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When Keith at the office gives me World of Warcraft, bidding me to “spend a bit of time with it — it’s really addictive”, I do that special thing that women can do whereby you roll your eyes inside your head, secretly, to show that you know more than the men. Yeah, right, I’m going to get addicted to World of Warcraft. Yeah, right, I’m going to join a worldwide online community of more than eight million people, running around a gigantic and complex fantasy world, engaged on a series of quests. It’s all highly unlikely. If I had to marry one of the cast of The Lord of the Rings, it would be Sam Gamgee — the completely prosaic, normal, nonmagic one, who comes across like the owner of a garage in Cricklewood having a particularly bad day, what with this vexatious epic quest and all.

In a nutshell: dragons embarrass me.

The game didn’t quite fit into my handbag, and I was slightly self-conscious about people spotting it as I caught the Tube. The last time I felt so embarrassed about the visible contents of my handbag was last spring, when I was carrying around a gigantic book on the history of the Ku Klux Klan. For two long months that book made me want to shout “I’m reading this because I know they were bad — not to get tips!” to any halfway full carriage. Similarly, a visible copy of World of Warcraft makes me want to shout: “I don’t seek to nullify my rampant sexual dysfunctions by pretending to be a Paladin called Thrusthammer Orcbash! IT’S FOR WORK!” Of course, the person I want to shout this to the most is myself. I am the judgmental one here. By and large, my theory runs, people who are into goblins and wizards are people within the autistic spectrum of behaviour, for whom the utopian sexual and racial equality offered by, say, sci-fi, is alarming. All those black chicks in Lycra jumpsuits philosophising about the fallible nature of humanity, and able to vote? Brrrr! In short, the entire fantasy genre is the domain of the sweaty, white, nonintellectual Herbert, and has very little to offer me — a sassy, metropolitan, militant feminist with an aversion to a) items of clothing made of skinned Gnoll hide, and b) swinging at someone with a two-headed axe.

Imagine my surprise, then, on being able to write the following sentence: on the first day I had World of Warcraft , I stayed up and played it until 2am. I got into bed at 10pm, switched on the electric blanket and opened my laptop, with the simple objective of “getting my bearings” for 20 minutes. Three hours later I was trying to retrieve the stolen journals of Grelin Whitebeard from a cave full of Rockjaw Troggs, while running a very lucrative trade in killing and skinning boars on the side. Then I accidentally got on the Deeprun Tram to Stormwind City, and had to bale out when I realised that I was far too poor to be in a city where “Heavy Mithril Pants” are 27 pieces of silver. 2am! I was so engrossed that I forgot to take my contact lenses out, and fell asleep with them glued to my eyes.

Although I am pathologically, fatally prone to exaggeration, it would be a simple statement of fact to say that World of Warcraft is as addictive as methadone. Indeed, when Robbie Williams recently went into rehab with the ostensibly risible addictions of Red Bull and espresso, I thought: “It’s just as well you have never been on Coldridge Pass trying to deliver a package of Kobold reports to Senir Whitebeard. Then, my friend, you would know true craving.” As with all good drugs, World of Warcraft has turned my perceptions of the world upside-down. Take, for instance, the very beginning of the game, when you decide on the character you will play. Personally, I’ve never created a character to play a game with before — hey, I have to do that in front of the wardrobe every morning for real, and I think all the ladies will know what I’m saying here. But when it’s for an inconsequential internet diversion, and you have almost infinite choice of what you will become — good, evil, male, female, human, weird minotaur thing with problem hair — it brings to the fore several profound self-realisations. My inner self, it turns out, is a beefy ginger dwarf, one with a huge beard. He is who I want to be. He is secret Caitlin. Discovering this is the kind of thing troubled celebrities pay the therapist Beechy Colclough thousands of pounds to discover. I had done it in seven minutes, and with a choice of beard stylings to boot.

I named him “Scottbaio” — you remember: Chachi in Happy Days ; the obvious ginger dwarf name — and launched him out into the world. Still, at this point, deeply sceptical about the game, I had preformulated a plan to make the whole experience tolerable. Whereas the ultimate purpose of most participants is to overcome the evil Horde through a series of pitched battles and strategic quests, I had come up with something a little more subtle. I thought the best way to quell the Horde would be gradually to gentrify the Killing Fields, starting by opening a deli and selling speciality cheese. After all, the lure of endless, sensual evil is as nothing compared to a good, spoonable vacherin. Those demons would be capitulating, buying a Victorian terrace and coming over to the Alliance in no time.

