WoW can be a solitary place ... if you want it to be. (©2006 Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved.)

After three years and a total /played time I probably won’t admit to, my “World of Warcraft” account has breathed its last gasp. I think a lot of my friends who don’t play view my time in Azeroth as wasted, but all in all, it was a learning experience. I don’t want the WoW talk to take over the blog, so over the next couple of weeks I’ll be posting periodically about some of the things I learned while glued to my computer screen.

The first lesson was that being an introvert doesn’t mean you can’t play MMORPGs. I loved the “Warcraft” real-time strategy games, and I’m a big fan of RPGs in general. So hearing a “Warcraft” RPG was on the horizon back in 2001 made me skip around Best Buy … until I learned it was going to be multiplayer. Whenever I take Myers-Briggs type tests, my introvert score is around 90 percent, and I was sure I’d hate an MMORPG. I only dipped my toe in the WoW water after HowStuffWorks started talking about writing an article about the game. The article was temporarily shelved, but by the time we made that call my tiny druid had taken on a life of her own.

Once I got into the game, it became obvious that playing didn’t mean getting to know all those massive multiples out there. Most of the people I met were in my guilds — guilds I chose because I had real-life friends in them.  It’s also easy to cut down on how much you see of people you don’t know. Leaving public chat channels gets rid of a lot of random chatter. There are also addons to block random duel requests and other annoyances. Turning off /yell in the chat settings silences the Stormwind screamers. If you wanted to, you could also turn off player names, making all those other folks look a lot like erratically behaving NPCs — but doing so on a PvP server might be hazardous to your toon’s health.

That doesn’t mean it was all smooth sailing. There were times when guildies just didn’t get that my desire to solo was all about me, not them. And you do miss out on some things if you avoid groups at all costs. It’s not just loot — a lot of my favorite memories of the game came from conversations in guild chat or during raids.

Any other WoW introverts out there?

Next up in this series: No. 4: Manage Your Aggro.

The rest of the top 5:
No. 3: The Hidden Meaning of “I’m Bored”
No. 2: Sweating the Small Stuff
No. 1: Failure is Awesome

More on games at HowStuffWorks.com:
How World of Warcraft Works
Halo 2 and the Art of Storytelling
How Guitar Hero Works