Canal Boating: Running the Gauntlet of Humilation

I know I have intense bad luck with holidays. It is now six years since I wrote: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2008/03/when-holiday-is-worse-than-no-holiday.html and in that period I have only had one holiday which has lasted more than 2 days before something has led to it being terminated. The last week-long holiday was in December 2012 in a cottage 45 Km from home. The last holiday I took did not even last two days as on the morning of the second day we woke to find the electricity had been cut to the whole district by a storm; power was not restored for twelve hours, so we simply went home.

I remain the eternal optimist and having finally got some compensation, after seven months of battling, for the car which lasted me 13 days before breaking down entirely, never to move again, I decided to go on a canal boat holiday. This is a very British style of holiday. Americans and Canadians do not have this kind of holiday and fall enthusiastically in love with it. Even northern continental Europeans prefer our quaint, narrow canals to the vast still industrial/commercial ones of Belgium/Netherlands/Germany. I am part of the canal generation. Growing up living near a canal I saw it transformed during the 1970s and 1980s from a disused channel with little water in it and a lot of rubbish, into a functioning canal which attracted the growing leisure boat crowd. Yachting and power boating has always been popular among the well-off of southern England where I lived, but canals now offered a whole new opportunity with less risk of storms and less distance to travel to reach your boat. With boats on canals limited to 4mph (6.4kph) it also appears to be a relaxed way to travel. Canals were built originally to move heavy goods like coal or stone to industrial areas and for this reason they are densest in England in the industrial Black Country of the West Midlands. However, also linked to rivers, they also pass through rural and former industrial areas which are more pleasant to go through and connect historic towns which are tourist attractions in their own right such as Oxford and Bath.

Aside from the 'boating set' canals have also had an attraction for a more 'hippie' like clientele. The association with moving freely around the country, tying up mostly where you choose, obviously has an appeal for people who like a less tied-down way of life. Certainly in the 1970s canals were heavily associated with folk music and handicrafts. It has only been in recent years that the styles and decor of them has been allowed to diversify from the black, red, green colouring of 'trad', i.e. traditional, boats. More and more have been built, many these days with modern facilities such as televisions and washing machines; steps are now in place to allow wi-fi on them. Perhaps the fad is passing as the number of canal boats for sale has reached an all time high and you can pick one up for as cheap as £32,000 (€38,700; US$54,000). This may seem a great deal, but new ones cost double or more that price. You are buying something 2.1m wide (for what is called a narrowboat, i.e. one that will fit all canals in the UK) and 16m long. The longest are 24m (72 feet) long, made of steel with water and toilet tank, a cooker, etc. on board. You can live on a narrowboat and in many parts of the country you will find people doing so for part or indeed all of the year, though it can get cold. You find the entire range from modern ones with double glazing and solar panels to traditional ones with the engine visible in the middle of the boat and a coal oven on board.

All over the UK you can hire canal boats for a holiday. They typically sleep six people but you can get ones accommodating more. For £1000-2000 depending on where you start from and the quality of your boat and its facilities, you can rent one for a week. You are permitted to drive it with only one hour's training. This is one challenge, people moving vessels 72m long in channels sometimes only a couple of metres wide with other canal users, notably canoeists and people on the towpath running beside the canal, including pedestrians, anglers and increasing numbers of cyclists. The other thing is that the momentum of a canal boat even when moving at 2kph is immense and water does not provide much friction. Lock gates weigh anything from 800Kg to 2 tonnes. There is a lot of room for bumps and knocks. One woman described it to me as 'a contact sport'. However, despite this, given the attitudes of canal users outlined below, you have to move as if walking on eggshells.

On paper a canal boat holiday might seem ideal. You can move at your own pace. It is like camping without having to give up all the facilities or having to queue to have a shower or use the toilet. In addition, if it rains you can retreat inside and watch television or a DVD; going through urban areas you can even use your mobile phone. The trouble is, the thing that ruins it is the British and indeed foreigners who aspire to behave like middle class Britons. You can do nothing in the UK these days without someone telling you very loudly that you are doing it wrong. They do this for two reasons: 1) to assert their social status, through having a privately owned boat or one that is 'proper' or better equipped compared to what you might be aboard; 2) to massage their egos, by showing you up to be ignorant or a fool.

