You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)

by Felicia Day

  On different projects I got to skydive, play with parrots, and eat five bags of Cheetos in an hour (FYI, it isn’t how I suspected. If you eat enough Cheetos you will NOT actually poop an extra-large Cheeto). I got hired to walk down a street thinking a whole monologue of silent thoughts about weight loss while drinking liquid yogurt. Later, they asked me to audition to be that same monologue voice in the commercial. Which I ended up LOSING OUT to someone else. Yeah, I lost a job to be my own inner voice. Strange, because I sound exactly like my own voice in my OWN HEAD when I think about liquid yogurt. But I got paid extremely well, so the empty feeling of being treated like a puppet was fine? Sort of?

  Actually, not.

  Acting in commercials was never my life goal. I wanted to be on TV or in an indie film with Parker Posey about quirky people having family issues around inheritances. Or Parkinson’s. SOMETHING where I wasn’t being yelled at for wrinkling my prop shirt or squeezing the prop burger too hard so the prop mustard started oozing out the back.

  After five years of acting and making a great living, I started to forget why I moved to LA in the first place. And so did my family back home.

  “We saw you on that post office ad, you’re so cute, are they going to turn that into a TV show?”

  “That’s not how that works, Mom.”

  “Well, here’s an idea. You should be on that NCIS thing with Mark Harmon. You grew up on military bases, you know that world!”

  “Gee, you’re right! Why didn’t I think of calling them before? They’ve probably been waiting by the phone for YEARS!” Le sigh.

  On a renewed quest for opportunity (i.e., last-gasp attempt to fan the dying fire of my dreams), I hustled to get hired on bigger projects. I finally accepted that my dazzling 4.0 GPA wasn’t the trump card in this new world that I’d thought it would be, so I started making changes. And I did them out of desperation, which is always a first step into the mouth of existential doom.

  I cut off all my hair when an agent suggested it. And, for some reason, I started getting hired more. “People like you looking less like a lead character and more of a ‘best friend’!” Cool! I loved listening to prettier people complain about their relationships, I could work with that!

  During one audition, a casting director said I looked “adorable” in a dorky rainbow scarf, so I started dressing only in bright, colorful clothes. Like a hot first-grade teacher who says, “My quilted cardigan hides sensible cotton lingerie under here. Come undress me, but first, please use a coaster for your drink.”

  The makeover cherry topper was when I got nerdy librarian glasses. They made me look older, but in a weird, accessible way. Suddenly I could play late thirties as a twenty-seven-year-old. More work flooded in. Good change! Good Felicia! Yay?

  And after switching up all the superficial stuff, I was the same person underneath, but for some reason, people couldn’t stop hiring me. The snowballing feedback made me abandon the whole “What does Felicia want to be?” and I started doing whatever anyone told me they wanted from me in order to succeed. Lo and behold, it WORKED!

  I got tons more commercials. I overcame my nuclear-meltdown nervousness in auditions to get a few jobs as recurring characters on TV shows. I didn’t work every day, but for the average actor, I started to have a career I could brag about at cocktail parties. With my head-to-toe makeover, I’d found my niche: cat-owning, stalker-y secretary.

  And I played the same part again and again and again.

  Thing is, the “cat secretary” role was never the focal point of any scenes. She was a decorative character, adding a touch of flavor to offices across the TV landscape. Most of my lines were in the vein of “Mr. Garrett, your wife is on line two. Can I go home early to feed my fifteen animals, please?” Either that or I was hired to do laundry. I’ve washed laundry in a half dozen different TV shows. I guess I look clean? Which is kind of a compliment . . .

  But who was I to complain? Every show needed secretaries! Finally, after six years of struggling in Hollywood, I was finding bigger success. My grandma got to see me on an actual TV show and brag about it to the checkout clerk at Kmart. I had pinpointed a salable stereotype I could play for the next twenty years, living the nomadic life of audition after audition (accompanied by panic attack after panic attack), begging to answer fictional phone calls in innocuous ways for decades to come . . . and I hated it.

