December 23, 2013 / KingsIsle Entertainment

What Wizard101 Means to Me – Friends Are Important

During the holidays, we’re running a contest through our “12 Days of the Spiral“. The question is – what has Wizard101 or Pirate101 meant to you and/or your family in the past year? Here is our thirteenth winner! Read how Wizard101 helped this father have quality time with their children as well as meet friends in the Spiral.

I am an adult and a dad and my 10-year old son Sam introduced Wizard101 to me. I was disinterested at first, seeing it as a waste of time and money and was amazingly dismissive of it. I didn’t like him making ‘friends’ online either. Eventually my young daughter Sophie wanted a wizard too when she saw Sam playing the game and so she started an ice wizard with pink hair and a unicorn. However, she couldn’t actually do anything more than walk around so she always badgered me to play for her. Well, I the end I gave in and did just that, and found myself slowly loving this game, this immersive world as I finished quests. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to play for myself and so I opened an account with a storm wizard. I was leery of everything at first and always denied friend requests, ploughing ahead on my own, and not taking part in anything I didn’t understand. Eventually, reluctantly, I accepted a friend and since then have never looked back.

I now have a house (the red barn farm) and am amazingly house-proud; I engage in planting and care for my plants deeply; I train pets and find myself feeling proud of them when they reach a new age or win a race; but most especially, I have really grown to enjoy the company of my online friends. What I love about Wizard101 the most is how it’s a perfectly safe community with people from all over the world (I myself am from New Zealand) that truly can come to respect each other. They might be girls playing boys, boys playing girls, adults playing as kids (and learning new internet buzz words!), or kids playing grown-ups, whites playing blacks, or blacks playing whites. It doesn’t matter: it’s all pretend yet incredibly safe and nurturing. I have made some brilliant friends, but there’s never any attempt to find out anything about you in real life, although over time, small clues can slip out.

I like being a friend that other friends can rely on, and now as I’m rising in level, being the powerful friend for new wizards and paying it forward, as old hands once taught me. But what I love the most about this game is how it’s another level of connection between me and my son. We can talk about this game if there’s nothing else to talk about. He’s my (more powerful) friend in The Spiral who gets to come to my rescue and help me out through this new life. It’s an inversion of the normal father/son relationship and it makes him proud and it makes me proud. Still nobody in the game knows about the bond we have and I don’t intend to tell anyone, just as they have no intention of telling me about themselves, and that’s just perfect to me. We can go online and be whoever we feel like being at the time. Mostly I want to be a good friend to the good friends I’ve made.