EPTRemembering back I have to say I never really had that many friends, attributed mostly to the fact that I am a person who is an easy target to bully and pick on. I’m kinda ugly and my mother made me run around with very short hair for quite some time in my youth. My glasses didn’t help either, I guess. I remember having one best friend though, his name was Marcus and his family was soooo much cooler than mine. They had a garden with big cherry trees, on which we used to climb and build tree houses on. His father was some kind of car technician and his garage was full of wonders. Together with him we build go-cards out of old moped engines and welded-together metal contraptions. He also had a bb-gun with which we always tried to shoot birds off of power lines, but never seem to hit. This way I spent a big chunk of my childhood outside, without ever touching a computer or a console.
When I was about 9 years old, Marcuse’s father bought him his first console, a PlayStation 1 together with the first Tomb Raider and we played the shit out of that game. It was the first time I ever got in touch with the digital world. Half a year later his father bought him a PC, too and we played games on Win95 all day long, Prince of Persia being one of them. Next was Tomb-Raider 2 and eventually 3. During this time I got my own PC and the first games I played by myself were Jedi Knights and Commandos. Not so much the all-time classics, but great games for me at the time.
When I was about 13 years old my father lost his job without any chance of getting a new one around where we lived, so the decision was made to move; move about 250 miles to a new future. A better future, well, at least that’s what my parents told me. As I mentioned before, I have tremendous problems with making friends, and the only person I felt connected to in a fundamental way was 250 miles away, without internet mind you. We called each other over the next couple of months but slowly and steadily lost our connection. He went his way, I went mine. I haven’t heard from him since.
At my new school the bullying and getting picked on reached a whole new level. I’m from Germany and grew up in Eastern Germany, then we moved to Western Germany and you have no idea how you get treated for being from Eastern Germany in the West. I literally got beaten up just because I came from the “dark side” of Germany. Nobody wanted to befriend me after they saw how the cool kids treated me. The teachers didn’t care and my parents cared even less. Half a year into my new, “better” future, I got my first internet connection. It was a volume tariff, but still enabled me to play my first online game, Guild Wars. With the internet, a whole new world opened up to me, a world in which nobody cared where I was from, a world of anonymity.
1 year of Guild Wars and Diablo II, 6 years of World of Warcraft, 1 year of Starcraft II, real life? What is real life? Ohh that thing, I hate it. I despise it, it made my life a living hell, kill it with fire. I literally had no real life, none. As soon as I came home from school I turned on my PC and played until I went to bed. Someone once said a person dies without social interaction. In Guild Wars I realized that in games like that a guild is almost mandatory. You need one to get the most fun out of the game, at least in my opinion. So I joined a Guild, nothing big, right? Well, the last bits of self-confidence that wasn’t already weeded out by my old school’s environment, was totally and utterly crushed in the new one. Still, I chose a guild from a list on a major community site for Guild Wars that fit the description in my head on how my new home should look like. I’m not that good at writing, as you might have noticed by now, but I have my moments. I wrote a guild application and posted it on their forum. A week later they picked me up and I was invited ingame. Chatting with the guild in guild-chat was not that much of a problem, I might hate small-talk but commenting on technical topics is not that much of a deal for me.
The big deal for me was TeamSpeak. Writing to someone isn’t that difficult, talking to them however is and holy shit was I scared. I can remember the first time I actually had to make a statement in TS in front of all the guild members, about how the guild’s future should look like and when it was my turn, my voice almost cracked and I barely got out a sentence that made sense. In the end it wasn’t that bad, but still it will be forever engraved in my memory as the day I almost pissed myself, because I had to talk to people I never even met in person…. After that I forced myself to always be in TS when I was playing the game, so I could get better at talking to people.
