Who is Spurlock

A friend asked me a question today that some of you might also have wondered about. Who is Spurlock? In my profile, after my name, I have in parenthesis (aka, Spurlock).

The long answer to who is Spurlock could go on for pages and pages, but the short answer is that Spurlock was the name of my main character in the World of Warcraft (“Wow”) online role playing game.

Wow is an online role playing game where characters can explore a rich and exciting world based on the Warcraft Universe. Blizzard (the manufacturer) boasts eight million players.

The setting is similar to the Lord of the Rings, in that you encounter elves, dwarves and other fantastic creatures. Players interact with the world through a character or avatar.

There are a few things that set Wow apart from a slash ‘em sword game you might play on a console. The first thing is that you truly interact with the world and other players. There are literally thousands of players on a server at any one time, and you can interact with them. Not only can you interact with them, but in many cases, there is game content that you cannot access or “beat” without a group. In some cases you need a very skilled group.
Another difference is that the game doesn’t have a real end. As you play, your character continues to improve in a variety of areas. There is really no “end” boss that you beat and win the game. From Blizzard’s perspective, as the game derives revenues from monthly subscriptions, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to have an ending. “Thanks Joe Gamer, you can stop paying us $14.95 a month.”

From the player perspective, they don’t want it to end because they have invested so much time and effort in their characters. There are players who spend forty or more hours a week playing wow. I knew a guy, who for a two or three month period spent almost ninety hours a week playing Wow. Sounds crazy, right? Well just a little.

While I never played an average of ninety or even forty hours a week, Wow was certainly a big part of my life for almost two years. At my peak, I probably played about thirty hours a week. That was when I was living and working in Columbus during the week, while the family was in Cincinnati. I had a lot of free time, and that was how I chose to spend it. Do you think I was crazy, well maybe, but maybe not.

One of the reasons I played is that my best friend from high school Dave played. Wow gave us the chance to hang out together. With a family, I wasn’t always free to run out and meet him for a beer, but we could keep in touch through the game. We would play together online, and even talk through voice over IP services. It was actually a pretty nice setup, I could hang around with my friend, but if my family needed me, I was in the next room. Since I generally played when the kids were sleeping and Tim was watching TV, it didn’t really have a large negative impact on my life.

One thing I didn’t count on when playing wow was its addictive nature. Now I’m using addictive in a very lose way here. I don’t mean that I (or anyone else) is addicted to the game in a clinical sense. I guess what I mean is that I really enjoyed playing the game a lot. As with so many things, I’m either on or off. Once I started playing, I was committed. The game is so engaging, that it’s easy to play more than you expect.

A big part of the reason the game is so engaging is the social aspect. The social aspect is ingrained in the game. Take a dungeon for example. It might take five players working together for two or three hours to complete. When you start it, you feel an obligation to other players to complete it, so it’s easy to end up playing longer than you expect.

For about six months I was playing a part of the game that required a coordinated forty person group to successfully complete. I was amazed that forty strangers could come together and work as a team to accomplish some goal. Of course, forty strangers never did. These other players were teammates in every sense of the word. We worked together towards a common goal. Each member of the group had a role to play. Just like in football, success required each player to accomplish their assigned tasks. It took a lot of coordination and leadership to accomplish.

Another thing I didn’t count on was some of the really amazing people that I met while playing Wow. I played with people not much older than my son and others the same age as my father. Male or female, black, white or yellow, it made no difference. I played with conservatives, liberals and those who show up in surveys as undecided on every issue. I played with people with successful careers, students and the unemployed. It was amazing to see such a diverse group work together.

In a lot of ways I owe this blog to my Wow experience. After listening to some Wow podcasts, I wrote some fictional accounts of my experience, which my dear friend Alachia put on her podcast. That really rekindled my love for writing.

Not all things Wow were flowers and pretty light. I saw people turn on friends all for some in game benefit. Alachia adeptly said that she wanted to market a t-shirt that said “Epic loot > real life friends.” Truly there were people who would lie, cheat or abandon friendships in order to acquire an in game item that made their character the slightest bit better. They were not the majority, but nor were they aberrations.

In the end I stopped playing four months ago, less because of what the game is, but rather because of who I am. I found myself playing out of habit. I was having fun to be sure, but starting up Wow became almost a default behavior. It wasn’t so much a problem when I was working, because work and my family commitments kept me from getting too involved. It would be too easy here in Thailand for me to play all morning and all evening. While that is not necessarily a bad thing, there are a lot of things that I want to do while I am here. Azeroth (the setting for Wow) is truly a wonderful world, that brought me many fond memories, but I needed to make time for the real one too.

The reason I have Spurlock in my blog name is because some of the people with whom I used to play read this blog. When you are playing the game, you don’t always know the real name of the person with whom you are playing so you use their character name. To many of those who I’ve played with, I was Spurlock.

So now you know my dirty online secret. Now you know why I have Spurlock as part of my profile. And if you read carefully, you might have gleaned that while I no longer play Wow, part of Spurlock still lives in me.