On Being a Digital Lumberjack

[This article was written by Renee Sima.]

My most memorable quest in Guild Wars 2 doesn’t involve any dragon slaying or airship battles. I started playing the MMORPG in October 2012, stepping into Tyria as Criafol, a naive sylvari Ranger born with the nigh impossible Wyld Hunt — a fated personal quest — of defeating Zhaitan, the Elder Dragon of death and decay. Criafol and I wandered across Tyria attempting to pet every fluffy critter we met, no matter how deadly. We delved into jungle caverns infested with way too many spiders, herded dolyaks across the icy mountain paths of the Shiverpeaks, battled restless ghosts in the ancient battlefields of Ascalon, and eventually led the charge in an epic airship battle at the head of a multinational effort to finally kill Zhaitan once and for all. 

Instead, my quest involved cutting down a frankly unreasonable number of trees.

Even though I’ve always been that guy who will side-eye your unsorted recycling —seriously, my six-year-old self talked way too much about dolphin safe tuna — I can’t deny my attraction to chopping down virtual forests. I have an irrational fondness for crafting systems, no matter how tacked on or tedious, as I love the self-sufficient fantasy of fighting with a weapon that I made myself. So I invariably find myself wandering into the forest to unleash my inner lumberjack.

I’ve felled trees to make makeshift bridges for my army in Fire Emblem, punched them to pieces with my bare fists in Minecraft, accidentally passed out mid-swing in Stardew Valley, and frantically scavenged twigs to avoid death by darkness in Don’t Starve. From the start of my journey in Tyria, I ignored the many guides that calculated the cheapest and most efficient pathway to attaining crafting mastery based on dynamically updating trading post prices. I preferred the simple satisfaction of progression through discovery of new recipes and gathering the materials myself.

In 2015, Guild Wars 2’s first expansion, Heart of Thorns, took the battle against the Elder Dragons to the hostile Maguuma Jungle, where Mordremoth, the dragon of plants and madness, made his lair. While Heart of Thorns added a lot of exciting new features, I most anticipated the overhaul of the legendary weapons system. These difficult-to-obtain weapons offer slight stat increases and a few quality-of-life benefits, but they’re mostly sought after for their big and impressive particle effects. Guild Wars 2 isn’t affectionately known as Fashion Wars for nothing. Thus far, there was only one legendary per weapon type*, so you needed to theme your whole character around the visuals of the weapon. Sometimes, it just didn’t fit your existing outfit: the rainbows and blinding white sparkles of the legendary staff Bifrost are whimsical and delightful in a vacuum, but it doesn’t look quite right when wielded by your dark and gloomy necromancer. With Heart of Thorns, developer Arenanet announced the creation of a whole new set of legendary weapons, as well as a major update to the crafting process of every legendary weapon.

Each Generation 1 legendary weapon required a unique precursor weapon that could only be found as an ultra-rare loot drop. Acquiring the specific precursor you wanted was literally luck of the draw, so most players simply bought them at the trading post. The expansion introduced a system to earn precursor weapons through in-game achievements in order to create a stronger link between the visual aesthetic of the finished legendary weapon and the gameplay experience of acquiring one. Rather than just opening the trading post and forking over hundreds of gold, players would have to traipse all over Tyria, and conquer jumping puzzles, defeat specific foes, or collect thematic materials.

In the three years since I started the game, I’d never tried to make a legendary, as none of the existing set appealed to me enough to really want to buy a precursor from the trading post. This updated version of a legendary quest was exactly what I was waiting for, and, on top of that, the newly announced legendary staff Nevermore was a perfect fit for my first character, Criafol. The completed Nevermore staff serves as the roost for a hand-raised raven, blessed by the Great Raven Spirit as a gift for your services in protecting the wilds of Tyria. Crafting Nevermore involves crisscrossing the continent while fighting off poachers, cleaning up hazardous waste poisoning local waterways, meditating at places of power on the summits of snowy peaks, and defending wild spirits from intrusions by darker forces from other planes of existence. 