What I can also remember quite vividly was the day I met my first “real” eFriend, who I talk to every day until now. I was fed up to a certain extend with playing Guild Wars and was just talking to another guild member about it, when I noticed 2 people in another channel that said “Diablo II”. I asked him who those two people were, and he replied that they once played Guild Wars, too, but lost interest. I wanted to switch channels and talk to them, but my incredible fear of meeting and talking to people I did not already know incapacitated me. After a few days I realized that they were in the same channel almost every day at the same time and one day I just went for it and switched to their channel. At first I did not make myself known, and they did not notice me either. They talked mostly about Diablo II. After I got used to their voices I brought myself to saying “Hello” to them and they greeted me back. One of them was about my age and the other one, with the game handle “Zanzara”, must have been around 40 years old, at least that’s what I deduced from his voice and the way he talked. After I had gotten used to them, we talked more and more about why they stopped playing Guild Wars and what they saw in Diablo II that Guild Wars did not have. That was the day I decided to buy Diablo II.
After a quarter or so year Zanzara and I had gotten quite close friends, as close as you could get over the internet anyway. He slowly but steadily became the father, my father never had the common decency to be. The guild we were in drifted farther and farther away from Guild Wars over to World of Warcraft and we both decided to switch from Diablo II to WoW. In comes the bane of my youth, the crippling and crushing addiction that is the World of Warcraft. Ok, that might have been a little bit of an overstatement, but in the coming 6 years my free time was conquered and occupied by WoW. 6 years of not talking to anyone outside the game, except in school, of course. Luckily I was not really addicted to it, because after those 6 years I was so incredibly bored by it, that I de-installed it and never thought about it again, at least that’s how I wished it would have worked. I don’t actively play World of Warcraft anymore, but until today I still have an active subscription and log in once a month to keep myself reminded of what I threw my youth away for. 10 max level characters with decent equipment. 10 digital characters… 6 years of my life… gone.
Approximately one year before I stopped playing World of Warcraft, my school problems were magically alleviated by the fact that people do grow up, not only physically but also mentally. Who knew? And maybe the fact that I grew up into a physically strong and tall guy that looked like he could handle himself, helped a little. I found a group of people I could talk to and hang out with, at least at school. Outside of school nothing changed really. I was still glued to the front of my PC but not to play World of Warcraft, but to discover a new passion, Starcraft II. While playing WoW I just played the actual game, I knew nothing about Totalbiscuit or any other Youtube WoW personalities. I did not even know what an eSport was. That changed, when I was told about Starcraft II, by an internet acquaintance of mine. I had never played an RTS game before, so I said to myself, why not give it a try.
Before I started playing I learned as much about the game as I could, after that I played only single player games against the AI to first get adequately good at it, before actually pressing the “find game” button and play online. As soon as I was able to beat the hard AI opponent my ladder journey began. Platinum in a week, no problem for this guy, I thought to myself. Boy was I wrong... Before buying the game I watched a video, where Husky was commentating a game between two players I don’t remember the names of, but I instantly was hooked by the Protoss race. That’s how I am, I picked Monk in Guild Wars before having played the game, I picked Paladin in WoW before having played it, I picked Demon Hunter in Diablo III, before I tried any other characters and my first character in Guild Wars II will be a Mesmer.
From Kennigit’s blog I knew, that random Starcraft 2 fans were asked at the last MLG event, who won IPL4 and most of them did not know. I wasn’t there and therefore was not asked the question, but I answered it nonetheless in an instant, when Kennigit brought it up in his blog. I just know stuff like that. Why? Because I am the guy who has no real life! I’m not in school anymore, I’m part of the workforce now and have a desk-job, because why the hell not. But that, again is the only thing that changed, my free time did not. When I’m not playing Starcraft, I watch a player’s stream or if a tournament is on, I watch that. That’s all I do with my leisure time, nothing more and nothing less.
By now I know a lot of people, well, about 200 and no one leads his/her life like I do. Therefore I’d like to pose a question at the end of my first blog. Do other people like me exist, who have literally no real life and most importantly don’t want one? Most of you will say: “Of course they do!” Well, I have never met one, neither ingame nor outside the game. No one! Bear in mind however I don’t talk about people who spend a whole lot of time in the virtual world, but still go out and have some of that juicy real life, everybody is talking about, because I do not. Ever!
Sincerely,
Tauchsieder
PS: Sorry for my punctuation and English. I hate colons and semi-colons.
