3 Couples Talk About How World of Warcraft Brought Them Together
As anyone who witnessed the state of Rachel Roy's Instagram on April 24, fandom is serious business. No one knows this better than World of Warcraft (WoW) players, who devote hours upon hours of time and energy to the game, then creating fan art, making costumes, etc. when they're offline. Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, involves a lot of interaction with other people. Naturally, some of this interaction leads to offline friendship, which in turn leads to romance. Ahead of the movie's release on June 10, Cosmopolitan.com chatted with three couples who met playing Warcraft and/or had Warcraft-themed weddings about how they took their relationships out of Azeroth (the fictional land where Warcraft is set) and into the real world.
AMANDA AND JEREMY, BOTH 31, MARRIED FOUR YEARS
Occupation: artist and stay-at-home-mom (Amanda); mechanic (Jeremy)
Hometown: Elgin, Illinois
How did you meet?
Jeremy: Raiding a small little town.
Amanda: Basically, we attacked a Horde village in Ashenvale. He was just someone who was in the zone, and we formed a party with other people and attacked this town.
When did you start talking one-on-one?
Amanda: We met when we first started playing, over 10 years ago. You can type in the game, so you can chat with people on different channels and stuff like that. But it wasn't until we joined the guild that we actually started talking. I was in Illinois and he was in Georgia. After being friends for two years, I was like, "Hey, why don't you come and visit me?" and he got a week off for vacation, and three weeks later, he was driving back up to move me down to Georgia.
Who decided that you would incorporate Warcraft into the wedding?
Jeremy: Her. I really didn't care as long as she was happy.
What specific things did you do to make it a Warcraft wedding?
Amanda: Basically, World of Warcraft was throughout the entire wedding. I wrote a custom script that was based off someone's role-play in game, mixed in with an actual wedding script. My veil had the Alliance symbol on it. My husband's tie had the Horde symbol on it. A lot of the creative stuff came in during the reception, where I actually made crests for all the guests. I made a custom cake topper set and a custom cake-cutting set.
I wanted to have the Alliance symbol and the Horde symbol painted onto the cake, but the lady I took it to said she couldn't do it unless she had a copyright release. So I just went onto the forums online on Blizzard's official website and someone was able to point me to their legal department on the forums.
I did all the illustrations for the wedding invitations. Pretty much the only thing I didn't make was the clothing we were wearing that day and our wedding rings. My father got our wedding rings for us and had them engraved with [the [phrase] "bind on equip." It's a term that's in the game that whenever you bind a piece of equipment and you put it on, it binds to your character.
Jeremy: It becomes soulbound, so once you grab a piece of gear that says "bind on equip" and put it on, it's now yours forever.
What did your family and friends think of theme?
Jeremy: My family kinda got it, her family not so much. We had to explain it.
Amanda: My family's a little bit older, so they didn't get any of the internet stuff. We had a few of our friends that we had met in the game, who were around when we first met, come to our wedding as well, and that was the first time that we met them [in person]. By that time, we had known the majority of them for anywhere between four and five years, or even longer than that.
What was your favorite part of the wedding?
Amanda: I liked the script and my cake topper. But the script was probably the best thing. In our script, I put some game euphemisms into our vows.
Jeremy: So instead of "in sickness and health…"
Amanda: It said "in full health bars and rez sickness." My friends giggled at that part and everyone else who didn't get it just kind of was like, "What?"
Did the person who officiated know what was up?
Amanda: I had to teach him how to say the greetings in Orcish and Elven. One of the greetings for Orcish is "Aka'Magosh." He had no idea how to say that so I had to sit there with him and repeat it over and over again until he understood how to say it correctly. He was open to everything. He thought it was cool and it was something different than his standard wedding that he normally does.
You guys mentioned you're excited for the movie because it comes around the time of your anniversary. Are you planning something special?
Amanda: We're going to get a babysitter for our daughter and then go to dinner and go see it. We're not going to dress up but I'm pretty sure I'm going to wear my shirt that says, "I'd rather be playing WoW."
Have you celebrated any previous anniversaries with WoW-themed activities?
Amanda: No, but we have a date night. We pick a night that we either are farming together, or we do twinking where we're leveling characters.
Jeremy: And we've got Lily.
Amanda: I had our daughter basically a year after we got married. She's actually named after my character, Lilyia.
JEN, 30 AND NICK, 35, MARRIED TWO YEARS
Occupation: web management (Jen); retail supervisor (Nick)
Hometown: Westborough, Massachusetts
How did you meet?
Jen: We actually met through eHarmony, but since we both played the game, we could talk through the game a lot easier than through anything else.
Nick: She lived in Massachusetts and I lived in New Hampshire, so it wasn't always easy to go out and see each other every night. So we'd log in to World of Warcraft and play together. We didn't realize we both played until our first or second date, and then we were like, "Awesome." I actually started a character on her server so I could play with her.
Who decided that you would incorporate Warcraft into the ceremony?
Jen: I think it was a group decision, but it was definitely his idea to make all the weapons.
What other details made it a Warcraft wedding?
