I have, as gamers like to say, succumbed to the dark side. My PC is now downloading a years’ worth of patches from World of Warcraft.

Justyn Olby will tell me, “I TOLD YOU SO.”

And that’s why I have to blog about it, so I can pre-empt his I-told-you-so-ness by telling it so first, thereby depriving him of first dibs pleasure. Hah!

I suppose I should start from the beginning.

Almost exactly one year ago, Chong bought me a WoW box for my birthday in an attempt to “lure me to the dark side”. I was playing EverQuest 2 at that time, he was playing WoW, and gamers have this incurable tendency to tempt all their friends into playing the games they’re playing.

I installed my birthday present but didn’t activate the account because I didn’t have time for two MMORPGs. And paying for two gaming subscriptions is madness.

So I put it off, waiting for myself to get bored with EQ2 before I started on WoW.

In February this year, I quit EQ2. Not exactly out of boredom, but due to lack of time. Because of that, I didn’t start on WoW, either. I suddenly decided that I had many more important things to do with my life. I decided to quit gaming totally.

Many gamers will find this declaration very familiar.

Many gamers before me have made the very same declaration.

Many, I think, invariably return to the “dark side” after a while.

That’s why every time I tell Justyn that I have quit gaming, he goes, “Yeah, yeah, tell me about it.”

Well, Justyn doesn’t give me enough credit. I did quit for five months. (Collecting daily bank interest in Neopets and making buildings and troops in Travian do not count.)

Well, you know, it’s not a game if it’s not MMORPG.

Honestly (and this is addressed to my gamer friends), if someone who only logs in to Neopets once a day to collect bank interest were to say, “I’m a gamer!”, you would die laughing.

SO THERE.

But, of course, Justyn will be pleased to proclaim himself a prophet now that I am back MMORPG-ing.

It was an impulse decision.

There have been one too many traumatising incidents this month. Losing roles, getting crappy roles (worse than not getting any), being embarrassingly bad at auditions (worst of all).

In an attempt to forget the trauma, I have been losing myself in my novels.

This night, as I finished devouring my last book, panic seized me.

I had no more books to escape into. The bad memories always know this and they always find me.

So, my solution: A game. I had to play a game.

I played some Neopets, but that made me feel giddy and restless. I wanted to play an RPG, but one that required no subscription. Just for this week, you know, I needed to kill some monsters and such.

I tried playing a free Flash-based online RPG, some silly game which entertained me for a while but then annoyed me because it started hanging every 10 minutes.

I even considered playing Maple Story.

And that was when I remembered.

I have a dusty box of World of Warcraft sitting in my shelf, still attached with a free one-month subscription (very important since I’m broke).

Wahahaha~!

So I am back to being a gamer.

Maybe only for a month because I don’t think I can afford to continue paying for the subscription after the free month is up.

But I know what Justyn will say to that.

“Yeah, yeah, tell me about it.”