If it hasn’t been made obvious by now, let me just clarify that I am, in fact, a gamer. A video gamer, to be specific, since people have often misunderstood that statement to mean either gambling or hunting. No, I spend hours in front of my computer, enjoying electronic entertainment in the form of interactive simulations, most commonly in the form of a role-playing game.
The largest of those games would be World of Warcraft (also known as WoW), in which I mainly play a large female minotaur with a bow and wolf companion (also known as a tauren hunter). I have been playing said game for over four years now, and commit quite a bit of time towards improving my performance within the game itself.
See, every character in the game tracks its progress with a system of levels, currently capped at 80. Almost anyone, with enough time, can reach that 80th level on any character. But once you’re there, you move into endgame – the high-end dungeons and boss creatures that require time, effort, and coordination with either 9 or 24 other people. At that point it’s very much a sink or swim situation – you can either sink, deciding that you’ve put enough effort into the game and you don’t need to do anything more; or you can swim, and push harder to accomplish all you can in the game.
WoW, just like almost every other game out there, is controlled by an enormous series of mathematical calculations. How well your character can theoretically perform is directly related to the numbers on the equipment you acquire in the game. As a result, there is an entire subsection of the playerbase that spends inordinate amounts of time and energy on figuring out those numbers to determine exactly what is needed to be the best in the game, and then insists that everyone must reach those numbers if they are to ever really succeed in the game.
Bear with me, I’m going somewhere with this.
I recently started frequenting a forum for writers, more specifically novel-writers. I’m nearing the home stretch on my first round of edits on AtS and am eager to find advice wherever it may lie. I began posting in discussion threads, trying to get to know the other forum-goers while reading through all the active conversations. As with most things, I went in with very high hopes and the best intentions.
What I found was a group of number-crunching aspirants. They wanted to be published writers, but they had done the math and they knew exactly what would make the best novels. They had a formula for what would sell and what would be great, and if your story didn’t have that then you weren’t going to succeed. They research genres, trends and fads and they can tell you if your novel was even worth writing in the first place.
In WoW, I pay attention to what the ‘elitist jerks’ have to say, but only just enough so I understand where they’re coming from. The way I play my character is not ideal, and it’s not perfect. I’ll never be ‘the best’ and they’ll never take me seriously, but that’s alright by me. I’ll play the game the way I want to play it, and as long as I’m having fun then I’m playing it right.
The same, I realized, goes for writing. Maybe my story isn’t the perfect formula, or perhaps it isn’t the smash original fantasy hit that the market so desperately craves. Maybe it won’t sell, or maybe it will but it won’t be a bestseller that I can live off for the rest of my life. But I’ll write the way I want to write, and as long as someone out there enjoys it then I’m writing it right.
And even if my story does become wildly famous and sells like chocolate chip hotcakes, I’ll still play my tauren hunter and always remember that no matter what, I’m doing it right.