There was a catch – though this new system was going to create a consistent pathway towards obtaining a legendary, owning a legendary had to remain exclusive. Anyone who’s ever played an MMORPG knows that prestige is attached to a long grind, a huge gold sink, a high skill check, or all three. Any easier type of achievement would quickly proliferate the entire player base and quickly cease to be impressive. Among the combat and meditation and waste clean up, building Nevermore required a lot of wood: 4,680 Hard Wood Logs, 3,120 Soft Wood Logs, 2,430 Seasoned Wood Logs, 486 Ancient Wood Logs, and 18,480 Elder Wood Logs, for a total of 29,196 logs.

I could have done the sensible thing. I could have farmed the Silverwastes and Fractal 40, the highest yield gold farms available at the time, and bought the wood in bulk on the trading post. However, I was enamored with the idea of doing a capital letter Legendary Quest for my characters, and running around in circles in the Silverwastes didn’t feel particularly Legendary to me. There’s not really an epic or unique legend to be told about beating the same boss hundreds of times in a row**.

Instead, I decided that I was going to personally chop down every tree needed to craft my staff. Each wood farming node scattered around Tyria yields three logs of one type of wood, and respawns every few hours. I would need to track down 9,732 trees in total. The cast animation of using a logging axe is 6,370 ms to chop down each tree, which works out at about 17.2 hours of sheer animation time, though that could be reduced significantly though animation canceling. I was going to preserve the intended design of exploring the wilds of Tyria by never farming the same map twice in a row, which we can call sustainable forestry. There was a certain irony to setting off on an epic quest to preserve the wilderness with a logging axe in hand, but I wanted this adventure to feel wholly mine.

Around the same time that I started my long quest for Nevermore, my real life was undergoing real turmoil, as my once-clear and direct life path started crumbling before my eyes. A series of incomplete assignments at my university turned into a year-long mandatory leave of absence and academic probation. Unable to cope with the stress of my academic failures, I ghosted my lab manager and mentor (sorry, Dr. Raizen), and I realized that I needed to entirely reconsider my childhood dream of becoming a research scientist. After moving out of my dorm mid-semester, I was stuck in my parents’ new home in rural Pennsylvania without access to a car, away from both my childhood roots in upstate New York and my new friends from college, who all seemed to be leaving me behind for bigger and better things. My parents, drawing on lessons learned from their own PhD programs, attempted to help me fix my mental health problems by pushing me harder academically, reasoning that I’d feel better once I pushed through finishing my assignments. They instituted weekly check-ins for the incomplete essays I needed to submit in order to finish the classes that I withdrew from. I couldn’t even leave the house without them agreeing to chauffeur me. I felt like a twenty-year-old woman trapped in the life of a middle school girl, nervously waiting for my parents to check my homework before being cleared to take a break.  

Even if I did leave the house, I didn’t have anywhere to go, nor did I have anyone to go with. Every single one of my relationships now fit into the lines of text and chat bubbles coming from the ever-present glow of my laptop screen. While I had always been comfortable conducting most of my social interactions through a screen from the comfort of my bedroom, communication now felt more like a prison than an escape. Most of my friends’ lives still revolved around school, and it took real effort to not fall into the well-worn grooves of conversation around classes, assignments, and summer internships, all topics that were increasingly anxiety-inducing reminders of milestones that I was supposed to be hitting.

I found my solace in chipping away at a long term goal in Tyria. Unpacking years of unhealthy coping mechanisms in therapy felt like scrambling up and tumbling down shifting sand dunes. As any therapist will tell you, the process of healing is not a linear progression. Conversely, every swing of my axe in Tyria put me exactly one swing closer to my final goal. Whether I just logged into Cursed Shores for a minute to chop down the circle of Cypress Saplings I’d parked my character at or spent an hour meticulously combing Timberline Falls for every Pine Sapling on the map, I’d log out of every session of Guild Wars with tangible progress towards Nevermore. It was a far cry from staring at the same unfinished final paper for months, tweaking a sentence here and adding a comma there in the morning, then undoing it all in disgust in the afternoon.

