My Funky Valentine

Let’s channel Haddaway for a moment and ask “What is love? Baby don’t hurt me, baby don’t hurt me, no more.”

I think gaming really does something to a person’s ability to maintain a relationship. And yet, paradoxically, the more time you actually spend gaming, the easier it is to find a species of love, albeit a parasitic, ultimately destructive one.

Some years ago I wrote about Victor Ninox’s dalliance with a woman whose obsession with The Sims 2 caused Vic to flee first his house and then the state, until the poor girl was eventually committed and Vic could return to a flat full of buckets and bricks with makeup on them.

And yet, he eventually came to look back on his time with the girl we still call Simantha, if not with fondness then at least a sort of nostalgia for the simpler times. Because Vic recently took up with a woman who was into World of Warcraft.

It seems incredible that he had the bad luck to meet her at all really, because Darlinghe Moonbloode - as she called herself both on and offline - spent almost sixteen hours a day logged in or queuing to log in to various World of Warcraft servers across the world. In much the same way a cascading series of errors culminating in the most severe windshear ever led to the tragic destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger, so too did Vic’s escalating desire for a midnight cheeseburger and a Stormscale server crash align with brutal synchronicity, culminating with us meeting Darlinghe at the Stanmore McDonalds, here in sunny Sydney.

The rest, as they say, is history. Or maybe catastrophe. When Darlinghe found out that Vic knew the guy (me) who knew the guy who wrote the Australian review of World of Warcraft, she could hardly keep her ample frame off him.

Now, I don’t want to suggest that Darlinghe was a stereotype. And out of respect for that wish, I just won’t describe her. The yards of black velvet both on her person and hanging from her four-poster bed were completely incidental to her obsession with power levelling the same goddamn Druid over and over.

I went into her house but once. Her parents owned the sane parts of it, and she was jammed out the back in a little granny flat, which, if she stayed there long enough, would first become a spinster flat and then an old maid flat. And eventually a crazy cat lady flat. I knew about crazy cat ladies: I could spot them a mile off.

Darlinghe had a unique perspective on the world… well, alright it wasn’t unique at all, but it was definite. Careful readers will know I’ve been seeing this girl Lara on and off, and Lara is everything Darlinghe isn’t, including but not limited to the way she runs half-marathons and doesn’t play computer games. Darlinghe, on meeting Lara at a coffee shop up the street which was as close as I was prepared to bring her to Darlinghe’s house, first exposed and then exploited the fact Lara knew nothing at all about World of Warcraft. Darlinghe was self-aware enough to feel superior but not enough to realise Lara’s tears weren’t of humiliation but just a histamine reaction to the completely insane cologne she’d bought Vic for Valentine’s Day and insisted on splashing all over him.

What’s the punchline? Was it Vic hiding in my kitchen while Darlinghe hammered the security buzzer six floors down for forty-five consecutive minutes until the desire to power level overwhelmed the desire to castrate Vic for wanting a day, a single day off from World of Warcraft? Was it Vic actually leaping into the harbour to make a midnight escape from the Guild Meet From Hell? Or perhaps it was Vic standing in my living room earnestly imploring me to hit him in the head with a claw hammer which he heard was the best way to induce a coma.

It’s no use Vic, I told him, because comas end. Wounds heal. But love springs eternal. A solution to Darlinghe Moonbloode came, at length, but I will save the tale for another issue, for two reasons. One is in hope this cliff-hanger of sorts will both mimic the current trend in game narrative writing. But also, stimulate what I think is badly needed sympathy for my friend and crazy ex-flatmate, Victor Ninox.