Gaming All By Yourself, Handsome?
The year after I cried my way out of a third-grade monopoly game, I sit with the only two girls who still speak to me at the end of our lunch-table command center and talk strategy. There is only one thing relevant to us, age 9: Wizard101. This, we determine, is a game that matters. See, we aren’t like other girls, we like creatures and dragons and turn-based strategy games. Barbie.com and Girlsgogames are for preps and princesses and maybe us at sleepovers after midnight when everyone else is asleep. In the fluorescent light of day, we talk about what we’d study at the Ravenwood school and the new worlds that are released and which of our quests we’re going to complete that afternoon.
Later, I shiver in my half-finished divorced-parent family basement in front of our Gateway PC, the one that takes a minimum of fifteen minutes to turn itself on and another ten to take me to Wizard City. In a few years, when I discover message board forums, I’ll sneak downstairs before feigning sleep to boot the computer up, so that later when I slide into the ghostly cold night she’ll be warm and ready for me. Until then, I dial the phone number to half of my friends and set my landline on speakerphone beside me. Our questing is punctuated with clicks and humming and “Can you teleport to me?”, “I need to refill my potions,” and “Did you see what happened at recess?”
This becomes a clockwork grind, a snow globe setting, the two of us hunched over keyboards in caves with LCD windows. I settle into the cobwebs and soft powder of basement-dust, the dead-skin-confetti lining the cases of files my mother has kept across her lifetime. The passage of time leaves a tangible scent, tucked into the stacks of eBay listings behind me. Maybe if we sell my childhood memories to someone else this room will feel like it’s attached to the house, instead of the shelved tchotchke it is.
This is the year before I start a feud with the other half of my social circle, convinced that she’s stealing parts of my personality. I am finite and she will take everything. I shove her into a desk that winter, unintentionally; I am the tallest girl in the class and am terrified by this freakish power. The next time I see her post-shove she gossips with me like nothing had ever happened, like we started over in Unicorn Way. We don’t talk about it again. But that won’t happen until later.
Until then, I arrive at the school Halloween function in costume, confident that I am the best and most insightfully dressed. This is a deepcut that everyone will surely get, while tactfully displaying my superior taste in the subversive underground media landscape of KingsIsle Entertainment. After all, I am my Wizard, my truest self. The spiky hair, two-dimensional green eyes, and a carefully planned red cotton dress with ragged edges and a black craft-store-ribbon sash (She’s a pyromancer, mom!) are sure to signal the top-notch effort I put into being here, the school gymnasium, on a Friday night. She is so beautiful. This is my chance to be beautiful.
I cry on the way home. When my friend and her landline move to another time zone, I hang up my cloak for good.
Until ten years later, when the only thing to do with the time is regress.
My best friend uses The Spiral as a meeting place for him and his boyfriend, bridging the states between them with the cartoon MMORPG. Together, on twelve-hour voice calls, they’ve completed the entire game more than three times over. That, I think, must be the pinnacle of passion. Meanwhile, I am three weeks into my first flesh-and-blood relationship and she hasn’t texted me for two of them. This totally doesn’t bother me, as I’m determined to never be the needy girlfriend; this is a test of my individual fortitude, a gauntlet to see if I can be the coolest and calmest partner who doesn’t ever get nervous or neurotic at the vision of returning to the unfeeling void of solitude. I have not written a list of reasons why this would happen to me. My journaling has been neither rabid nor rampant. I recognize that I’ve found myself in a lawless land.
So I am determined to find love in Wizard101.
With free chat enabled and a box of wine at my side, I log in with anticipation of my own whirlwind romance. We’d be the next Malistaire and Sylvia Drake: I will not accept anything less than a lover who will tear worlds apart to bring me back from the crypt.
Despite my most wistful musings, I swiftly lose hope in finding my white knight in the rank-and-file of spellcasters. Somehow, I encounter car mechanic after car mechanic instead. This will never make sense to me. Car mechanics all the way down. Countless strangers who want nothing more than to tell me how often I should change my oil and whether or not I received fair estimates on my repairs. I am grateful for their oddly-placed expertise, a glint of the lives held in their skin.
After a few hours of sparring side-by-side with enough banter to catch my attentions, I cast a friendly technician a line to reach me. To reach my flesh self. We start by sending each other pictures, affirming our personhoods with more pixels. He’s ten years older than me. He tells me he thinks I’m pretty.
So this is what it feels like to reach another person, alone on my bedroom floor. Shouldn’t I be dancing through the mysticism of meeting, a fantasy’s vivid fantasy? Shouldn’t I feel a jolt as my fingers grace the keyboard? Shouldn’t I want for something? I feel nothing and I want to feel nothing. I reach through my webcam video, face clasped between my hands, and scry for the answer. My eyes reveal nothing.
I block the mechanic kindly, peacefully, unceremoniously. I hope he understands why I may have second thoughts about contacting strangers from the internet, or that I want to remain rooted to the social scene on my carpet and that he should keep to his. I send my girlfriend a nude and she texts me again. I’ll figure out in another three years that it won’t work out. I do not need the external validation. I never did.
Stephanie Anderson (she/they) is a visionary pyromancer from baltimore, maryland. more of her words are in don't submit!, Silly Goose Press, Genrepunk, en*gendered, and more. they're @whoastanderson everywhere that matters, but they'll gladly trade treasure cards with you in exchange for signing their guestbook whoastanderson.com.