Encouraged by the woman I used to live with and her son, I hired a 33-metre, 6-berth narrowboat on a canal in southern England for one week. In many ways this holiday was a 'success'. It lasted 5 days rather 2 days, though it was supposed to last 7 days. I lost a hat and a map; a watch strap was broken but no electrical items or money were lost. I had some scrapes but no serious injuries. It did not rain and the weather was fine, with some reprieve from intense sunshine. We moved very slowly, covering around 7Km per day. In part that was due to the number of locks and swing bridges along the way. A lock is a large mechanism sometimes 3 metres deep with usually four, though sometimes two, of the large gates already mentioned. They allow the lifting or dropping of the water level in an enclosed space, so permitting a boat or sometimes a pair of boats, to go up or down hills. They are marvels of 18th century engineering and can be entirely operated by a single person if required, though it is typical to use two or more. You also need someone on the boat to move it in and out of the lock. To operate the lock there is no power bar that from your arms and legs. You let water in and out of the lock by turning ratchets and you open and close the locks with the strength of your back. Thus you need to be physically healthy and fit. However, of course, the British work at two extremes, either they lay utterly passive on the beach or they insist on a holiday which in centuries passed would have been deemed labour.

I knew locks well. Probably better than almost anyone we met. When the canal behind my house was derelict friends and me would climb down the tunnels that run through the locks. They were dry then and are now literally filled with tonnes of water. I have climbed up and down lock gates that most people now only see as they pass them. I am unfit and overweight, but thought I remained strong enough to do the job. Despite some 'sticky' lock gates, this proved to be the case. Indeed the 12-year old boy (1.67m; size 42 feet) with us was able to operate them alone.

The trouble with the holiday was not the mechanics, it was the people.  It was the not so wonderful British public who cannot let anyone pass without making some jibe or instructing them about how pathetic they are or simply insulting them.  When you are in a hire boat, you are the lowest of the low.  The company you are hiring from has its logo, its name and telephone number emblazoned on the boat.  Everyone knows precisely where you have come from and that you are not a 'proper' boater despite all the exhortations in the canal associated publications that people like us are an important source of revenue for the upkeep of the canals and for restoring the many miles of canal that still remained disused.  However, the British cannot stop themselves and it even seems the hobby for people to hang around locks simply to shout advice/abuse.  Within the first hour you get used to person after person telling you exactly what you have been told in the training you have received.  You smile and nod thanks.  However, this does not seem to be enough.  The people seem to want you to bow down and kiss their boots for the wonderful enlightenment they have given across.

We had a Dutchman not even bother to talk to us, but in the middle of us operating a lock simply walk up and take over.  I stepped back trying to stay calm and not say anything.  By dropping the vent (the piece in a lock gate that lets the water in or out) early, he actually made our job harder.  We had people bellowing at us that we were not doing it the 'correct' way, even when we were in fact the right.  One man became indignant when we started to use the barge pole to move the front of the boat away from the bank, though that is its purpose.  He insisted that the 12-year old insert his foot between the side of the boat and the lock wall, even though this risked it becoming crushed.  He would not accept our rebuffs.  We had people trying to race into a lock before we had exited it, making it far harder for the pilot, only a few days into driving anything let alone a 33m boat.  We had people 'speed' (if you can call 8kph speeding) past us, and they scowling at us when their wash meant we were sucked into buffing the stern of their boat. Always we were deemed to be on the 'wrong' side or opening the lock too fast or too slowly.  We were even chided for 'not having come far today' as if there is a set distance you must cover every hour to be deemed an appropriate boater.

Every passage through a lock we made, every peg we hammered into the ground, every knot we tied was judged as having failed and we were told very vocally that that was the case.  I tried to throw one rope aboard the boat, missed and cursed.  This resulted in a woman pursuing us for 1Km down the canal, bringing with her the representative of the boat company we had hired it from to harangue us for ten minutes about appropriate language.  Clearly you are not permitted to 'swear like a bargee' (i.e. someone operating a barge, a commercial version of a canal boat) however, the locals are into 'trad' boating.  To be told off for swearing such distance from the incident made me feel like a child.  I swallowed all the abuse, all the snootiness, all the patronising behaviour, all the haranguing, all the people pushing their way in to take over my task and all of this with the expectation that I would be grateful for their intervention.  I feel utterly debased from my five days on the boat.  I feel as if I have given up all dignity, all initiative and am fit only to be ordered around by people apparently so superior to me.  As you can imagine, I snapped and abandoned the boat.  No-one else would come with me.

