Looking for Gotterung

Gotterung is the screen name of a friend of Chris’s and mine, a holy priest in the World of Warcraft. He’s the reason we play: in 2006, he called up Chris and convinced him to try the game out. We played together for a while, but he wound up closing his account because he couldn’t find a balance between his home life and his work life and his gaming life.

The term in we use is “wife aggro.” She never could see how spending time playing games with friends was the same as spending time with friends.

Gotterung killed himself last week. He woke his wife up in the middle of the night, said some stuff, and blew his brains out.

It’s hard to know how to handle it when someone who has been your best friend since you were 12 does something like that.

I keep looking for him.

I’ve been on a low-level character, my warlock, whom I rolled ages ago, at Gotterung’s suggestion. I’ve been running around getting flight points (we did that, got them all at crazy low levels; it came in handy later) and re-running the instances we ran together. I remember all the drops. I remember how everyone on our server thought I was some leet player because I always had all the best gear, the whole time I was leveling, and it was always enchanted. Gotterung did that for me, when I was learning the game and he was a more experienced player. If I was ever any good, it was because I had Gotterung in my corner.

I don’t need him any more. I have all the flight points and I’ve run all the dungeons and I’ve done all the quests. I can buy my own gear now, and I can enchant it myself.

I still need him, even though I have all the flight points and all the titles and all the achievements and all the fat, fat loot.

I have his account now; well, Chris does. Somewhere, on a slip of paper, we have his login information. He insisted we take it, the last time we saw him. “I’m never going to play again,” he said.

It’s easy to look back and see what we didn’t, what we couldn’t, maybe what we didn’t want to.

I wonder if he had been able to play with us more, if we’d been able to spend more time with him over the years, if he would still be alive.

I keep looking for Gotterung. If I can find him, maybe he’ll accept my rez and heal himself back up to full, to start the fight again. He never could accept the idea that he was too low, or too under geared, for a fight. He would never give up. If anything, that’s what got him in the end.

He’s playing a different game now. I know someday, after a while, I’ll find out where he’s hanging out. He’ll be there, waiting, to explain how the new game works, and twink me out with gear and enchants again so that I can be the best. It’s going to be epic.