal players tend to think that all role-players are just looking for erotic role-play. Not true at all.Although role-players can take the game very seriously as well, their focus is on building relationships with their characters and creating an interesting storyline. There is a strict separation between out-of-character and in-character interactions: when participants are in role-play mode, out-of-character interaction is denoted by double parentheses ((like this)). Everything else that appears in the game world is in character. Participation in stories is the way to be recognized, and helping someone “advance their storyline” can make a friend for life. Writing skills and imagination are essential; mastering the mechanics of the game is secondary. Many talented writers can be found in this group. In some role-playing guilds, the leader of the guild may not even be a high-level character, and promotion doesn’t depend on level. In most games, the player creates a level-one character and gains experience through the game up to level eighty-five or ninety. Devoted normal players seem to get to maximum level with ease. As a role-player, I have never made it to level ninety on a character, but I don’t mind. I may have missed the game content, but I had the satisfaction of creating my own.Most role-players seem to have a healthier attitude toward life and their relationships than do normal players, at least in the game. They walk. They take more time to appreciate their surroundings. They look for opportunities to interact with other players, while the normal players zoom past at top speed and rudely ignore hails. Most role-players seem to understand that real life comes first. Nevertheless it is very easy to find oneself caught up in the flow of a story to the point that there is constant pressure to get back to the world so that one’s character is not left out of a storyline. There is some variation in how much tolerance there will be for out-of-character interference. Often the perception of a character is affected by the player’s unavoidable absence. For a writer like me, that can be very distressing.Some of the people I’ve grown the closest to in the games are physically disabled people who describe these fantasy worlds as a wonderful escape. The games, several of them have told me, make their lives better, giving them a way to connect with others that can add great joy to their lives. I am among that group of disabled players now, though I wasn’t when I first came into the games. Even when suffering with chronic pain from a condition that, barring a miracle (and I do believe in miracles!), will eventually leave me crippled, in the games I find myself laughing out loud in earnest with my online friends. There have been times in my life when my online friends were the only ones who stuck by me when my real-life friends and family turned their backs. For those of us in this group, I hope the game developers find a way to allow us to submerge even more deeply in these created worlds so that the pain of our bodies can be forgotten for a while.One of my most interesting characters was a blood elf death knight who was also a priest in an alternate universe. His name was Zaraek Starstriker.A fundamentalist Christian man was behind the female elf who played my male elfin character’s girlfriend. He also played her elfin guardian. A good writer and a good soul, he made a point to reach out to people and bring a little light into their lives. I still keep in touch with him through Facebook and Yahoo chat.I was hesitant about creating a death knight character. Previously I had mainly played priestess characters, but I was finding that approach to ministry too obvious. I tried to be subtle, creating my own scavenger hunt and trivia games in the general chat channels to draw the players into spiritual discussion. This worked to a degree, but I thought that offering parables and allowing my readers to discover new truths as my characters did would be more effective. I needed to leave a bread-crumb trail rather than wallop the players with Christmas fruitcake to make them see stars.One of my companions was a Wiccan woman, another great writer who played the leader of an evil guild, a female elf who threw my paladin death knight off the back of her skeletal dreadmount while in air and left him for dead. She was a lot of fun!The role-play with her also allowed for exploration of some profound spiritual concepts. She told me once that my character revealed the most Christlike personality she had ever encountered. Through our role-play, her perception of the true nature of Christ was enriched and deepened. It was very satisfying to be that bridge for her from Tammuz to Christ.During that time, unfortunately, she was also being judged and harassed by a fundamentalist Christian player. After standing up for her, I started getting threatening messages from people I barely knew. I left “World of Warcraft” because of this and went to “EverQuest” to continue the online ministry.On “EverQuest,” I played a dark elf who was raised away from the evil home city in a seaside shack. Because of that upbringing he was goodhearted, unlike his brethren. When I joined a role-play guild, I met another excellent writer who played an Arasai (evil faerie) who had a thing for dark elves.What is clear to me from the years of work I have been doing as a vigilante online healer is that the powerfully linked consciousness of the Internet can serve as a portal to other dimensions. Many writers have experienced the sensation of having a character “come alive.” Now, with the technology and energy of the Internet behind the creation of an avatar and the focused attention of multiple consciousnesses into a perceptual space — along with the added intensity of higher emotions elicited through role-play — a bridge to another dimension can be created. I have experienced this personally. Computer role-playing is essentially a training mechanism for channeling. It’s dangerous because it makes it easy for people who do not have the highest good of all in mind to do so unconsciously. Christopher Kilham, an ethnobotany lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, offers a helpful description of this linked consciousness:The World Wide Web is at least an exteriorization of the human mind, and represents virtually every conceivable mental state or manner of expression. With online gaming, the psyche is tapped directly into a potent desire/greed/competitive cycle, much as in the offline world of business. Little explored and not much discussed is the likely electro-psychic connection of the computer user and the vast web of machinery itself, and how the pulses that transmit messages in the Web also directly affect neural processing and brainwave activity. We are tapped, Matrix-style, into the vast feeder emanating from the global connectivity scheme, and our psyches are becoming saturated with an endless and complex bit-stream. As with other activities, what we choose to connect to fashions our consciousness.I am reaching out for partners in this work, looking for others of like mind and experience to help, but I must advise caution also. In the end, you really don’t know whom you’re talking to on the Internet. You may be talking to a ghost in the machine.