2005 Was the Year I Lost to World of Warcraft

If I’m going to pick out a specific year of my life within the last two decades, it would be easy to determine that 2005 sticks out in retrospect significantly more prominently than most of them. It was the year that I began attending the University of Illinois, studying for what would become a degree in journalism and cinema studies. It was the year that a scrappy Chicago White Sox team unexpectedly led the division wire-to-wire and went on to win the World Series, upending the defending champion Red Sox and favored Astros. It was the year that my first real relationship ended in a drawn-out, messy breakup. And yeah, it was the year of my life that I simultaneously lost to World of Warcraft. The back half of it, anyway.

So many of the specifics are now lost to the fog of memory, but I can certainly recall that I first encountered WoW before leaving for college, perhaps in the spring or summer leading up to the big move. The game had launched in the fall of 2004, and I was intrigued despite having never played an MMORPG because I was already familiar with the setting–as a longtime Starcraft player I had also delved deeply into Blizzard’s Warcraft III, obsessively following the strategy game’s development on forums at a time when details on game development were perpetually scarce. The idea of getting down onto ground level in that fantasy world was attractive for a kid like me, reared on Tolkien, still giddy from Peter Jackson’s recently concluded and miraculously successful Lord of the Rings trilogy. The lore of the setting hooked me in a way that other properties would never have been able to match.

Because to be honest, I wasn’t in most respects the ideal target demographic for a monthly subscription game like World of Warcraft. I remember feeling disdain for the idea of MMOs, or having joined in on the online hazing of that particular brand of earnest nerd who had been really into first-generation MMOs like Everquest or Asheron’s Call, which I saw as hopelessly chintzy. The roleplaying element of such games had never truly appealed to me in any real way, and I was still years away from participating in a tabletop D&D game for the first time. Moreover, I was an oddly frugal kid, one who clutched tightly to the meager funds he’d made through summers of lifeguarding leading up to going away to college. The idea of committing to a $10 or $15 per month cost (on top of the initial purchase) was no small thing for me at 18 years old, clutching my first-ever debit card. But I think that deep down, I already knew on some level how WoW was going to consume my free time. I figured I’d be getting my money’s worth.

And so, I made the plunge, right around the same time as I moved into my freshman year dorm. Between the introduction to classes and campus life, I was always retreating to my room, so I could plug away at the totally novel level-grinding and gold-grubbing process that was WoW in its early days. I quickly made some of the basic player decisions that would stick through hundreds of hours of playtime: I was going to play Alliance characters, because I liked the Eastern Kingdoms’ classical fantasy geography more than the Horde continent of Kalimdor. My main? A dwarf warrior, with flaming red hair. I won’t embarrass myself further by disclosing his profoundly stupid joke of a username. I dabbled in other classes and races as well, of course, but that warrior was the only one I ever leveled all the way to 60 in the vanilla WoW era. Pretty much all of my World of Warcraft memories revolve around him.

Those memories are increasingly jumbled these days, which probably shouldn’t be any surprise. How much gameplay should one really remember in a process that so often involved just auto-attacking a single enemy for minutes at a time, until you finally loot its body, turn in the quest, and then look for another 5 boars or 10 gnolls to collect? These fetch quests of WoW were often satirized, but rightly so–they made up the meat and potatoes of the experience, as did the gathering of every conceivable random bit of crafting material. Did I ever actually craft anything directly useful to my character? Doubtful, but you could always sell them at the auction house, right? My fondest memories of the game come from this early period, when it was still fresh–when the gibbering sound of a Murloc still promised some shred of exotic novelty.

