andy gillette

So, I know that I’m a few years late here, but today, for the first time ever, I played World of Warcraft.

I was having another fun-filled morning obsessing over internet memes.  And I think it was while reading TEH HOLIES BIBUL that I decided I needed to play WoW and see what it was all about because these have simply GOT TO BE my people.

Among the more obnoxious things that I LOVE: Lolcats, Rickrolling, Kittens Inspired by Kittens, David After Dentist, and the god-damned absolute genius of Kittens Inspired by David After Dentist.  And all of these things are possible because of places like 4CHAN and Something Awful, which means they are possible because of the same people who play World of Warcraft.

There’s an oxymornic aspect to nerd-dom.  They’ve got some very high-tech pursuits and are fueling technological innovation, but they’re also the only people who still use really low-tech online services (like 4CHAN).  They’re on IRC way more than iChat and on old-school, 1980s-style bulletin board services way more than facebook.

But anyway, this is way off-topic.  The point is WoW.  I downloaded the trial version this morning and got it all loaded up because I love IRC and 4CHAN and LOL.

The first character I built was a dwarf rogue with a big red beard.  He died, pretty quickly.  I didn’t realize, at first, that you can just respawn yourself, so I went back and made a new guy.  This one’s a human warrior and he and I got stuck.  I don’t know how or why, but hours passed.

So, I get it, kind of.  For me, anyway, part of the draw has to be that the game universe is a lot like the actual universe (vast and ever-expanding).  So you can just go forever.  And your character grows.  I mean, it’s not exactly analagous to really human growth, but where it differs it’s actually better.  You go through experiences and challenges and buy and sell things, but unlike real life where it’s generally impossible to figure out why you’ve done anything or whether you’re better or worse off for it, in the game it’s obvious and numerical.  You are constantly improving and you can see it happening.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep it up.  I’ve got the kind of mind that can obsess over these sorts of things, but I also have the attention span of a 4-year-old.  For now, I think I’d like to get my little human up to level 10 (he’s a level 8, as of this writing) because that would be the first official “milestone” in his young life.  So if I just stop posting altogether in the near future you will know I have run off to live the sad, lonely, but delighfully controllable life of the gamer.

I don’t find sports particularly captivating.

I played a lot of them when I was younger: baseball, football, hockey, wrestling, track and field, I was even on the swim team for a minute.  But since, maybe, age 15 I haven’t even had a passing interest in most sports. And yet, they seem to be coming up a lot lately.

I’ve been trying to write something for Nike for a few days now, and the assignment is specifically to write something topical and relevant related to women in sports.  So I started researching and putting ideas together and I’m still not convinced that this is a good idea at all.  I have no idea what I’m doing, is the short version of that story.

But anyway, at one of the more frustrating points in my effort to write this piece, I turned on the TV and a basketball game was on.  It happened to be the Cavaliers vs. the Lakers, a game of some importance because these are, arguably, the best teams in the NBA.  Sports people, it would seem, are pretty comfortable describing both Kobe Bryant and Lebron James as geniuses, and two of the greatest players to ever play the game.

I managed to tune in right before the game started.  So, thinking maybe this was some kind of sign, I decided to watch the whole thing through, to make an earnest effort to understand why so many people watch professional sports.

First, I should note that all of these guys, Kobe and Lebron in particular, are REALLY GOOD at playing basketball.  So I get that part of it.  I could watch them play just to appreciate how finely tuned that peculiar set of skills is for them.  But I still don’t get it, and I think there are two main reasons for this.

1) I don’t get idolatry.  And this one extends into all aspects of my life.  Like, I don’t read biographies, as a general rule, because I just don’t care.  For example: I really like reading and writing and books, and I also really liked ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’  But I’m not going to go camp out at Salinger’s house waiting for a glimpse of him.  Salinger doesn’t interest me any farther than he wrote a really great novel one time.  That’s totally good enough for me.  I don’t care where he buys his groceries, or the kind of clothes he wears, or the car he drives, or even how he “feels” about stuff.  Sports players, even less.

An interview with a really great writer could conceivably be interesting because by their nature they should have an exceedingly good grasp of the language and be reasonably intelligent.  That’s how you be a really great writer.  So it might be fun to learn something about their inner workings simply because they would probably say it in a clever way.  An athlete is really good at playing a sport, and, along the same lines, I don’t automatically care about anything beyond that.  I don’t want to hear about their lives or where they came from or what they ate for breakfast or whatever.  And because they don’t need to have skills like wittiness and grasp of the language, I can’t imagine that it would be very interesting to hear about any of that stuff.

This point has been further clarified now that there’s all this scandal being made about Alex Rodriguez taking steroids.  This is only an issue if you idolize him.  If he’s just good at playing baseball then steroids is nothing more than a questionable move on his part.  It makes him better at hitting balls really hard, maybe, but could also seriously shorten his life-span.  But everyone is worried about the “message” this sends: to kids, to other players, to politicians around the world, etc.  From where I stand, A-Rod is not in the business of sending messages.  The same goes for Michael Phelps.  Being upset that Phelps smoked pot one time has absolutely nothing to do with enjoying watching people swim really fast.  It has everything to do with being let down by your idols.

2) I missed the chapter about male comraderie, team spirit, and competitiveness.  I really enjoyed playing sports when I was a kid, but I never talked to my teammates much and I definitely didn’t talk to my opponents.  I mean, I was and still am a very sociable person, but when the game was on, my job, as I saw, was to determine the most efficient and effective way to complete whatever task was in front of me.  I didn’t need or want feedback of any kind.  I knew when I was doing a good job.  And when I wasn’t doing a good job, I tried to figure out what was going wrong and adapt to it.  I can’t remember having a lot of emotions about it.

But I know people who used to play sports and are now sports fans who are, probably sub-consciously, reliving something that I mostly missed the first time around.  It doesn’t really excite me to see anyone win or lose or inspire their team or insult their opponents.

All this is to say that there’s something illusory about being a sports fan.  There’s way more to it then just being a fan of sports.  And in this world of jocks v. nerds it may well be that I was just born to be a nerd.