Looking for Party – Non-sexual Healing

If you have a Facebook account, Twitter account or have ever been on the Internet at some point in your life, you may have seen this meme:

It is pretty cringeworthy, isn’t it? Apologies to my friends who have shared this on their walls or feeds… but I just cannot agree with the statement it is trying to make.

I would say this is confession time, but it is more a ‘glaringly obvious’ moment for me – I am a dreadful healer. No shadow of a doubt, if you need to turn to someone to keep your party alive, I am not that woman.

At this point he stood up and shouted ‘I PLEAD THE FIFTH!’ threw himself over his desk and ran out of the room screaming.

But the assumption that because you have a) Tits and b) An active subscription to a game your other half is playing then you will be the healer is pretty overwhelming. It’s something I have been curious about for a while now: why is it assumed that female MMO gamers will be the healer class? Is it connected to the maternal instinct? Or that we want to protect the people we care about? Does this make me a bad example of a female gamer then? And how does the fact I am female playing a videogame even matter in the grand scheme of everything?! So many questions and so little time…

Starting to disappear into the dark corners of my mind and contemplate every little thing I had ever done, I turned to the one person who I knew I could get a straight answer from: Kody.

Asking him to be honest with me, I said ‘would you have me in party as your healer?’

At this point he stood up and shouted ‘I PLEAD THE FIFTH!’ threw himself over his desk and ran out of the room screaming. I think he is hiding in the freezer and he can stay there.

After that exhibition of brutal honesty; I thought I should look over my time on MMOs and see what I have ‘been’ and where I have been most successful…

My first MMO was Phantasy Star Online, where I was gently brought into the fold by some lovely people who were patient and kind. I still miss them to this day! In PSO, I was a damage dealer (DD) with dual blades. I did tinker in healing but I found it slow and boring, and my gear was pretty low so I wasn’t really effective. I liked fast action and chucking out damage left, right and centre.

So bludgeoning enemies with two massive blades seemed like the natural choice. And I stuck to that for the years I played.

Eventually moving on to Phantasy Star Universe, I can safely say I had to learn the values of healing. And the reason?

No one else bloody played it! All the people I previously played PSO with didn’t follow over and moved on to other games.

No parties meant no healer which meant a continually dead Carly (or ParvatiIV if I am gonna get technical) so class mixture was essential.

My entire PSU career can be summed up in one (yet another) meme:

It was a very lonely time for me, gaming wise.

Then I started seeing Kody and he introduced me to Final Fantasy XI; a game he had been playing for a few years before we got together. One of my good friends described it as ‘the violent, abusive partner of MMOs’ so I was slightly deterred! Kody and I sat down one evening and over dinner, discussed what class I would take. White Mage came up and I thought it to be the ‘useful’ class for me to take – I like to be of use to people plus I didn’t get a chance to play a healer much in previous games.

A few weeks into it, several deaths and a multitude of swear words later, I came to realise I was not a healer. I enjoyed the ‘I am well useful!’ aspect, but you are only as useful as your skills allow you to be, and I severely lacked. Yeah I could learn, but I honestly believe I would still be at same stage now as I was then if I’d carried on.

Feeling defeated, I turned to what I know best – hitting things hard and fast. Monk was one of the basic start up jobs and within weeks I was ploughing in the faces of many a beast in Vana’diel and have done so for a few good years.

Is it wrong that I like to be one of the DD of the group? No.

Should I be the healer because I happen to be a female playing the same video game alongside many, many other females? No.

Should I feel flattered that a guy wants me to heal him whilst he does all the groovy crazy shit? God no!

But I admire anyone who takes a healer class as their main job, regardless of gender. I am not a hater, being the main healer is a mighty difficult job to maintain. One of the most amazing White Mage players I have ever met is a guy called Tiberiusara (Tibs for short) aka Jim. Whenever we all trundle off into combat, if we have Tibs with us we know we can crack out massive damage and he will keep us safe. It’s an incredibly hard task keeping several people alive whilst trying to avoid becoming the monster’s main target, yet he does it flawlessly. Hats off to him!

So think before you meme, she just might want to play that game with you. And if you are lucky, she might heal you. And if you are super lucky, she might hand you your arse on a silver plate in Player vs Player!