Ian Bates is a 21-year-old junior English major. His goal is to become a fiction writer. His hobbies include reading, writing short stories and playing World of WarCraft.
Starting in 2005 and continuing for every year after, except for 2006 and 2012, Blizzard Entertainment has held a convention called BlizzCon in Anaheim, California. I have attended every BlizzCon except for the first one. However, it was not until BlizzCon 2010 that something extraordinary happened.
BlizzCon is devoted to Blizzard Entertainment’s games, such as World of WarCraft, Diablo and StarCraft, as well as the communities that have developed around them. At the convention, new games in those series are revealed and fans are able to play them for the first time. Panels are held discussing behind-the-scenes information, and fans from all over the world can meet up. The question-and-answer panels at BlizzCon are especially interesting to me. Fans can ask the game developers anything they desire, if they get in line soon enough.
I was too nervous to ask a question the first time I attended BlizzCon. I tried to in 2008 and 2009, but the line was too long and the session ended before I reached the front of the line. Finally, in 2010, I was able to ask a question. It was far more unsettling than I had assumed it would be. I am not the best at social interaction, so I had hoped the structured format of the question asking would help me. This proved incorrect. Aside from nervousness, I heard my own voice echoed through the microphone as I was speaking, which was disorienting and confusing, but I persevered and finished my question.
My question was that in “The Shattering,” one of the many novels based on the game World of WarCraft, a character named Falstad Wildhammer had been slated to become an important lead character in the game. However, in the World of WarCraft game itself, Falstad had been removed and replaced with another character named Kurdran. Chris Metzen, the senior vice president of story and franchise development for Blizzard, answered that he thought Falstad had been killed in a previous novel and they would fix the issue.
I didn’t think much of the event afterwards. As far as I knew, I had merely asked a question and provided valuable feedback that would be used to improve the game. Little did I know, I had been filmed by a YouTube channel called The Game Cavern. They uploaded the video to YouTube under the name “Blizzcon 2010 – The Red Shirt Guy,” and it has since gone on to obtain more than 5 million views. Apparently, people were impressed I had managed to “best” Metzen at his own job of keeping track of and developing the story content for the franchise. I had no idea of the significance of the video until I returned home and a family friend told me that I “was on the Internet.”
I was amazed to learn I was “internet famous,” though when I first saw the video it had only just began to spread. It quickly reached one million views and didn’t show any signs of slowing. It was not entirely a pleasant experience, however. A lot of the earlier comments on the video made fun of me. Jimmy Kimmel even featured a clip of the video on his late night show and made an obscene, insulting joke. Everyone at my high school recognized me and tried to talk to me. Unlike the comments, they were nice, but all the attention was overwhelming. Luckily, it died down by the next school year. In BlizzCon, it’s only intensified. For each BlizzCon I’ve attended since, the developers have made references to me and I am frequently recognized by the other convention goers. There, I’m prepared for people to come up and talk to me, so it’s not as uncomfortable.
What surprised me even more was that, when Blizzard did restore Falstad to the game, they added a new character: a character in a red shirt called the Wildhammer Fact Checker. Upon first learning about the Fact Checker, I thought it was a joke, a fake screenshot somebody on the Internet made. To get a character based on you in World of WarCraft is one of, if not the, highest honor Blizzard bestows upon their fans. When I checked in the game and saw it was real, I was overjoyed.
In years the since, I’ve frequently been mentioned by Blizzard employees and I am on their list of influential community members, who they occasionally reach out to in regards to community events. At this moment, the original video has exactly 5,244,790 views. Thankfully, as things have died down outside of these conventions, my life has resumed a fairly normal structure. I learned that I didn’t like the attention of fame constantly and was happy to remain anonymous outside of controlled environments. My outlook on life hasn’t changed much, aside from a hope that I’ve made an impression on Blizzard that could help lead to a potential future career. I guess I’m not the kind of person who craves fame.
