Breakfast Topic: Connecting with loved ones
by Phillip Pauquette 
Jul 26th 2010 at 8:00AM
In our age of technology and isolation, we often unintentionally turn a cold shoulder to our pals and relatives for a number of reasons. Sometimes we may give them a quick five-minute call once a month to say hello, just to feel like we're holding up our end of the relationship. Pokes on Facebook or comments on Myspace (who uses that anymore?) are basically the same concept. It seems that the more methods of communication we develop, the less we properly utilize them.
Being the mushy dude that I am, I prefer physical contact. I want to see my brother, best friend or mother's eyes light up when I tell a joke. I want to be able to be gossiped up by my grandmother as she cooks a family-favorite meal in the house she's lived in for over 40 years. But sadly, I realize that most of us are given very few chances as adults for such real-life connections.
However, technology has helped bridge the gap between loved ones in one very unusual place: Azeroth. The closest I've ever gotten to "being there" with someone hundreds of miles away is through the use of an avatar. World of Warcraft has given me the opportunity to connect with friends whom I haven't seen since years back, and my mother, who always complained that I didn't call her enough before I introduced her to this game. Granted, Granny and I won't be standing in the kitchen chatting and preparing a meal when we next see each other; instead, we'll be running through the Plaguelands blowing up zombies and skeletons to smithereens -- which, in my opinion, sounds so much cooler.
Nothing beats physically being there with family to share a moment. But until I can hop on a plane and head back home again, my mother and I will be catching up over nice pint of ale in an Ironforge pub. What about you, dear readers? Do you have any relatives, good friends or long-distance lovers who play WoW? If so, how have in-game interactions helped save your relationship from becoming just a once-a-month phone call?
Have you ever wanted to write for WoW.com? Your chance may be right around the corner. Watch for our next call for submissions for Breakfast Topics via Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. The next byline you see here may be yours!Filed under: Breakfast Topics, Guest Posts
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Sword Jul 26th 2010 8:09AM
Sometimes I wonder if we as a society have lost track of what is truly important in life, our family and friends. In many cases replaced by long work weeks.
I for one say we return to what is important.
Ishammel Jul 26th 2010 8:26AM
Completely agree.
Lovely post - I often find myself wishing I'd got friends and family involved in WoW as I've used it in the past to keep in contact with my girlfriend. It's a great way of keeping in touch, good fun playing together!
blueindy322 Jul 26th 2010 3:24PM
Who ever said it's bad to "intentially" turn the cold shoulder? Playing WoW for me, is about enjoyment and to get away from family and such. Like the idea of avoiding family get togethers...
Not every family is filled with sunshine and ponies. I.E. Alchoholics, Jerks, you get the point.
Sleutel Jul 26th 2010 8:22AM
I have a couple of old friends I hadn't seen much since we stopped actively posting on the same site. A while back, they decided to come roll alts on one of my servers, and we've spent a lot of time playing together since then--and even on nights when we're on different servers, we'll often be sitting in Vent together.
jimlang5 Jul 26th 2010 8:24AM
Azeroth has been a family adventure for my family ever since my nephews introduced us to the game about 5 months after launch. While our intensity of play has waxed and waned at times it still is a place for us to get together and do something together while chatting over Vent. Since i travel a lot for work it helps pass the time in the evening to be able to group up with the wife and at least one or two kids and run a few heroics or jump into a raid while keeping up the family chatter over our own vent. Add in a few RL friends and neighbors with a couple trusted guildies and it's just missing a big ol' pot of food and some cold RL ales...
Galilyse Jul 26th 2010 8:30AM
I myself met my boyfriend over WoW when I was living in WI and he in SC. We've been together a year and a half now and WoW is still our main way that we connect. I've since moved home to the UK (due to the recession, lost my house, belongings and crushingly had to leave my daughter with my ex-husband) and it's very, very hard for me to see him or any of my family members (such as my 5yr old daughter) without the great expense of a trans-atlantic plane ticket.
Even though my daughter does not play WoW due to her being too young, I keep in constant contact with my boyfriend as we find that we can hang out a little in the evening when he comes home from work. We've both been playing for several years (him since the beginning of BC, me since the beta) and we both get frustrated and bored with this game from time to time. But I will never forget that it helped me to find him in the first place and it helps to keep us in touch. Since then, we've added Facebooks and weekly phone calls into our repertoire...but it always comes back down to WoW.