I returned to the yard where we had started from.  The woman on duty was surprised to see me leaving.  She has the faith that canal holidays are the very best that anyone could have and was unable to tolerate the fact that someone was having such a humiliating time that they had to go home early.  Of course, I have absolutely no interest in going nowhere near a canal ever again and will be happy if they all fade back into blocked up obscurity where they should have been left.  Dried out they could have provided decent roads between many towns.  The British (plus representatives of the Dutch, German and even Canadian populations) have to bring their egos and their suppression of people around them to everything they do.  You see it constantly when driving; you now see it if you ever dare venture out on a bicycle; I am sure you have long seen it on the golf course or the tennis/squash court.  They cannot be happy unless they are pressing someone else down and not just with a simple cutting remark but with sustained abuse, at best patronising; at worse insulting.  If you are thinking of a canal boat holiday, I would utterly advise against it unless you have skin as thick as a rhino or enjoy being made to feel small on an hour-by-hour basis.  The alternative is to go to another country where you do not speak the language and when treated this way simply plead lack of comprehension.

Has Cycling Become Simply A Poser's Hobby?

As regular readers will know, after being bullied for twelve months, I went into melt down and ended up losing my house and living with my parents, something which proved to be more of a challenge than I had anticipated.  Not only were there the issues of being around them but also the fact that they have lived in the same house since 1968 meant that there were far too many ghosts of the people who had bullied me for around a decade in my youth in the small town where they live to allow me comfortably to go out around there.  Consequently, I tend to keep to my room and play games.  Eventually I managed to find a room closer to my work and moved to South-West London, into districts I had never visited before.  Whilst many of the locals are very rich and come with attitudes of the kind that make the government insufferable, I felt pretty comfortable here.  With my mental health a lot better, I started looking at my physical health.  I had put on about 5Kg since things had started going wrong.  I am supposed to be 82Kg for my height, but have typically been 90Kg since the mid-2000s; 95Kg was certainly too much.

My job is not well paid and given that I am so physically unattractive I can alarm people in sporting venues, gym membership was out of the question.  I have failed at fencing and Aikido, so such sports seemed to be pointless, though I did consider badminton, though was worried it would simply be too middle class all round.  I was not able to find any swimming pools around.  I considered taking up running.  It seems to be a common urban sport.  In addition, I have always had a curiosity to find out where specific roads go to.  My interest in modernist and other 20th century architecture means that I can actually find going through suburbs pretty interesting.  I know it is sad, but there it is.  Given I have spent much of my life living in suburbs, I suppose it is a good safety mechanism.  Saying that I would never go back to Perivale.  That exceeded my tedium level and I could not get out of there fast enough.  I imagined that running would be a comparatively cheap sport.  Yes, I might need so decent shoes and one of those fluorescent tops that would keep me safe but not sweat too much.  However, reading 'The Guardian' guide to running last month: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-running-blog/2013/may/28/running-etiquette-10-commandments  I was utterly put off even trying.  It might have been good for my fitness but facing up to the scrutiny and the disdain were too much and threatened to throw me into the haunted state I had when living with my parents.  I know the locals now and disdain flows from every pore even if you skulk away from them.  Shoving myself into their line of sight so clearly was bound to lead to heckling.  I have experienced this when cycling for not wearing cleats, but the advantage is you can get away from it easier than when running.

With running ruled out, I thought of a return to cycling.  As regular readers know, I used to cycle a great deal, even going on cycling holidays of my own making.  One key problem is that I cannot cycle fast enough.  I average 14.5kph (around 9mph) whereas cycling clubs require you to go at 15mph (24kph).  My father averages 10kph but he is 75 so I think they give him some leeway.  My father only cycles mid-week and whilst he comes past my work, I would only cycle on weekends so there would be no chance of humiliatingly running into him.  There was one big challenge and that was that whilst I had a bike that had once cost £329 (I got it in a terrible state for £90), I had not ridden it much.  The last time had been when unemployed in 2012 and I had felt terrible vertigo as if I was constantly going to crash over the handlebars; I often felt nauseous though never actually vomited.  That was on a 3Km ride to and from the job centre.  I thought that given my blood pressure was down, I should be in a better state.  However, thinking about it the woman who used to live in my house had similar symptoms and had to stop motorbiking as a result, so maybe there was some inner ear infection we caught, I do not know.