Jen: We had special [themed] drinks our venue made for us. The table names were named after bosses in the game, and instead of bride's side and groom's side, we had Horde and Alliance side.
Nick: Which none of our family understood. We had, like, three people at our wedding that actually got it. I made a treasure chest from the game and we filled it with some treasure. With my wife's help, we created coins on the computer and then sent them out to a company that actually stamped them, so we got a couple hundred gold coins to hand out as favors and that looked pretty darn awesome in the treasure chest. We took the logo from the Alliance side and took the lion head out and put our initials in it [and put that on the coins].
[Our first dance] started with "Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros … and halfway through we cut into "(Do You Wanna Date My) Avatar" which was a Felicia Day song from The Guild, which is kind of a spoof off of World of Warcraft. We did our dances from our World of Warcraft characters. She was doing the Draenei dance and I was doing the Human Male.
What was your favorite part of the wedding?
Nick: Can I say getting married?
Jen: Getting married.
Nick: I had a lot of fun with the pictures because we were running around with the weapons and doing poses with them. Pretty much anytime any of the guests could get a hand on a weapon, they were out taking pictures, and it was just a lot of fun.
Have you celebrated any of your anniversaries with anything Warcraft-related?
Jen: No, but I think we're planning to for our five-year.
Nick: I want to have a second round of coins made up. I'm thinking throughout our marriage every big milestone, we'll have another set of the coins made so we can have a treasure chest that's full of our lovely treasure.
Do you still play Warcraft?
Nick: We actually stopped playing right around the time of the wedding. But the CEO of Activision [which owns Blizzard, the company that created Warcraft] contacted us and asked if he could send us a wedding gift. We were like, "Heck yeah, you can definitely send us a wedding gift!" We were thinking we were gonna get some awesome helmet or something from the game … but it was the most traditional gift we received out of the entire wedding.
Jen: It was a crystal ice bucket and crystal champagne flutes.
Nick: And a bottle of Dom Perignon. It was a lovely gift; it was absolutely amazing. They also sent a note that said that they were happy that their game could help bring some people together, and the CEO had signed it. I actually liked that better than the gift itself because it was just cool that he had hand-signed it.
ASHLEY, 27 AND JOSH, 29, MARRIED ONE YEAR
Occupation: medical coding student (Ashley); station agent (Josh)
Hometown: Wrangell, Alaska
How did you meet?
Josh: It was pretty random. She had a boyfriend at the time, and her boyfriend and her little brother and she were all playing Warcraft, and they were looking for another party member to run this dungeon. I said, "Oh yeah, I know that dungeon really well, I'll come along," and we ended up spending probably six hours in there. We added each other to our friends lists and that probably would have been the end of it, but then I saw her in game again probably a day or two later … and then we just stayed in touch over the years.
What were your characters when you met in the game?
Josh: I was a shaman named Crimly and my wife Ashley here was a druid. What was your druid's name?
Ashley: My name was Ashli with an "i" instead of an "e-y." A friend of mine showed me the game when I was super young, and I thought it was absolutely ridiculous and I was like, "I'm never gonna play this, this is absolutely stupid." So instead of making up a cool, awesome name, I just put whatever I could in there, and it kind of stuck because I ended up playing the game for way longer than I expected.
How long did you know each other before you started dating?
Josh: Probably five years.
Ashley: We had kind of stayed in contact via the game, and I think both of us had kind of transitioned to [where we would] play for a little bit then kind of give it up. Via social media and Skype and everything, we had stayed in contact, and then we were just randomly texting one day and found out both of us were single. My handsome husband here had a job for the airline industry, and as soon as he found out we were both single, he invited me to come visit him in Alaska. I was absolutely terrified because I've seen Dateline and CNN, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, I'm not gonna go visit in a stranger in Alaska." So he offered to give me home court advantage and meet where I lived, which was in Arizona, so I said, "Yeah, sure, he's never gonna fly to Arizona to meet me, that's insane." And so he did!
Was anything about your wedding Warcraft-themed?
Ashley: No. We had considered incorporating some aspects of it and then it just never happened.
Josh: But her maid of honor was actually someone she met on the game as well.
What did your family think of the fact that you met playing Warcraft?
Josh: Both of our families know that we're huge nerds. Her little brother was actually on the run that we met on [in the game], so he was all about it. People always ask, "How did you meet?" and the easiest thing to say is, "Online." And then if they press for further details it turns into a really long explanation.
Do you still play?
Ashley: Sometimes.
Josh: Every now and then. We've actually been playing one of Blizzard's other games called Heroes of the Storm. There's a character that's a two-headed ogre named Cho'gall, and one person controls the movement and the other character controls all the spells. So we're like the husband-wife team that controls the two-headed ogre. I'm the feet so I run us around.
Ashley: I'm the spell caster. I don't enjoy the stress of having to move out of the way of things.
Are you planning to see the movie together?
Ashley: Yeah, we're really excited for it. We probably won't dress up.
Josh: I think as I approach 30, I'm a lot more rational about dressing up, but there was a day when I would have been there in costume.
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