Now, I'm just hoping WoW will still be around when my daughter is old enough to play...haha.
Cainicus Jul 26th 2010 8:44AM
My fiancée and I both play and it's probably our main activity we do while spending time together. I was introduced to the game by my brother, and played casually since vanilla, and she had been playing casually since not long after BC came out.
Once we got together, we re-rolled on the same server and finally levelled our characters to level cap for the first time together. Then WotLK came out about 6 weeks before our daughter was born. We just recently hit 80 on our alts together, which happened close to when we got engaged. A lot of real life and WoW milestones mark each other for us.
We used to come home from work and play together all night then work without sleeping so often. Now I'm studying full time I tend to deactivate my account during the semester, much to her frustration, but I always activate the evening of my last exam and join her for a heroic or 2 while i relearn to play, and remember how much fun we've had together through this game.
MW Jul 26th 2010 8:49AM
My son introduced me to WoW a little after it started. I became hooked. We still share an apartment (no, he's NOT living with his Mom, we are kind of family-based roommates who share expenses) but sometimes this Mother-Son connection has some frazzled moments.
But as we play WoW together, be it in ICC or leveling lower toons, we share some fun moments. He definitely is still teaching me things, which is a delightful role reversal. We may be in the same room and talking over our shoulders to each other, but it is a short-distance connection that is different from our RL interactions. I even send him stuff from WoW.com, I'm the researcher in the team. WoW has definitely brought us closer.
Axolotl Jul 26th 2010 8:55AM
How about those people that lose friends and family by playing WOW all the time, fathers that go home while their wife is giving birth to their first child, people that end up in prison because they thought of themselves as firemage while setting fire to a friend, kids that starve to death because their parents are so adicted to WOW ... which reminds me, best get mine out of the cellar for feeding time :-D
ducss750 Jul 26th 2010 10:25AM
"kids that starve to death because their parents are so addicted(corrected) to WOW "
One incident in 2005 in Korea: a young couple went to their local game parlour, came home to find their infant had suffocated. If you're thinking of the recent similar situation in March 2010; the game was PRIUS and the parents were so engrossed in raising their virtual child in-game they neglected their corporeal offspring.
How many children die in swimming pools while mommie-dearest watches Oprah/Rachel Ray/whatever? "I just looked away for a moment!"
How many wander into the street/into the woods/fall down the steps...or, my personal favorite, spend the day still strapped in the carseat because mommie-dearest forgot about them?
I'm sorry, several news searches fail to find the person who set fire to a friend because his grasp on reality was weak but I did remind myself of a personal favorite:
http://www.wftv.com/news/12926707/detail.html
Yes, maybe we should regulate comic books. They obviously corrupt upstanding citizens.
Don't blame the game for the failure of the player.
joshbuddha Jul 26th 2010 9:01AM
My cousin is in the Air Force, and has been stationed in Europe and taken a couple trips to the Middle East. His WoW character and vent chats are our ways we keep in touch along with his wife updating facebook with pictures of their baby. While sure our whole family anxiously awaits his cycle back to the states, at least we have found a way to keep in touch, via videogames and voice chat.
slythwolf Jul 26th 2010 9:22AM
WoW, like the rest of the internet, is a place I go to get AWAY from my family. Those of you with well-adjusted families may not really "get" this, but my relatives are assholes and I try to spend as little time with them as possible.
Kylenne Jul 26th 2010 11:44AM
As someone whose family puts the "fun" in dysfunctional, I can't vote this up enough.
Calamus Jul 26th 2010 10:05AM
I have a close friend that moved out of state years ago. We always kept in touch, but as time went on it became less frequent. Recently he started a Death Knight on my server and we have talked and reconnected more while playing than we have in a long, long time. Technology is great!
AudreyR Jul 26th 2010 11:05AM
I'm lucky enough to live nearby the majority of my family. I often take off to see them. There's nothing like seeing my nephew's big grin when I go to visit. It just wouldn't be the same to have him /smile at me in Azeroth. He's only three now, so I don't have to worry about the disconnect for a few more years, fortunately. :)
However, I have friends that I've known for years that live all over the world. The distance seems to be a little less formidable while we're getting lost in BRD together. The game certainly lends itself to more interaction than is available through chat rooms and forums.