Anyway, the decision about whether to return to my bicycle was soon made for me.  I know I live in a snobby area, but no-one who cycled passed me did not look like they were about to race for a leading team.  The bicycles were generally more expensive than my car (it is insured for £1000); I have now seen bicycles for sale at twice that amount.  Even Halfords sells bicycles for £850 (€977; US$1300); let alone the Giant dealership I passed, with bicycles for £4499 (€5699 - their exchange rate; US$6883).  As when I drive it is clear that I would be disparaged for simply what I was using.  The other thing is the clothing.  Very few people ride around on a bicycle in normal clothes, let alone work clothes.  The time when people would ride in their suit or overalls to work are long gone.  The only people in ordinary clothes on a bicycle are either children generally in school uniform or people riding on the pavement.  These days adults riding on the road, whether it is a weekday or the weekend must ride in a pristine cycle team strip.  I used to have the Credit Agricole strip because Chris Boardman rode for that team and they were only bank in Falaise which would change my traveller's cheques.  That was my kit until I got chocolate ice cream on it at a restaurant somewhere South of Fecamp.  I guess these people change when they reach work and probably shower too.  Given that my workplace has no air conditioning and the window beside me does not open; it has an extractor fan embedded in it which does not work but madly is cleaned periodically.  I would arrive with sweat dripping from me and having to squeeze into a toilet cubicle to change.

What soon became apparent is that like football and running, cycling is no longer a democratic sport.  Football was captured by the prosperous middle classes (as opposed to me who was middle class and not prosperous) in the 1990s and running soon after.  In swimming there has been a similar attempt, but fortunately most pools at least leave some segments of the pool clear of the swimming lanes that these 'elite' practitioners favour to demonstrate their skills.  Heaven help you if you attempt to swim in them, you will be swamped and even kicked to get back into the non-laned area.  The sense that 'you are not doing it right' and thus open to public ridicule, sometimes very vocal, has now become embedded in all of these sports, cycling among them.  It is as much about how you appear as about what you do or what benefit you are gaining.  The other day I sat in central Esher for about an hour; 34 cyclists in small groups of individually came passed me going off in different directions.  It is clearly a crossroads for different routes around that part of Surrey.  Of those that I saw, and there may have been others I missed, only three cyclists, all men, were not wearing a pristine cycle team strip and riding a bike which, at least, would be at the top of Halfords range if not that of Giant.

As they whizz past, you get that look of disdain and often are told to get off the road, back on to the pavement, apparently nowadays the cycle path for those just using a bicycle as a mode of transport rather than a status symbol.  Non-status symbol cyclists now get it from all sides.  Of course, we have always been shouted at or pushed by car drivers, for 'being in the wrong place' or 'not knowing the law' especially when turning right or using a cycle lane.  On the pavement the large pushchair mothers shout as if cycling there is tantamount you trying to abduct or crush their child and now the poser cyclists have a go at you for being where they want to be and not dressed 'right'.

Yes, you can have your Sky Rides around city centres and all of the initiatives to get more people cycling.  However, it is too late, certainly in southern England.  Too many influential people want to keep the average person off their bicycle.  As with running and visiting gyms, cycling is now the preserve of the rich.  They identify themselves by what they wear and ride and have no tolerance for 'plebs' trying get in on the game.  It is all about status, as Professor Felipe Fernandez-Armesto when lecturing on the cultural perceptions of fatness, it has all been turned on its head from three centuries ago.  Then it was the rich who were seen as fat as they could afford to eat well.  Now it is the rich who are the slim ones, sometimes looking as if they are starved, because they can still afford to eat well; our definition of 'well' having changed.  Thus, they are going to prevent any ordinary person from exercising so that they cannot aspire to even look like their 'betters'.  They do this by making it so unpleasant to take part that individuals abandon it for not wanting to suffer further chastisement.  I was blind to this, but realise now that I own no house, living in a sub-let room and drive a 15-year old car, there is no way I would be accepted into the ranks of cyclists and to even try is to open me up to more of the bullying I have too often experienced in my life.

P.P. 06/08/2013
I read an article in 'The Guardian' on Saturday 3rd August 2013 which seemed to sum up my fears.  One person interviewed said that 'cycling has become the new golf' for upper middle class males.  The newspaper's own coverage of Sunday's 100-mile ride for serious amateurs seemed to reinforce this view.  It is all about the kit and now increasingly about downloading the statistics regarding your ride from some on-board device.  Performance now seems to out-rank achievement.  Despite the newspaper arguing that cycling has become 'less cliquey' in fact itself is showing that simply the clique has shifted from rather nerdy individuals of the past to snobby ones of the present.  Nothing is going to keep me away from cycling more than knowing I am going to be heckled for not only what I am wearing and riding but also what electronic equipment I might be carrying.  Cycling, like running is now an elitist hobby.  What is going to be next?  Darts?

