I like kittens. And also WoW.



Hi, I'm Christie--more commonly known on the internet as Jagwyr or Jag. I’m twenty-six years old, college educated, and mostly unemployed. I live in my mom’s garage, which I share with my dog, cat, and many stacks of cardboard boxes. Half the garage is my domain; the other half is storage space. It was never my intention to become a basement-dwelling nerd, but here I am, so I may as well fess up to it.

This blog will be (mostly, most of the time) about WoW, from my perspective. That is to say, the perspective of somebody who loves the game for its plethora of digital animals, pretty fantasy outfits, and because it’s an interactive social hobby to share with friends.

In this blog, you are likely to find many screenshots of pets, mounts, and RP outfits. You’re likely to read my opinions about the facts that Worgen do not have tails, and that the Alliance guild mount is a majestic golden lion, while the Horde's is a disgusting bug with pincers.

You are unlikely to find any discussion of class mechanics, raid strategies, or damage meters, unless they happen to relate directly to something theme-appropriate—like the fact that I am so excited about the Worgen Running Wild ability that allows them to drop to all fours and sprint at mounted speed.

By way of introduction, I will share the story of how I became a WoW player.

So I’ve always been a geek, but WoW is the only video game I’ve ever played. Well, almost-only. I did manage to beat The Lion King back when I was in 6th grade, on my little brother’s original Sega Genesis. Allow me a moment to establish my geek cred with this list of stuff that makes me happy:

Star Trek (and other sci-fi), Dungeons and Dragons (and other tabletop RPGs), Renaissance faires (yes, I dress up), anything by Joss Whedon (Buffy, Firefly, etc.), and the list, it goes on.

During my recently-ended college years, I was lucky enough to live in a great big house full of geeks. Our living room boasted two floor-to-ceiling bookcases packed with gaming books. Many evenings found us either clustered around the kitchen table rolling dice, or plopped on the furniture watching sci-fi together. Most of my friends liked video games, too, but that was never my thing. I like social activities, where you get to interact with people. Video games just couldn’t hold my attention.

And then WoW entered the house. It started with just one roomie, who began playing during Vanilla, but never really attempted to recruit us into his hobby. Then, about the time BC launched, another roomie bought the game, and another, and another, until everybody in the house was playing. Except me. I would glance at their screens and shrug, baffled by the UI. So many buttons, it looked completely overwhelming. Zeiseit the Paladin frequently urged me to join them, to add my biological and technological distinctiveness to their own, resistance was futile… but I did resist, because nothing about the game appealed to me.

Have I mentioned that I also love animals? My lifelong obsession with adorable, fuzzy creatures began sometime during my early childhood, in those hazy years before memories start to stick. As a kid, much to my mother’s dismay, I filled the house with a menagerie—dogs, cats, parakeets, hamsters, rats and mice, guinea pigs, bunnies, fish, and a horse. I grew up wanting to be a veterinarian, though I changed my mind after a few months of working in a clinic and witnessing sick animals and their owners suffering. I adore animal movies (The Lion King, Seabiscuit, Homeward Bound, Free Willy) and animal books (Watership Down, Call of the Wild, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill). As kids, my best friend and I didn’t play with Barbies—we played with stuffed animals, Littlest Pet Shop, and My Little Pony. We didn’t play “house,” either—we crawled around on all-fours and pretended to be puppies or kittens. I suppose I never really grew out of this, because during my high school and early college years, I identified as a Furry—not because I have any sexual interest in fursuiters or animals, but because I had so much fun hanging around with people who thought that it would be pretty awesome to have whiskers and a tail.

It's important to establish my obsession with all things cute and fuzzy because this explains why, whenever my friend Zeiseit the Paladin attempted to convince me that playing WoW would be fun, my question was, repeatedly, “Can I be a kitty?” I just couldn’t see the point of playing a video game if it meant that I had to be humanoid. I mean, I’m already a human in my everyday life. If I’m going to play in a fantasy world, I want to run on all-fours, I want my whiskers and tail. I want to claw, bite, pounce, and roar at the monsters. The fantasy genre is full of intelligent, talking animals as characters, so I didn’t see why this should be a problem.

So the conversation would go like this:

Zeiseit the Paladin: You should really play WoW with us, it’s so much fun! C’monnnn.
Me: Can I be a kitty?
Zeiseit: Um, no. But you could be an elf! Or a troll!
Me: Ew. Trolls sound ugly. And I don’t really want to be an elf. I want to be a cat. Maybe like a panther, or a lion. Sorry, but if I can’t be a cat, your video game sounds lame.
Zeiseit: Sigh.

And that was the end of it. It got a little annoying when we all hung out together, and my friends would talk about WoW, about how they were blasting kobolds with their fireballs or slaying ogres with their magical swords, and getting “loot” and leveling up. It all went right over my head. My eyes would glaze over and I’d wait for the conversation to turn to something in which I could be included. And then one day, during one of these conversations, I catch the phrase, “Druid in cat form,” coming out of my friend Baro the Priest’s mouth.

I immediately dove into the conversation. “What’s a druid in cat form?” Long pause. Zeiset the Paladin is suddenly looking a bit embarrassed. He literally facepalms. “I can’t believe I never thought about druids. I forgot all about them. Yeah, if you’re a druid, you can shapeshift into a cat. I’ve been trying to convince her to play for weeks, and she keeps refusing to play unless she can be a cat, and… I’m such an idiot.”

The next day, on my shiny new trial account, Lynxr the Druid was born. Her name was a typo. I was trying for “Lynx,” which I’m sure would have been unavailable anyway. So I went with it.

Why did you start playing WoW? What is it that caught your eye and appealed to you about the game?