As I sank into WoW, I was unsurprisingly missing out on some degree of socialization during my first year in college. To be frank, it was an escape during a lonely time, before I had put much effort into making new friends. My roommate had been discarded as a real possibility pretty quickly: He was a Taiwanese international student who may or may not have possessed some kind of ambition to achieve an advanced degree, but I’ll never know. We barely spoke; in truth we were barely ever even awake during the same periods. Every day he slept until after noon, while every night he stayed awake until dawn, obsessively losing money in online poker and playing loud K-Pop standards despite my pleas to turn it down. I’m not sure he ever attended a class. We immediately lost touch after I transferred to a new dorm sophomore year, but I’m fairly certain that he dropped out immediately thereafter. The most lasting memory he left me with was the intense awkwardness I was marinating in on the night that he got drunk and repeatedly wandered up and down the halls of the dorm banging on stranger’s doors, while the occupants of those rooms yelled at me to corral or control this drunk person I barely knew. Is it any wonder that hanging around in Azeroth seemed like the more attractive option?

Ironically, the lack of socialization actually extended to the game as well, despite the fact that MMOs are “massively multiplayer” by definition and meant to be collaborative experiences. I effectively ignored this, soloing the experience as much as one possibly could. I had no other friends who played WoW, no natural allies to call on. At one point I actually did join a ramshackle clan, only to find that this didn’t really suit me either–I didn’t want to remake my schedule around the random whims of other players for communal events. The closest I ever got to truly experiencing WoW’s endgame content as intended was through joining pickup raids of random players, repeatedly running through dungeons like Scholomance or Stratholme in pursuit of specific bits of gear for my warrior. Molten Core? I only ever got the smallest glimpse at those massive, 40-man raids.

Scholomance: Again, and again, and again.

And ultimately, it was this wall I was butting up against that spelled the beginning of the end for my time in World of Warcraft. When reaching the true endgame content of this kind of property, the opportunities for solo play begin to rapidly diminish in variety and satisfaction. Do I really want to spend another night grinding away in the Plaguelands, trying to gain reputation with the Argent Dawn? Is the 20th trip through Scholomance worth it, for a chance at another miniscule dice roll to obtain a piece of digital shoulder armor? Can I afford to invest even more time into the game, to get “serious” enough about it to be playing the genuinely high-level raids? And uh, isn’t there coursework I should probably be doing at some point? The arguments against WoW mounted pretty quickly.

Sometime in mid-2006, I allowed my battle.net subscription to lapse, and stopped playing World of Warcraft. My grades were in the gutter–in truth, I barely made it to my sophomore year of college at all, as my parents threatened to pull me out of the university if they didn’t immediately improve. It was a symptom of a certain breed of arrogance common to smart, somewhat lazy kids who had coasted through school on their natural intelligence, never really challenged to put forth serious effort. Now was the time to start giving a damn.

At that time, the first major expansion to WoW, The Burning Crusade, was still well over the horizon–it would release worldwide in January of 2007, beginning a series of revisions and reimaginings of the core gameplay experience that I had known, adding everything from new continents to flying mounts and beyond. There have subsequently been 10 full-fledged expansions to the game, but I know of their content only in the most passing of terms–I never played a single minute of any of them. I was curious, sure, but by that point my college experience was rapidly improving. I had made the core of a new friend group after switching dorms, had become more invested in my classes and was generally in a more healthy place, mentally and emotionally. There was little allure to going back down the rabbit hole. My dwarf warrior stayed in mothballs, and I never explored any other MMORPGs.

The only moment I seriously thought about WoW ever again was, oddly enough, in 2019 when World of Warcraft Classic rolled out as pure nostalgia bait (a return to “vanilla”), offering a parallel experience to players of the mid-2000s who wanted to go back and do it all over again from the start. By this point I was engaged to be married, living my life, though still playing plenty of (mostly indie) games, as I continue to do to this day. WoW Classic did make a nostalgic appeal–I think it would be fun to play for a few days, just to put myself back in the headspace of what 2005 had been like–but it registered to me as only the briefest of passing temptations. Ultimately, there was no way that any iteration of this game was going to have a chance of commanding my attention now as it had back then. The world has changed, and I changed with it. Someone else is going to have to slay those 10 gnolls; I just don’t have that kind of time or determination.

Jim Vorel is a Paste staff writer and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film and TV writing.