How 'World Of Warcraft' Ruined My Life

Back in 2009 I wrote about how I had started to play the so-called Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, 'World of Warcraft'.  My early views of the hazards of playing the game were posted back in July 2009: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/07/online-behaviour-world-of-warcraft.html   I am still playing it, probably even more because with me being long-term unemployed, losing my house and having no clear idea of where I am going to end up, escapism is vital.  During the Depression of the 1930s and the mass unemployment of the 1980s, consumption of alcohol and tobacco increased and funerals became more elaborate (if you have had a grim life people feel they need to give you a good send off, just witness any funeral in Mile End or Poplar in East London).  People seek escape and I am not exempt from that.

Of course, computer games of any kind have the danger of becoming addictive and you finding the hours passing by quickly.  Rather than doing the housework or the shopping, instead you keep playing even into the early hours of the morning.  With a game like 'World of Warcraft' in which there is not just a single character progressing down a chain of missions, but you can go and produce things like weapons or clothing and market them or go on quests for rewards or duel with other players or take part in the regular seasonal events, such as around the Solstice or Valentine's Day, there is even more to keep you engaged.  You can have up to 50 different characters so even if you tire of running around as a troll hunter you can log on and be a werewolf druid in a different location.  To stop players tiring of the settings and quests, periodically those running the game, a US company called Blizzard, recreate their world.  In December 2010 they launched 'Cataclysm' which saw regions of their world flooded, some split apart by earthquakes or volcanoes and new areas appear from the sea; new races were introduced and players could now rise up to level 85 rather than 80.  There were numerous new missions and even new skills that players could train in.  The game is always evolving and sometimes this is for gameplay reasons (such as no longer needing to buy ammunition for bows and guns or putting more mail boxes in certain cities) and sometimes to develop new storylines.  In such a fantasy continent there has to be lots of drama, invasions and betrayals.

This is all great.  Though I do not always agree with the changes made, and smaller updates and alterations come between the big relaunches like Cataclysm, it certainly keeps my interest which is why I am still playing it 20 months after I started.  The key problem for me and what makes me keep thinking I should turn away from the whole thing, is the people.  Of course, many of them are teenagers, you expect that with any computer-based game.  However, there are also older people with partners and children and work to go to.  Certain 'guilds' only permit people over 18 to participate in their group.  The range of nationalities is diverse.  There are different servers for the main language groups of Europe (and others for China and many for the USA), so being located in the UK I do not mix with French or German or Italian speakers.  However, the British server does have players from many minor states across Europe especially the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, but also Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece.  I quite enjoy playing with people from such diverse backgrounds.  Though English is the language for the server once in a while people go off into Dutch or Danish and some guilds intentionally recruit people of a specific nationality.  Of course, in this age of semi-literacy among English speakers, a lot of the online discussion is in fact in a hybrid of text speak and simply bad spelling.  'LFG' - Looking for Group, 'JC' - Jewel crafter; one of the professions you can study and the whole range of smilies; 'OMFG' for 'Oh My Fucking God' seems unnecessarily hyperbolic in its anger/condemnation.  However, new terms develop simply because so few people seem to be able to spell, 'Rogue' (a character class) is always rendered as 'Rouge' and now 'give' has been replaced when it is a demand by 'geif' which seems to be turning into some form of German.  Again, being a man in his forties, I recognise that with the English language changing far more sharply between my generation and the one that is following than between my generation and that of my parents or even my grandparents, I am happy to accept that when online I need to use a different language.  I can type far faster than the bulk of the gamers, so accept the need for abbreviations.

What is more of a challenge is not really how discussion is had but what is said and beyond that, the behaviour of the people it betrays.  Someone said that the 'World of Warcraft' was like a Gold Rush town in California of the 1840s.  This is unsurprising, people are doing missions and fighting monsters to win magic items and gain gold.  With such funds they become better fighters or magic users and get access to higher level areas and so on.  This is the basic dynamics of numerous fantasy fighting computer games.  The problem is that many of the people gamers are interacting with are not computer generated they are people with feelings.  In the game two warriors with the same equipment will be equally matched and in combat it comes down to luck and which combination of buttons you press.  A well-equipped person playing for 3 months could beat someone who has been playing the game for 5 years, though the latter generally pretends his/her knowledge somehow makes them stronger.  In fact people who have that attitude often lose because they have no flexibility in their thinking.  So, how do you show you are 'better' than the derided 'newbies' or 'noobs' as it is typically abbreviated to?

