One Troll To Rule Them All: My Unhealthy College WoW Addiction

I remember the first time I was introduced to World of Warcraft. A friend of mine from high school invited me over to her house to sleep over. She told me of this game she was playing online. She said she had to pay for it once-a-month, and I thought “Well if I had internet on my computer at home, I’d play it, too!”

Long story short, I ended up making my very first WoW character, Jethra. Terrible name, I know… She was a Rogue Troll and I couldn’t have been happier. I ran around for a little while, killing boars and collecting some sort of cactus fruit in the desert canyon I had started out in (mind you, this was over seven or eight years ago, if memory serves) until I had stopped playing because I was tired.

And that was it.

I didn’t play WoW again until I went to college to live in a dormitory in 2008. It was my first time not living with family – and I was loving it!

I was addicted to WoW by 2009.

It started out fine. I would go to class all day, sometimes come back to the room between classes and play a little WoW, then go to my next class. Then in the evening, I’d come home, do some studying and homework, and then jump on WoW. It was all I wanted to do at one point – it almost became my life.

In case you’ve never been to college, the Freshman 15 is when you take advantage of the dining commons’ all-you-can-eat buffet appeal to the point where you gain 15 pounds. Needless to say that I became a victim of the Freshman 15, but by the time I realized it, I was actually at a healthy weight so it didn’t matter too much.

Then I started eating more junk and drinking those little Starbucks Frappuccino-in-a-bottle drinks almost every day. And that was after my addiction to Monster Energy Drinks, which had to end because I would start shaking when coming down from the sugar high.

So imagine all of that, mixed in with sitting on my butt for hours on end, trying to get to the next level for my new female Troll (yes, I love the Horde)! It was just unhealthy for me.

I’ve always been bad at time management, and I honestly think that if I had stuck to my original way of playing WoW, which was at the end of the day after studying and homework, then I think I might still be playing it today.

Sadly, I’m not.

WoW was a lot of fun, but it became too much for me after a while. I couldn’t control my urges to want to play or see what my guild or my friends were doing or saying, so I had to give it up altogether.

There is a healthy way to play online MMORPGs (if you play one then you’re probably fully aware), and the key is time management. Don’t just stay inside all day and play WoW. I mean, that’s awesome and everything, but what about the friends you have who you can hang out with in-person? What about exercise? What about going to the movies? Or what about going to parties and socializing (which is the thing to do in college)? Yes, I know that you can do almost all of that in WoW, but it’s much more fun and exciting in real life.

My point is don’t waste your college career (or your life, for that matter) on WoW or any MMORPG. I’m not saying that it’s bad to play video games full-time (especially if you’re getting paid for it!), but play it a bit every day. Have a balance. I know of a guy my husband works with who balances a wife, two children, a full-time job, and WoW every day. That is impressive to me because I couldn’t make that work with a full-time college workload as a freshman back in 2009. I didn’t have a job then. I had a boyfriend at that time, but that didn’t last (and I’m not blaming WoW for that!). Just make sure you’re keeping up with everything else in your life because when you put an MMORPG over everything else in your life, you’re bound to crash and burn.

And I don’t want you to crash and burn!