  The role was a shadow of the kind of characters I wanted to portray. No one had a place for my geeky, weird, homeschooled, video-game-loving inner self. They could only see me as an extremely clean but neurotic secretary. “Your nose is too weird to be the focus of the show, but you’re perfect for answering the phone in the background in a quirky fashion!”

  I painted myself into a tiny corner, so I could be simpler and cleaner and more hirable by Hollywood. I was rewarded for it, but it made me miserable, and I didn’t even realize it.

  When the system you want to be a part of so badly turns you into someone you’re unhappy with and you lose sight of yourself, is it worth it? Er . . . probably not. But self-reflection wasn’t my strong suit at the time. I just knew that I kept getting opportunities I couldn’t turn down, that I would have killed to have in the dry years before. I never stopped to wonder, Why am I so depressed all the time after all this success?

  Instead of making big-girl decisions about my future, like setting goals for myself, working on other characters I could play, or hell, signing up for some good ol’ therapy, I turned to another world.

  An online world. A game called World of Warcraft.

  - 5 -

  Quirky Addiction = Still an Addiction

  How my obsessive personality steered me into a twelve-hour-a-day gaming addiction and an alt-life as a level 60 warlock named Codex.

  Anal retentiveness is one of my most attractive genetic traits. (I also hit the genome lottery for “The ability to pack a suitcase efficiently.”) As a little kid, I filled out index cards on every movie I watched and stuck them in a yellow recipe box. The cards were filled with critical insight and searing analyses. Par exemple:

  National Velvet

  4 Stars

  This made me cry because horses were in it, but the girl had purple eyes. I want purple eyes too.

  I tend to obsess over things easily. Like eating oatmeal every morning for a year, wearing a pair of sneakers over and over again until my big toe pokes out, and having an unhealthy fixation on the martial arts personality Jean-Claude Van Damme. (Did you know his real last name is Van Varenberg?) When I travel, I read dozens of books about the locations I’m visiting, to the detriment of SEEING anything. I can’t show you many pictures of my trips to Thailand or Vienna, but if you want to discuss the history of Buddhism or secessionist furniture design, I’m ready to dish!

  I have been borderline-ready to become addicted to something my whole life. And more common addictions got ruled out because I’m weird. Alcohol, I metabolize too fast (two sips I’m twerking, five sips I’m snoozing). I’m too neurotic to do drugs because they give you meth teeth (not all, but enough to make me concerned), and sex addicts get vagina warts. Or so I read on the side of a bus. What’s left that could become a trigger area?

  Video games, of course.

  At the height of my “auditioning for burger commercials” acting career in late 2005, my brother, Ryon, invited me to join a new online game called World of Warcraft. For nongeeks (Are there any of you out there reading? I like your hair!), it’s a “Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game” where millions of people can play together simultaneously. Ryon had been playing for a few months with his friends and thought I would enjoy it.

  My brother and I hadn’t been close growing up. I know that sounds weird. You’d think, two kids locked in a house together, there should be some great indie-film, Wes Anderson bonding happening, right? Not so much.

  I could maybe trace it back to when he was three or four years old, when he ate chocolate ice cream in the messiest way possible, sprea
ding it all over his face, and I’d dry heave and scream, “Mom! Tell Ryon to eat neater!” and then he’d smear it even BIGGER, right up to his eyebrows. Or it might be the time when he was ten, when I wanted to watch a miniseries about Anastasia, the maybe-not-murdered Russian princess, on our only TV. He wanted to watch Monster Truck Racing. My mom wasn’t home to arbitrate, so he forced me to try to strangle him with a phone cord.

  Either of those incidents could have been what separated us emotionally. I’ll talk to a therapist about it and get back to you. We loved gaming together, but that was about it. We kind of just EXISTED with each other. I regret that, because if we’d supported each other more, I think we could have been more secure in our respective weirdness when we finally encountered the real world (which was WAY later than it should have been because we were homeschooled). The fact he was reaching out to me to play an online video game together was flattering. I jumped at the chance.

  BUT A TINY CAUTIOUS LITTLE JUMP.