Status is clearly important.  People aim to reach that level 85.  However, this can take weeks and months and while your character is rising through the ranks, how do you show you are better than the others around you?  It is by making divisions.  In many ways whilst 'World of Warcraft' is like California of the 1840s it is also like London society of the 1840s, snobbery is rife.  People put out a call to get a group of assorted characters together in order to attack a castle or run through some caves, fighting monsters.  Now, of course, the opponents are of differing levels depending on the location and so a level 10 warrior would die quickly if fighting level 20 dragons.  However, the person soliciting recruits does not stop there in separating out the volunteers, s/he insists that they have equipment of a certain rating, their 'gear score' has to be so high or they are 'kicked' from the group.  They are commanded to go to a location for inspection, i.e. a player looks at all the equipment the character has.  Many players simply preen around the centres of the big cities showing off what they have like so many peacocks or prostitutes.   Those volunteering rather than preening are grilled about their 'dps', from damage per second, how much damage their weapons or spells can inflict.  If it falls below some arbitrarily set figure then the person is refused.  Now that level 85 is the peak, recruitment advertisements in the game often say 'level 85s only' even when going off to a level 70 dungeon.  At level 83 I asked if I could join in as my damage and spells were only a little lower than the level 85 set and, of course, I was refused. 

Once you have got through the equipment inspection, you have to have your 'achievements' checked.  This is the list of successful missions and quests that you have already completed.  If you have not been felt to have achieved enough already, again you are refused.  This is a chicken-and-egg situation, because people often volunteer so that they can win an achievement, and yet because they do not have it, they are refused.  A lot of this reflects the lack of maturity of thinking on the part of the recruiters, no matter what age they actually are.  Even if you recruit a group yourself you are quite likely to find a member leaving mid-way through some battle because s/he feels the rest of the group is not up to scratch.  Even more criteria are piled on to segregate and demean other players.  One is speed.  There are no benefits for charging through a castle quickly.  In fact you often find if you do this then some monsters appear out of a room behind you that you have rushed by and start attacking you from behind.  However, warriors, paladins, death knights, the physical attack people, are very impatient and charge on.  If they upset a whole room of monsters and die due to rushing through it, then, of course, they blame everyone else for being pathetic.  These people should be compelled to play games such as the paper-based 'Dungeons and Dragons' role-playing game and know that to succeed in such fantasy settings bravado has to be tempered with caution and forward planning.

This brings us to 'tactics'.  'Must know tactics' is another criteria often set for volunteers to groups.  This does not mean how best to use your character's particular weapons or spells, but precisely where to stand in a castle room when a specific monster attacks.  Again, of course, if you have never done that mission before then how are you supposed to know that.  If you are even a little wrong then you get a long lecture about how wrong and stupid you are.  In addition, everyone thinks their tactics are the only feasible ones and any alternatives are derided.  This is often how arguments start out in groups.  I have done the same missions with differing groups all insisting that their tactics are the only correct ones and if you do anything different then you are kicked out.  There is a sense of a single truth.  It is not surprising that numerous wiki pages and websites have been created to provide players with very precise details about what to buy and where to stand in a particular room of a particular castle or cave.  Like most computer game players I use walkthroughs and other resources that are not part of the game.  However, because specific knowledge is used to denigrate other players, you end up having to read as much as if you were doing an Open University course, just so you do not 'blunder' when you go on a mission.  You ask for help in the game and are told you must be an idiot for even asking, because, of course, to any intelligent person, the answer is obvious or are told to go off and open up numerous webpages outside the system.  The reason for this is supposed superior knowledge is the only real way that one player can make themselves seem superior to another.

Pride in your achievements is a fair trait.  However, the sense that anything you have achieved or know (however wrongly in fact that information might be) should be constantly used to put down others as vocally as it is in the game is unnecessarily nasty, but seems to be a constant behaviour in the game.  I suppose this is a reflection of our contemporary society, especially in the UK: you can only get on in life if you not only eliminate potential rivals but you humiliate them too.

If assistance is offered it is never in a constructive way, it is patronising.  I might expect too much of the average 'World of Warcraft' player to know the difference.  It is great to share knowledge, tell people about bargains in the auction house or how to get through a new mission or quest.  However, that is never enough.  The bulk of players who share information (and they in themselves are a small minority) want you to abase yourself before their greatness and acknowledge that you were stupid until they decided to pity you and shower you with their grace.  Trying to find a specific trainer I asked for help and one player decided to advise me.  Initially I was grateful.  However, he felt he had to lead me through the city and if I said something which disagreed with how he saw the world he went 'WRONG' at me in the text.  The one useful function is 'Ignore' which blocks communication from certain characters if you choose.  Unfortunately it does not block it from specific players and I have had some switching from character to character, pursuing me across the continents of the game repeatedly telling me how wrong or stupid I am until I have blocked every character they can spring on me.  Then they send me messages in the in-game postal system continuing their diatribe.

