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don’t want to play a little game of Monopoly with your real live mom and dad?” said Dad. “But you’ll play all night with your invisible Warcraft friends.”
    “I haven’t got any real live friends left, have I?”
    “Maybe you would have if you weren’t always coaxing them into illegal situations involving high-powered sports cars.”
    “Oh now,” said Mom, “he isn’t always doing that. He only did it once.”
    “And isn’t once enough?!”
    They were still discussing this when I logged into Azeroth and summoned my guild—the Wanderlust Warriors.
     
    We were crossing the Blasted Lands with a caravan of traders when the door opened and Dad looked in. “Listen,” he said, “I’m sorry about earlier. If you don’t want to play Monopoly, that’s fine. I’ll play Warcraft.”
    “Oh. Thanks. But it doesn’t really work like that.”
    “How does it work then?”
    So I tried to explain Warcraft to Dad, but honestly—wheredo you begin? He didn’t even know what an avatar was.
    I said, “Like when we play Monopoly and you are always the top hat? Well, it’s like that, only more complicated. That’s me on the screen, look, that elf.”
    He squinted at the screen. There were hundreds of avatars across the vast desert of the Blasted Lands. I showed him which one was mine and I introduced him to all my other guild members. We’re mostly very heavily armed Night Elves. I think he was impressed.
    “You see,” I said, “in Monopoly, you get as much money as you can, right? And that’s it. In here you have to get money. And health. And experience. And skills. And then…you use them. For a quest.”
    “What kind of quest?”
    “Well, there’s all kinds. Some of them are dangerous and complicated and some are simple. And you meet hazards and monsters. Sometimes serious monsters—so you run away or get help. And sometimes trivial monsters—so you fight them. And if you complete the quest, you gain experience and new skills and maybe some strength and wealth. So then you can level up…”
    “What?”
    “See, I’m a Level Forty elf, but what I want to be is a Level Seventy elf. Then I can Engage with really serious monsters. When you Engage, that’s called an Instance. We’re having abit of an instance right now with this dragon.”
    The dragon had ambushed us, but the Wanderlust Warriors stood their ground and fought like a well-oiled machine. Soon the dragon was dead. So were two of my Warriors, but that was okay because I’ve got healing powers. I brought them back to life and we looted the dragon’s hoard.
    That’s what was happening in my head. Of course, to Dad it just looked like I was sitting there clicking the mouse so fast it sounded like castanets.
    “Cosmic!” I yelled. “Look what we found: Elixir of the Mages. If you use that just before an instance, it doubles your brain power.”
    “This,” said Dad, “is not a game. This is a career.”
    “But it’s good on here because people just accept you for what you are.”
    “Namely an elf with magical healing powers. Is that what you really are, Liam?”
    “No, but in-game, if I have experience and strength and stuff, I can go out on quests and do things. In-life, you can look like a grown-up and shave like a grown-up and be Gifted and Talented and everything, and you’ve still got to sit in a class full of kids who call you ‘freak’ and ‘Wolverine’ and stuff.”
    Dad nodded his head like it all made sense to him. Thenhe got my profile up so he could have a proper look at my avatar.
    “It says here he’s shorter than average.”
    “If you’re short you get extra agility. Plus you can sneak up on people.”
    Dad said, “A shorter-than-average magical being with lots of friends. Well…that’s a very nice avatar. Good night.”
    I did offer to tell him something about the history of Azeroth and who the Horde were and about the Alliance, but he said, “That’s enough for one night, thanks all the same. You get