So, Sally and I have given each other some simple writing assignments and this is the first one I’m tackling.  The topic: why/how I like gaming with Sally.

The short, general response: it’s great to play with the people you love, especially when they are good players.  And it’s fun.

The long answer touches on a lot of things we’ve been talking about: sharing a common activity, having built-in goals and discussions, combining out collective smarts (or lack thereof), and just having fun together.

Sally is an incredibly bright, deep, warm, and social person.  Being able to share one of my primary interests with her and have access all of her reactions, insights, and capabilities into what we’re doing is pretty awesome.  Not just that, but she’s a great teammate.  Working on a shared goal as a team is a pretty rewarding endeavor and games are the place where we can have that team and have fun at the same time.

Some of the most fun we’ve had together over the last few years have been playing WoW together, from simply leveling up another duo while watching some TV to leading a relatively large raiding guild.  Leveling is a pretty simple shared activity that requires little bits of cooperation and coordination with nice little rewards scattered along the way.

It’s also just hard not to like being jumped by higher level enemy characters and winning because we’re better players and/or better organized.  That’s just awesome.  You get to turn to each other, throw a high five o/\o, and then run the hell away before they come back with more people.

When we were some of the founding officers of a new raiding guild, we spent countless hours working together at coffee shops on boss strategies, guild member issues, and ideas on how to improve the guild and our experience in the guild.  It was a great project where we were both on equal footing and had tons of little tasks in it that we could work on together (setting up raid schedules, determining fair loot policies, evaluating performances of members, and on and on).

It’s also very apparent when I play other games on my own, either when Sally’s not around or because the game doesn’t appeal to her, that I’m always wishing either that she liked the game I’m playing or that there was a good way to make it into a game where we could play together.   Our experience in WoW together has almost spoiled me - most games are just more fun when we can play them together and both be into the goals we set for ourselves or are presented by the game.

I’ll also highlight one more time that Sally is, in general, just a good player.  I definitely come to the games we play together with more experience in games and often pick things up faster, but it hasn’t really been an issue. It turns out, we’re both pretty hardcore gamers when it comes down to it, trying to learn as much as possible about the mechanics of the game and making sure we’re doing as well as we can in the roles we choose.  Sally’s hunter was always in the top 5 damage dealers in our raids and I was almost always the main or primary off-tank.  (I think she often feels like she’s riding on my coattails sometimes, but she’s always the only one who feels that way.)

Anyway, there’s a start to answer that question.  I’m sure a lot of posts here will explore the whys and hows of our gaming as we continue writing.