Interestingly, Blizzard tries to engineer the game so as to promote a better level of co-operation between the players.  You can block swear words to eliminate the harshest abuse, interestingly 'Nazi' counts as a swearword but 'wanker' does not, probably due to the game originating in the USA.  Racism does sometimes break through.  Periodically people condemn non-English speakers struggling to phrase things correctly, which is laughable given how many errors they put in their own writing.  However, it is mob rule and if the bulk of players spell 'rogue' as 'rouge' that is acceptable in a way errors from someone using English as their second or third language is not permitted.  A lot of general public dialogue seems to be as if it was between a group of drunken football supporters watching a match in a pub.  The rules can shift quickly, but always to their advantage in denigrating other players not deemed to be part of the mob. 

The sense that it 'that's the way it is, you cannot question it' is all pervasive.  I have seen that phrase or variations of it banded around.  Once I saw a discussion about so-called 'twinking' when people with characters who have a lot of money send it to their lower level ones to raise them quickly through the levels without much effort (sounds familiar behaviour to anyone who lives or works in the UK).  Someone questioned if this was the right way to behave and whether it was fair on other players.  Rather than put forward a reasoned argument for continuing the practice, the response was, 'it happens, live with it' and the player was condemned even for questioning it.  I know it is a game, but these basic assumptions are carried out into the real world and you do wonder if the regimes in Tunisia or Egypt had changed if the bulk of the population had had that attitude.  Perhaps British complacency and pervasive self-righteousness is what makes us behave this way.  It does not seem healthy in a game, let alone real life.  The worst case was a discussion about Hitler.  I have no idea why it came up in the game.  Some realms of the game insist you only speak about in-game things others start debating the football match or the weather or Michael Jackson's death.  What alarmed me was the view that 'well he sorted out the Jewish problem' which seemed accepted without question.  I started pointing out that any 'Jewish problem' had simply been an invention of the Nazis anyway, and yet was being taken here as something that everyone knew and accepted.  I was barred from the game for three days for participating in an off-topic political discussion, but I was proud to be for challenging lazy, dangerous, Fascist assumptions.

To earn money in the game many players auction off unwanted items through one of the auction houses.  This is a bit like eBay fantasy style.  When fighting monsters you are quite likely to pick up armour or weapons or food or even scraps of fur or rock that you have no use for.  Someone else might just need that item to improve their armour or make something using a profession skill like blacksmithing or leatherworking.  You are not supposed to make a loss but the prices many people set are ridiculous.  I remember having a level 20 character, who was recovering tens of pieces of silver from his quests.  I looked to buy a pair of boots from the auction house.  The best pair for my level was a level 19 pair of boots, but the cost was 799 gold pieces.  There are 10 copper pieces in 1 silver piece and 10 silver pieces in 1 gold piece.  I would be unable to afford them until I was many levels higher and by then their strength and certainly any magic on them would be too feeble for the kind of monster I would then be fighting.  Hyperinflation is a real problem in the game which makes it very discouraging when bringing on a new character.  It is exacerbated by 'gold sellers' criminals who sell gold in the game for real pounds or euros.  This allows some players to simply buy their characters everything they need rather than having to earn it the way most players do.  The gold sellers put software into the sysem which creates 'mining robots' or 'collecting robots' which go round scooping up the raw materials in the game, faster than any players can and then they auction it to raise game gold to sell to players.  Of course, this is illegal, but because status-hungry players indulge in it, it helps upset the balance of the game play.

Hyperinflation always generates excessive behaviour.  A key problem is even if the collection 'bots are not around high level characters go into low level areas, able to move around on mounts far faster than anyone of the appropriate level can do, and mines or collects all the raw materials to then take them back to sell them at incredibly high prices leaving the poor low level characters with nothing to practice their skills working on or to make any money themselves.  Very quickly you have an elite of very high level characters whether migrated from another realm or who have bought their standing, simply selling to each other at very high prices, leaving poor lower level characters without a high level character to supply them, struggling to advance.  Guilds are supposed to help lower level characters advance, but as I consider below, this does not really work either.

