Well in the post below I talked alot about World of Warcraft, as much a social tool as it is a game. Last night, I was ‘running a dungeon’- killing lots of monsters with a team of four other random people, who before that night, I had never spoken to or played with before. It was all going alright, not particularly brilliant, for about an hour. But then we reached a boss character, and it was clear we couldn’t do it- and I was getting tired- and we kept dying- so eventually, I quit the game.

So why do I feel guilty? Well, I didn’t tell anyone I was quitting the game, I gave no signs I was quitting the game and it wasn’t the worst group of random people I had ever grouped with, I even had a friendly chat with one of them. The thing is, I was tired and had work to do and not feeling too well, so just like that…I quit.

Repercussions? Well I don’t know if there will live to be any in-game ones due to it harming my reputation, though I was having connection problems so they may have put it down to that. But personally, definitely repercussions. I let four people down, albeit four people I had never met before, but still four real living souls with emotions and thoughts and minds, and to let them down like that struck me hard, it always does. I’m not saying I do this alot, far from it, but this was a good group and they were good people, and it particularly struck me as a bad example of how I should act.

The consequences for them? Well they probably waited for me for a few minutes, which is the bit that makes me feel really bad. I have done it enough, waiting for others, but the fact that they were waiting for me even though I knew I wasn’t going to come back just makes me feel really deceitful and easy. Hopefully they would have found someone else and continued on, maybe even done better without me, but I don’t know that… they could have disbanded and gone to bed themselves, their evening of gaming wrecked…all because of me… perhaps I should start to do this less, this virtual guilt in the real world really is unbearable…