The Beginning

I was sunk in a kind of lethargy and my brain was unwinding bit by bit. I alternated between sleep and the decision to open one of the books at my bedside, with the news channel murmuring in the background. It was the obligatory ritual for slipping into the embrace of a deep, sating sleep.

"Are you asleep?" Alin asked me.

I snapped back to reality.

"No."

"Come, let me show you a Matrix in its infancy. Come and see what they've done with Warcraft!"

I obeyed meekly, though I can be quite violent when you wake me from sleep. "What could possibly be so great?" I grumbled in my mind, but I couldn't refuse him.

"What is this?"

"World of Warcraft, a new game from Blizzard."

Yes, I am a gamer, and I own it, even if I look rather ridiculous admitting it in front of serious, solemn, level-headed people. I played Warcraft for a long stretch and loved it. I played Diablo and Vampire, flirted with Starcraft, and tried all sorts of 3D games with shoot-outs and car races. I liked beautifully drawn games, and for that reason I held on to King of the Road for a long time. For hours on end I drove an idiotic truck that kept breaking down or flipping over. I would have liked to be a long-haul trucker. "I like to travel along with the road" was my justification, if anyone was curious where such a childish stubbornness for playing games came from. At last I settled down, armed with a great deal of patience, beside Alin, who was trying to find his way around the game — new even to him, though he kept a little arcade of games on his computer. He did it with surprise, with delight.

World of Warcraft was a fascinating game! From the very start, you became a character in a fantastical world. You were transported inside a cartoon — or, more precisely, inside a fairy tale — in which you could move however you pleased. A world you could sink into completely.

"How beautifully it's made!" Alin exclaimed.

Meanwhile, he was running his character from one side of the screen to the other.

"This is the starting zone, it's called Northshire Valley. Let's see where this road takes us, shall we?" he decided all on his own, and went tearing past a high wall roofed with red clay tiles, without giving me enough time to admire the sumptuous portal of the cathedral in Northshire Valley and its impressive stained-glass windows, or to make out what he was discussing with a character planted stiffly in front of the cathedral.

"What did you talk about with that one?"

"He gave me quests to do. Didn't you see?"

On either side of the road, beneath the trees, grey wolves padded along calmly.

"I think I can kill these wolves, but better to stay on the road, let's see what's further on." We came to a crossroads. "This is Goldshire. There are quests to do here too, but I'm not going to stop and do them now," Alin explained.

"What beautiful buildings!" I exclaimed.

I had seen others among the trees, and by my logic I would have explored them all, or at least tried to see whether I could, but Alin was in a great hurry. I left him alone. I had asked him several times to move more slowly, but he had taken no notice of me.

"Go into this building on the left for a second, please."

"Let me see if I can. Ah, it's an inn! From here you can come back from wherever you are. You talk to the innkeeper and he teleports you here whenever you need."

"What innkeeper, which innkeeper?"

"This one!" Alin clarified, hopping up and down in front of a character, then resuming his dash.

"Hold on, child, let me have a look at the hearth."

"What hearth?"

"I think I saw one, behind you."

"Ah, yes, it's quite well done."

"It's great! Look how it's built, and how the fire burns in the hearth! Just look — there are some barrels stacked under the stairs too… and the tavern music..."

"Never mind, we'll come back another time. Come on, to the capital, let's find a player and ask where the battle happens in this game."

"Ask him?!"

"Yes, we're online. The game is interactive and it's on the internet... Which way the hell do I go? It has a map, but I can't see anything on it, because first it has to be discovered. Ha! There are signposts! This is the way we go! Look, some bandits! Let me try to kill one!" He pressed a few keys and exclaimed, pleased with himself: "It worked!"

Alin was talking to himself, and I was watching a film in which you can take possession of the main character. We reached the gates of an imposing citadel and were advancing across a bridge flanked on either side by lamp-posts and enormous statues. Broad, impressive, the background music halted even Alin's impatience to find a player of flesh and blood, for a few seconds. I gazed, breath caught, at the fairy-tale realm on the computer screen.

"I want this game too!"

"I'll put it on your computer as well. Look, a player!"

Alin struck up a conversation in English with "the guy." In the meantime, I had the leisure to admire the bridge arching gracefully over the canal of crystal-clear water and…

"I'm logging off, I've got things to do," Alin said, once he'd worked out how things stood in World of Warcraft.

"Can I walk around a bit with your character?"

"Go ahead. When you've had enough, you hit "Esc" and quit. Listen, I told that guy I'm 30. If he asks you anything else, just act like you're AFK."

"AFK?!"

"It means away from the game — that is, that you're not in front of the computer."

In the days that followed, we returned to this shared occupation — that is, he learned the game and I watched. Now and then, he would let me play too. And so I found myself in a band of players, at the feet of a great red dragon that killed me every time it blasted a wave of flames from its nostrils. A player labelled "Priest" said in exasperation, while bringing me back to life:

"This one's a noob!!!"

"Leave him, he's an OK guy. Hit the dragon, man, and run when you see it breathing fire from its nostrils!!!" Achille leapt to my aid.

Alin wasn't home. I phoned him in a panic.

"Come on, these people teleported me who-knows-where and all I'm doing here is making a mess!"

"Don't embarrass me!" he shouted at me down the phone, and hurried back home.

Once in front of the computer, he apologized to "them":

"Sorry, I let my sister play for a bit," he told them in English. "I couldn't very well say you were my mother. That would have been weird!" he justified himself.

After two weeks, Alin grew bored.

"This game takes itself too seriously. It's a time-eater. I'll put it on your computer and you can log in on my account."

"Child, I don't know English and I don't understand what these people want from me!" I told him, hoping I might soften him into helping me at least until I'd worked out how to use the game's interface and the keyboard. I don't know English. I didn't learn it in time and now it irritates me. It feels to me as if I have to memorize metaphors, not words, and the kind used in the game only heightened that sensation.

"If you're curious, you'll learn!" Alin encouraged me, in his unmistakable style.

Yes, I was very curious. The game drew me in, it seemed a miracle to me, so I took it on by myself, facing down its riddles and challenging the English language to a wholly uneven fight. But one thing is certain: I can no longer learn English.