If I decided to take a break from chopping down trees, Nevermore would wait for me. It was the only part of my life that didn’t feel like it had a ticking time bomb attached to it — my graduation year slipped forward, placing me further and further out of sync with my peers; my decision date for a new major and new life direction loomed; my deadline to turn those incomplete classes into passes instead of fails grew closer daily. Completing Nevermore was solely for my own satisfaction, and my methodology was solely my own choice. It didn’t really matter to anyone but me whether I finished Nevermore this week, this month, or even this year. When I stepped out of my bedroom and into Tyria’s forests, I could focus on the perfection of micro-deciding efficient pathing between harvestable trees and speed-boosting skill rotations, letting my macro-indecision toward concepts so large they overwhelmed me fade into the background. While I didn’t know what my next semester looked like, nor what my future career path could even feasibly be, I always knew exactly what I was working towards in Tyria.

In real life, I’d come out of a therapy session having spent an hour learning exercises to replace negative self-talk with phrases like “perfect is the enemy of good” or “tomorrow is another day,” only to be given constant, immediate feedback that I needed to turn in a perfect – not just good – assignment by the deadline, and not a day later. It turns out that it’s hard to cultivate a true acceptance of the present when the implicit purpose of the exercise is to tamp down the panic long enough to push through to a better future. I was trying to jam the techniques of mindfulness onto a life where there were concrete negative consequences to accepting my present imperfections, which was about as absurd as jamming a massive wood requirement onto a quest ostensibly about the conservation of natural resources.

In the philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus famously argued that one must imagine the mythological king Sisyphus to be happy in his damnation. The original Greek myth ends with Sisyphus punished by the gods to reach the top of a steep hill while pushing a boulder that is enchanted to roll back down right before the finish line. It is an impossible task. Camus argues that, due to the inherent conflict of humanity’s need for meaning and the uncaring silence of the universe, Sisyphus’s task is no more meaningless or absurd than any other human endeavor, but Sisyphus has the clarity that his struggle is futile. As a result, he is able to live clear-eyed in the present of his task, rather than putting his effort into hope and yearning for a potential future where the task is done. Camus writes, “All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing.” 

Nevermore was my thing. My entire life up to that point had been a constant sacrifice for my future self. I pulled countless all-nighters studying in order to get into a prestigious university, where I could do it all over again in order to enter a prestigious and well-paying career, where I could do it all over again in order to earn a well-funded retirement, where I might finally be able to actually do the things I wanted to do. As I attempted to reconstruct the very ground that my life was built upon, I kept wandering back into Tyria’s forests and chipping away at my silly little self-imposed quest. Though I wouldn’t read Camus or interact with absurdism for another ten years, I found my absolution in an absurd task that I had sole control over. While everything else in my life was clamoring to assert its future significance, I could come back to cutting down digital trees to make a digital staff knowing that it didn’t matter in the grand scheme of my life. I was swinging that axe solely because I wanted to, not because it was going to make my character stronger, or because it was going to look good on a resume. Because it meant nothing, it could mean anything – and that meant everything to me.

It took me about three years to finish making Nevermore. In that time, I went back to university, went off of academic probation, went back on academic probation, went on another mandatory leave of absence, went back to university again, and then, finally, graduated. Finishing Nevermore did not instantly endow me with a sense of Zen against the grind of the world. As Camus puts it, “One always finds one’s burden again.” However, every once in a while, as I descend the hill to start over for the umpteenth time, I hear the rhythmic thunk of axe on wood, and I smile.

*One for each weapon (18) and three for greatsword (3) for a total of 21 legendary weapons in Generation 1.

**Unless you involve some kind of timeloop. Now, there’s a character concept that I haven’t explored yet.