What Does Poly Have to Do With Vidya Games?

Apologies for the lapse in posting – I’ve been sick and hopped up on cold medicine, and coherency has not been my forte as of late.

Should have a few posts in the chamber this week, though! Enjoy!

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I would consider myself poly-flexible. I didn’t come to it naturally, but it always made intellectual sense to me.

I was thinking about it the other day, and it dawned on me that my approach to poly in my life almost exactly mirrors my approach to creating characters in video games.

Let’s use World of Warcraft as the model here.

When I first started playing WoW, I had no idea what I was doing! I created a Mage and just screwed around and learned the game. I didn’t bother trying anything else, and I wasn’t even interested! I had limited video gaming time, and I was going to invest that time developing this one character to be the best it could be!

Years went by before a situation arose where playing a Mage was not in the best interest of what was trying to be accomplished (such as needing an additional healer for a raiding guild, etc.). So I still maintained my Mage, and she was still my main, and she was AWESOME and burning up the DPS charts, and she was just an extension of myself – but I began developing my Priest!

That Priest was a lot of fun, but every time I got an achievement while playing her (and was super excited about the achievement!), I was somewhat disappointed that my Mage was missing out on that achievement, too.

Sometimes an expansion would come out that was absolutely brutal for Mages, either in terms of solo questing, or raiding DPS, and I’d create other characters just to try them out and level them to max level.

But there my Mage was, always calling to me. Reminding me of those early days of exploration. She’s who taught me the game, through trial and error and dumb newbie mistakes. And every time a new expansion came out, she was the first character to make it to max level and get the cool gear.

I would then seek to level other characters, but I just never invested as much enthusiasm with them. I’d get them all to max level (by the most recent expansion I couldn’t even do that, because I’d gotten 8 different classes to max level during the previous expansion, and I was BURNED OUT!) They’d always lag slightly behind my main, except in extremely lucky loot drop scenarios sometimes my Priest would come out ahead for a while (she seems to be my home away from home).

Some people talk about managing to switch main characters later on in the game – they’d played a Warlock for years or something and then during one expansion they tried out Paladin tanking and fell in love and abandoned their beloved Warlock. That always made me sad. Regardless whether the expansion was ruthless with nerfs – my Mage would still be what I consider my main character, even to this day.

If I were to go out and buy the newest expansion and fire up the game again, Ajatara the Draenei Mage would be waiting there for me, and I would be so happy to relearn the game all over again with her.

My poly life seems to mirror this. I enjoy meeting new people (creating new characters) and developing relationships (leveling them), but my husband has been there through so much, and taught me so much that he has become synonymous with how I live my life (my main). And it sounds hierarchical, and it sounds like no one could ever be him – and I think for me, that’s true. It’s not on purpose. I’m not LIMITING other people or my relationships with them – this is just how my brain naturally works. I hitched my wagon to my husband, and we’ve built our life together, and I want to keep our life together until one of us kicks it.

Ajatara can’t do everything, though. She can’t heal. She can’t tank. And I like doing those other things, too.

And seriously – I absolutely LOVE playing my Priest (She’s a red-headed human named Hymnpossible, because puns within cartoon references are the BEST). She’s always the second character I level to max after a new expansion hits. I would never abandon her or leave her unleveled during an expansion, and I play her almost as much as Ajatara. But she’s not Ajatara. She does different, awesome things, and provides a different experience, but Ajatara is like my home.

(I’d say my boyfriend is totally my Priest)

(And my current FWB would be my Paladin, because wrecking faces is just FUN)

Right, wrong, or indifferent, that’s how my brain chooses to allocate my attention and time resources, whether we’re talking romantic relationships or video games.

 

 

 

Also…For the Alliance! 😉