When I was younger, I could game all day, all night, and repeat it the next day. There was something special about being that passionate, so focused, and lost in time.

That feeling changed in my 20s when I was deep into my Melee career. It might have looked very similar, playing games every day. But it was rather structured, even if it didn’t appear so. My mornings were for practice, organization, errands, and recovery. My evenings were for tournaments. Some weekends I traveled out of town for bigger events. It was an every day grind.

I wasn’t just playing games to fill the time or feel my passion. Every move felt effective. Each practice session, each tournament, each challenge I had to face. If ever there were a setback, I had to personally overcome it. Because of this onus and responsibility, gaming felt productive and I never felt guilty about it.

That part is quite surprising looking back. Growing up, there was always a critical voice in the background, nagging at me anytime I sat down and played video games. I heard every critique: they were bad for my eyes, only lazy people played games, that they were a waste of time, and a useless skill. I always had classes or homework to attend to, aspirations to aspire to, and parents to disappoint less.

But when I was competing, those voices went away. I didn’t have time to hear those nagging whispers in my mind. I had practiced, traveled, competed, and progressed. It was not just time spent. It was time invested. The players who beat me when I first entered the scene began admiring my progress and it wasn’t before long that I had very few peers in my eyes.

But competitive gaming has an expiration date whether I’d like to admit or not. When that time came, I didn’t know how to transition away from gaming. My actions and habits persisted and I still gamed as a hobby. But my child-like guilt came back, with all the past criticisms. When I competed, gaming had meaning and purpose. When I no longer competed, I looked for other ways for gaming to be productive.

Many posts in this blog are related to World of Warcraft because that is the game I poured my heart into heavily after retiring from Melee. It is fitting because I stopped playing World of Warcraft around 2007 to invest more time into the real world and competing. Melee took all my effort from traveling town to town, state to state, and practicing at home alone.

So when Classic WoW was announced and my Melee career was already sunsetting, I spent a ton of time in Azeroth and started to use my gaming energy in new creative ways. And for a long while, World of Warcraft was able to replace that feeling. So I leaned into it. I played excessively during lockdown and made sure once again it was not just time spent but time invested.

I ran and recruited large social guilds, hosted raids, managed players, and ran custom events. It felt close enough to competitive Melee, with responsibilities and emergent rewards. This worked for a long time, filling the itch. But it wasn’t the same, and lockdown would not last forever. I tried persisting through that feeling, playing more and finding new meanings.

I didn’t know what had gone wrong. Was it the next expansion? Was it my fault in leadership? Maybe I needed to do better. Maybe I just needed more time.

It took me a while to understand what was happening. In Melee, I sought deeper meaning after I had journeyed through mastery. In Classic World of Warcraft, I attempted to seek deeper meaning right from the start. Sure, I had some first hand experience of WoW mastery from 20 years ago. But nostalgia has its limits and it would only be a matter of time before even old content became new to me.