Blizzard's steps mean that you need groups to run through 'instances' and 'raids' specific missions in castles or caves or wherever that gives good rewards.  Generally you cannot do it alone.  However, as seen above this actually promotes division rather than collaboration.  They encourage 'guilds', collectives of players focused on one or two activities in the game.  You get a guild 'tabard' showing the logo of the guild and access to a guild bank where items can easily be shared between players.  With Cataclysm Blizzard added other features, cheaper repairs to armour and weapons, access to greater funds, specific items, available to guilds that were thriving and successful.  The basic idea is that players help each other and more experienced players and higher level characters help lower-level characters.  Of course, you can be very experienced and yet be starting a new character among the 50 you are permitted to have, though you still seem to be treated as if you are new to the game as a whole.  The guild system does not really work.  There are some decent guilds.  The woman in my house is a member of one, but I have not been able to find one that is like that.

On any given server there are tens of versions of the world, each with a specific name, so that you do not get tens of thousands of people trying to move through the same area mining for ore or picking specific herbs.  When a 'realm' has too many players, people are offered free 'migration' to a new less populated realm.  This does mean you can have hundreds of people in the same 'place' who cannot see each other as they are on different versions.  Nowadays, random groups can be assembled automatically from across realms on the same server and it can be interesting to talk to people who generally play on an alternative version of the world to the one you are on.  Factors such as the cost of items sold by other players, how crowded certain locations get and even the tone of discussion in the realm can vary greatly.

The other element Blizzard introduced to guilds with Cataclysm was that they could attain levels by their members completing missions and other achievements.  I think the idea was to encourage people to become guild members, but it has completely back-fired and has simply added a new aspect to snobbery.  As in real history, large guilds that can offer their members lots of facilities prosper.  There is the snobbery 'I am in a level 10 guild, oh, but you are only in a level 5 guild, you must be a poor player, no-one else clearly wants you'.  As in our society exclusive clubs are yet another way to segregate players.  They have strict entrance criteria and anyone who does not fit with their arbitrary rules or does not carry out their designate tasks in time or simply is no longer liked, is excluded.  Some US companies take into consideration if prospective employees have run guilds on 'World of Warcraft', but from how most are run, the only kind of organisation such experience would really suit you for is working in the mafia.

Blizzard tries hard to encourage players not to behave in the cut-throat way so many do.  The 'hints' when you log on often advise players to be polite when playing with others and encourage them not simply to open a trade with a player or try to duel with them before actually talking with them.  However, walking through a city my character is quite liable to be repeatedly challenged or offered some trade with absolutely no dialogue.  You can see why many of us become 'backwoodsmen' keeping our characters in the less populated areas of the world.  Generally the whole feel from the players I encounter is that somehow conservative if not Nazi values have become the norm.  A lot of discussion is misogynistic.  I suppose you would expect this in a game about battling monsters, but there are female characters and female opponents.  Yet, a female character is often dismissed, even though a level 10 female warrior is no weaker than a level 10 male warrior in the game.  Of course, just because a character is female or male does not mean the player is too; yet that is the assumption so patronising of female characters is quickly translated into patronising of female players.  Some of the races are very glamourous, especially the elves and their accentuated femininity for the females, with tight fitting clothes, large breasts, slender waists, long hair and often large earrings, does not help.  However, saying this, troll and even orc females have a certain elegance but certainly a strength about them.  When you come across male characters named things like 'Hymenripper' then you have a sense that misogynism is not really challenged.

How 'World of Warcraft' ruined my life was not because I spent so long playing it and neglected other hobbies such as writing fiction or swimming.  What it has alarmingly shown me is that the norms of the next generation are focused on segregation of society by status.  That status has to be maintained rigidly by codes and that those outside have to be regularly humiliated.  The best the ordinary person can hope for is to give up their dignity and be told patronisingly how wrong they are and try to ape their 'betters' in the vain hope of being accepted.  It is a society in which people grab all the resources they can and shut out those coming on after them out of the opportunity of advancing themselves unless they can pay.  It is a society which is discriminatory to women who are assumed to be weak and interestingly that it is demeaning to accept assistance from a woman, no matter what your own gender.  It is a society in which bad language is used to show your level of anger at the 'stupidity' of people who have views different to your own.  It is a society in which you always believe you not have the correct answer but the only possible answer.  It is a society in which things should not be challenged and to even dare to question them opens you up to attack.  What I have seen in 'World of Warcraft' players is the very worst of British society distilled.  The government with all its plans for a very stratified society with opportunities for the few and people all 'knowing their place' should look to 'World of Warcraft' players for their footsoldiers.  These people have the perfect attitude to fill the ranks of the 'little Hitlers' that any authoritarian regime thrives on.  'World of Warcraft' ruined my life by not offering me the escape that I yearned for, but rather shoving the worst of everything I encounter in real life forcefully into my face every time I log on.