Not Just a Gamer

I’m sure I’m adding fuel to a fire that isn’t worth fussing over. In fact I’m also quite sure that when Alyssa Bereznak decided to tell Gizmodo, a gadget-guide web site, about her apparently disastrous date with a Magic: The Gathering champion, it was her intention to antagonise and provoke a response.

I feel reluctant in doing so, but this is what I am referring to: My Brief OkCupid Affair With a World Champion Magic: The Gathering Player. I have used OkCupid to meet people, so perhaps I have an authority on the matter. Then again I’m not a dingbat so perhaps I will never understand her point.

“This story sounds mean. It’s about a girl judging a boy because he’s a nerd (like so many of us!) that she met on OkCupid. But that’s the point: Judging people on shallow stuff is human nature, and the magic and absurdity of online dating is how immediately and directly it throws that into relief. One person’s Magic is another person’s fingernail biting, and no profile in the world is deep enough to account for that.”

Let’s get one thing clear, I can be a shallow person too. When I started using OkCupid, I had a specific idea of the kind of person I wanted to meet. I also had an image in my head of the ‘type’ of person who uses a dating site. Desperate, lonely people, who were too socially inept to move forward from making face-to-face acquaintances. I’m happy to say I was very wrong.

However, by “One person’s Magic is another person’s fingernail biting, and no profile in the world is deep enough to account for that”, I think there’s been some confusion. Alyssa has, apparently, such a deep-set hatred of Magic: The Gathering, that she cannot date someone who plays it. She cannot date someone who has friends who play it. And she certainly cannot date someone who competes in it. At a push I’m sure you could summarise this as ‘different strokes for different folks’, but she openly admits this is a game she doesn’t actually know anything about. “Eventually I even felt a little bit bad that I didn’t know shit about the game”. I cannot fathom this. If playing a card game is such a horrendous flaw, evidently she should have specified on her profile that it is impossible for her to communicate with someone who partakes in card games (unless she can post a ‘lock up your daughters’ style mockery on the internet about it afterwards). It’s completely possible to add a list of interests you cannot tolerate to your profile. Perhaps setting one up whilst sober is the trick here. This is the “depth” she requires to overcome her problem.

Dating and meeting people is an intimate, sensitive matter. It’s something I sometimes struggle to talk about, and if I do, it’s only to a close friend or two, in confidence. I received all kinds of messages when I was using OkCupid – some scared me and some made me chuckle, but I’m a human being, I like to imagine I’m at least vaguely aware that other people have feelings, which is why I haven’t written items such as “This guy sent me messages that weren’t spelled correctly LOL HE’S SO SAD” or “I met a guy who had a hobby I don’t understand, DON’T GO OUT WITH HIM BECAUSE CARD GAMES ARE THE PLAGUE”, etc.

I was terrified if I met someone via this site, they would arrange to meet me, see me, and run away. They’d go to the toilet and never come back. I’d say I love Metal Gear Solid to bits and some tumbleweed would roll past. I had all kinds of fears, but having a date with someone who decides to laugh at you, write up about it afterwards and warn people away, for the whole world to see, would crush me.

I met someone on OkCupid who is enveloped and immersed by World of Warcraft. I’ve not played many MMOs and I’ve never stuck with one, and I hadn’t even touched WoW. I know nothing about it. The only opinion I had of this game was that it’s not the most attractive MMO of the bunch. A ridiculously popular ugly duckling. This is a game he has been playing for six years, and he invited me to join him.

He set me up with an up to date copy of the game and a time card, we started levelling two characters together, and I had one to myself which he’d sometimes give a flying visit from his level 85, and give me better equipment and gold (I thought that was very sweet, but I’m sad like that). He encouraged me to play through my first dungeon.

It was a fucking disaster. My character was supposed to be healing, on the verge of death we struggled through various mobs of enemies. I ran out of mana, and had no means to replenish it. Someone died. “Res me” they kept saying in the chat window. “Res me”.

I couldn’t find my resurrection spell. I panicked. It turns out I hadn’t even learnt it. People kept leaving the dungeon because I was so shit. I have never felt so lost and clueless playing a video game before (The Tomb Raider: Underworld bridge bug in Mexico being exception to that, I was throwing Lara into walls for four days before I learned the level was broken).

Fast forward a year, and we are living in a wonderful apartment together. I’ve used my savings to pay the council tax and buy some furniture, he is working full-time, and supporting me while I chase my dream job in the games industry. Our characters in WoW are both level 85 now, Jim has started making his videos, and I’m still playing (I’ve started a Frost Mage called Refridgerato – because I’m so cool). He is not just a WoW player in the same way Jon Finkel is not just a Magic: The Gathering player. Hobbies may reflect your interests but they do not define what sort of person you are – so it is no surprise that readers of the Gizmodo article do not learn anything about Jon Finkel, other than his crime of playing Magic: The Gathering. It is Alyssa’s loss for not endeavouring to find out more.