  Because I didn’t know much about this Warcraft thing, but I did know that anything online with other people in a “game form” could be potentially hazardous to my time-health. The previous year, I’d developed a slight addiction to another online game called Puzzle Pirates. It was brilliant in its design, AND you got to customize your character, who was a pirate. In all categories, it was a four-hour-a-day winner.

  The tasks in the game were simple but fun puzzles. There was a carpentry puzzle (like Tetris), there was a sailing puzzle (a variation on Tetris), and about three other puzzles with . . . Tetris-like qualities.

  There were overall goals, too. The better you played, the faster your ship ran. The faster your ship ran, the more stuff you gathered. The more stuff you gathered, the more money you earned. The more money you earned, the cuter the outfit you could buy, and the cuter the outfit . . . well, that was a basic end goal. The outfits.

  I was KILLER at running my pirate ship, particularly with the navigation (quasi-Tetris-like) puzzle. I mean, savant level, guys. And after a few months of playing, I impressed enough people to make a lot of in-game friends, and we banded together to form a regular “crew.” It became the people, not the clothes, that kept me logging online day after day as we sailed the virtual seas.

  Both of my closest friends in the game were stay-at-home moms. “Ploppyteets” had just had her first baby, and you could tell from her attitude, she did NOT know what she was getting into with the whole “Shoving a human out of the bio-oven.” She’d type things like, “Sorry, have to leave. This baby wants to rip my tits off all day.” I never figured out much about her personal life, but I pictured her in a trailer park in Nevada, breast-feeding as she solved puzzles and smoked cigarettes, ashes dripping on the infant’s forehead.

  The other mom we’ll call “LadyLee.” She had a newborn and a two-year-old, and her husband traveled a lot. LadyLee seemed like the kind of woman who was pretty and sweet but unhappy in her marriage. She had gained a ton of weight after her last child and was depressed all the time, so she didn’t leave the house. Ever. Real American Dream story. Instead of worrying about herself, LadyLee would counsel people in the crew about their love lives, their schoolwork, anything they needed, all through the game’s chat interface. She was always there and sweetly comforting, like an AI big sister.

  There was one incident where I got a job on Days of Our Lives, and afterwards, the producer called my manager up and said, “We will never hire this girl again.” I had exactly five words in the episode, and I couldn’t figure out how I screwed them up so badly. I kept having panic attacks in my sleep, reliving the single line, “My princess, how are you?” over and over in my head, as if somehow it could un-ruin my career. LadyLee was the only person in my life who could get me to laugh about how stupid the whole thing was.

  “Oh, was that the scene with Sami? She had an affair with her brother-in-law Tom, and then he murdered his own brother, which caused her to be committed to a mental hospital and meet another woman who was MARRIED to Tom, and then they broke out together and got revenge on Tom by ruining his shipping business. They probably didn’t like your nose.”

  Then LadyLee bought me a new Pirate hat in-game, which had a feather in it and REALLY looked good with my character’s hair design, and suddenly I was weeping onto the keyboard, typing, “Thank u, life saver. <3.”

  She was a yar pirate friend. So it was sad when things went off the rails SO BADLY for her.

  A new guy, “TreeMaster,” joined the crew a few months in, and he and LadyLee started chatting with each other privately. A LOT. I’d load cannons (in a PINBALL Tetris-like game) and gossip with Ploppyteets about the Lee-Tree relationship.

  “Are they on her ship together in private chat again?!”

  “Uh-huh. Wow, my kid is a crap fountain, how do you plug them up? There’s no manual with this thing.”

  Things escalated, LadyLee and TreeMaster bought a ship together (hello, virtual commitment!), and I could sense something was going too far between them. I tried to caution her.

  “You and TreeMaster are hanging out a lot, is that a good idea, Lee?”

  “Oh, Howard and I just like working together, that’s all.”

  I stopped typing in shock. HOWARD? They’d advanced to real names?! This was serious!