Joakim Jul 26th 2010 11:13AM
Its not mushy to prefer physical contact.
It's human.
Since an avatar is the closest we come to being human - it's hard to relate to the blocks of Tetris, or the white dot in Pong - being physical with an avatar is, therefore, also human. Even if we essentially spend time with a hotrod version of Pong.
Thus, we learn more about what it is being human through our games than through our world coverage (wich, if we would learn humanity through media, would mean we have to kill, maim, abuse and greed our way to the next lev... erhm ... doh!).
It happens quite often that I kiss my GF through WoW, even though she sits in the next room. I love her, sure - but then again ... one more level is sometimes more important. Either for me or her. I've been rejected over a "only 200 xp left not now!"-ding, is that sad? Not in my book, on the contrary it's quite romantic :)
Now if antigamer peeps could just get that one through their heads without whipping out a "go out and play!" argument, it would be a good start for understanding.
And besides, I don't want to get cold while playing with my fiancee. And you get cold -frozen solid - outside.
I've seen it in Northrend.
Kylenne Jul 26th 2010 12:01PM
I introduced my GF to WoW in large part for this very reason. We're long distance, and while we're not TOO terribly far away from each other, she's Canadian and I'm not. For very obnoxious and infuriating reasons I won't get into here, there is no easy answer to the question of how we can be together. (Long story short: US immigration law forbids LGBT citizens from sponsoring same-gender partners for citizenship, even in those tiny handful of states where marriage equality is law or same-gender marriages from elsewhere are recognized, like my home state. The odious "Defense of Marriage" Act is federal and supercedes that.)
So, outside of visits, we've got WoW. It's not the same, but talking on Vent and running around even in virtual space is somehow a little more personal than just talking via IM all the time. It helps that she loves the game, and teaching her how to play's been really fun.
Chetti Jul 26th 2010 12:08PM
I can't say I've got family that plays, although it would be nice. I do have 2 really good friends that play, and aside from phone calls, its really the only way to stay in touch. I moved from Philadelphia to Harrisburg 5 years ago, and away from my best friend of now 20 years. She got me into the game (after I moved), so we spend a lot of time just chatting while we do our own respective questing. Sometimes we do quests together or help each other out with some objective we can't complete on our own. I do make trips down to see her also, and between texts and phone calls we still communicate outside of the game, the game just adds another way to keep communication going. I have another friend that I met on another gamesite (pogo.com) years ago, maybe.. 13 years ago, I sort of forget how long its been exactly. She played forever ago, when the game first came out, and tried talking me into playing but I insisted I would hate it. She laughs now. :) After she came back to the game after a RL break, we made characters together that we've been leveling. We call and text each other as well, we've never met in person, her Tauren Shaman is about the closest I've gotten to being able to "see" her on a somewhat regular basis.. well I mean I've seen pictures, but.. you know what I mean.
I'm a big believer in the goodness of the internet as a whole, I use facebook to keep in touch with friends I haven't seen in years and family members I don't get to see often. WoW is just another way to do that, no its not a "social network", but with all the ways to meet people whether you've known them in real life or are just meeting them in Azeroth, it isn't surprising that people are using WoW as a means of communication. I understand the not-so-goodness of the internet as a whole, but.. I think we all do. :) It'll never truely replace visits or phone calls to friends or family, but its a fun alternative.
Ellemir Jul 26th 2010 1:35PM
Indeed - this is why I spent my last spring break with family showing my dad and my sister the game and getting them to try it and getting them HOOKED.
We don't get to play together as much as I'd like, but when we do it's great fun. And Dad and Sis play together all the time. We all get together on vent and chat. Yesterday I healed them through Uldaman and my spouse brought a rogue that needed it too. That was a blast. Healing lets me stand back and be helpful without running the whole show myself due to my greater experience.
bennet Jul 26th 2010 1:53PM
It's very hard for physical distance not to create emotional distance without some kind of shared experiences to talk about and laugh over. WoW has been great for that. In the four years we've been playing my husband has reconnected with his best friend from high school and we've kept in weekly contact through raiding with a friend who moved four hours away and another who left the country. Through WoW we've made friends with their friends, some of whom we've never met in person but will still chat on Skype with for an hour about work and family after the raid is over and everyone else has logged off.
Not to be trite, but like everything else in life, WoW is what you make of it.