  But LadyLee seemed so much happier after she met TreeMaster (as much as you can glean emotion from alphabetical letters placed together in a chat interface), and I felt bad about being negative. LadyLee was an adult, she had things under control. Plus, their ship was SO FAST, who was I to judge if they worked that well together?

  An acting job took me out of town for two weeks, and when I returned to the game, everything in the crew had collapsed. The only person I could track down online was Ploppyteets. I typed to her, frantic.

  “Where is everyone?!”

  “New Mead Brewing mini-game just got released. I’m balls at it.”

  “Um, ok. Where’s LadyLee and the crew?”

  “She dissolved the group. Won’t be online anymore :(”

  “Why not?!”

  “She left her husband last week for TreeMaster, he found stuff between them on her computer, and I guess she’s losing custody of her kids. She hasn’t logged on since we talked last week.”

  “WHAT?!” Because of sailing the pixelated seas, this woman’s whole life had collapsed? “Are you kidding?”

  “I wish. Bonus, my baby has a thing called ‘colic.’ I’m looking to trade her in for a Chevy if you know any takers.”

  That was the last day I ever played Puzzle Pirates. I was worried about LadyLee and felt incredibly sorry for her but had no way to contact her outside the game. I didn’t even know her real name. It felt helpless to care about people I’d never meet, who could disappear on a dime. I would miss Ploppy, too (even though I worried about the future of her offspring), but it was too hard to play anymore.

  It had gotten too real.

  That eight-month “Yo-ho-ho!” sideline made me aware of my personal slippery slope in the online gaming area. It was VERY slippery. But I rationalized that my brother was reaching out to “bond” with this new MMORPG game, and that was something I couldn’t turn down. And if something went wrong, at least I knew how to reach him via phone to say, “Don’t leave your husband and children for a random guy named Howard who’s really good at virtual carpentry!”

  I bought World of Warcraft in the summer of 2005, right after I lost a part in a television pilot to a girl who looked EXACTLY LIKE ME. Red hair, pale lumpy face, if you squinted at our head shots we looked identical. And it was depressing. To come in second choice to . . . myself? So I installed the game and created my first character, named? You guessed it. Codex.

  In this game, people group themselves in private “guilds” instead of “crews.” My brother was a member of a guild of players called Solaflex, and it was for “little people” only, which sounds offensive, but the fact that everyone had to be a gnome or a dwarf character was funny at the time. Becaus
e they’re all short. Other players who were not gnomes or dwarves were tall. So in-game, when you ran around together, it was a tinier group of people than average.

  You had to be there.

  I created a Rogue (Thief) character, because I enjoy channeling my inner kleptomaniac, and stepped into a world so real, so “graphically advanced,” that as I hopped around in the starting area, clutching my little beginner dagger, I fell in love. Deeply. Unutterably. In love. This probably sounds strange to nongamers. I understand. The best analogy I can make to real life is this:

  You know how sometimes you go to another city and, while driving around, you see a house that looks so cute and inviting that you fantasize about what it would be like to drop everything in your life and just move there? Like, you see a cottage while on vacation in Belize, and think, Prices are dirt cheap, people look chill, let’s DO THIS! It’s a feeling of new possibility. Of starting fresh. Imagine capturing a kernel of that in your own life right now, by sitting at your computer and paying $15.00 a month in subscription fees.

  That’s what it’s like to bury yourself in a virtual world.

  And it WAS a completely new world. With hundreds of players running around, animals attacking you, different categories of chat rooms, tons of buttons and commands, at first, I was lost. Every two minutes I’d type to my brother for help.

  “Which buttons move me?”

  “Where is my backpack screen with my clothes in it?”

  “What is ‘leveling’ and how does it work?”

  “I’m stuck in a wall, can you come get me?”

  All these questions are the real-life equivalent of, “What is this thing at the end of my arm, and how do I close it around items to lift them?”

  After giving me a brief, thirty-minute crash course of the logistical life of being a gnome, Ryon went to play with his fancy level 60 friends and left me in the baby starting area alone, an innocent level 1, to be killed over and over by virtual spiders and boars. (Classic sibling behavior.)