However, as a new émigré to the realm of Sha’tar, I knew that the deli was something I’d have to work up to slowly. I spent an hour tootling around a pretty snowy mountain running a few errands — delivering parcels, relaying messages, buying nicer boots, earning a bob or two; already the addictive side of WoW was becoming apparent — through a cunning combination of small, quick tasks and longer, more complex ones that can be chipped away at over time, there’s always something you could “pop in” and do, or just spend “ten minutes more” knocking off. And — contrary to all perceptions of online gaming being a lonely, solitary pursuit for, ahem, “bachelors” — I found WoW to be an excellent and rewarding family pastime. My two daughters — aged 6 and 3 — were thrilled to sit next to me, watching Mummy kill the pigs and jump over fences.

Indeed, I was just marvelling at how female-friendly and “untestosteroney” it was, compared with what I expected, when a member of the Horde, Hellfist, began stoving my head in from behind. Having no idea what to do, I fell back on my old playground technique: I tried to talk my way out of it: “Please don’t smite me, I’m having an asthma attack!” I type. “I’ve come on a quest by accident; if you hit me, it’ll be murder!” Hellfist makes a clucking chicken sound, to highlight my cowardice, and hits me until I die. When I resurrect in a nearby graveyard, Cadisfael, a dwarf warrior, is sitting next to me. “I ownz you, n00b,” he says.

“I’m afraid I’m 31, and don’t have a clue what you’re on about,” I say, as primly as a ginger dwarf named after the over-emotional one from Happy Days can.

“That means that you are a newbie, and I own you. You are my bitch,” Cadisfael explains, patiently.

“Do 1, you Herbert,” I say, trying to jump over a fence.

“Cait, it’s me, Joe,” Cadisfael says, jumping over the fence with ease, and then executing an impressive Russian dance. It’s my 14-year-old mathematics genius brother, Joe! He’s tracked me down on line! Jesus!

“I’ve had to regenerate with a new character here,” he says, rather crossly, as we walk up a mountain. “I don’t usually come to this realm. Sha’tar is for newbie losers. I’m usually in Hellscream, with the hardcore. Over there I’m a Level 66 mage, with an epix mount.” “I’m in a much higher tax bracket than you,” I counter, trying to smash him with my giant dwarf hammer. He easily dodges the blow.

I’d like to pretend that Joe and I then spent the next week or so bonding in our fantastical realm — going on daring raids on the goblin mines together, before drinking a flagon of hot Rhapsody Malt back at the Scarlet Raven tavern. In actual fact, Joe is so repulsed by the easiness of my realm that he logs off after an hour, with a cheery farewell of “I ownz you, n00b! Pwnz!”, which he then has to log back on to explain means a kind of “zapping sound that you make when you hit someone”. Still, he’s given me some good tips: find a trainer who will teach me new smiting spells, earn money skinning boars, spend the money on armour, and don’t chat to people too much — they find it weird.

I flagrantly disregard this last rule ten minutes later, in a bar at Anvilmar, where I try to start a conversation with a room of saturnine-looking dwarf warriors. “They need a jukebox in here,” I suggest, to kick-start the debate. “Some Queen, bit of classic Bowie. Guns’n’Roses. And maybe a frozen margarita machine. Razz the place up a bit.” A couple of implacable pugilists issue a polite “LOL” (Laugh out loud) — but then go back to buying huge and fatal swords from the weapons vendor. One small gnome girl called Flopsey, however, sidles over.

“Yeah — maybe a pub quiz, or a meat raffle?” she suggests. We sit down at the table and spend the next 20 minutes discussing what we’d like to see in WoW to cater for the female palate. We’d like the option of working as prostitutes, we decide: it would be a quick way of earning money. We’d like to be able to conceive and raise children, seeing whether they look like the father, teaching them our spells. We’d like a bigger range of wardrobe and hairstyles, and the ability to gain points simply by being amusing, or wise. Or pulling off a good outfit.

Indeed, it’s turning out to be a thoroughly enjoyable conversation, when Flopsey’s character suddenly issues the message “flirting”, and comes to my side of the table. Of course! She thinks I’m a buff ginger warrior-priest called Scottbaio! All this conversation about virtual prostitution has an entirely different spin from her side of the table! She wants my hot dwarf ass!

So here I am, a 31-year-old mother of two, at 2am, in bed in my Bliss Spa Socks, and having polymorphous cybersexual frisson with a 15-year-old gnome called Flopsey, who lives in Antwerp. Really, the modern age is a marvel.

Game on: other worlds to enter

Star Wars Galaxies: based on the films, it is built around ten planets. Players erect their own buildings and create cities.
Number of users: about 150,000
Popular with: sci-fi fans, older players
Key feature: realistic economy and sophisticated division of labour

Lineage: fantasy game involving a prince regaining his throne. “Karma system” penalises those who pick on weaker players
Number of users: 2.25 million-plus
Popular with: Koreans
Key feature: based on a comic book

RuneScape: fantasy game accessible through a web browser. Brunel University says it offers young people a “chance to develop important social and cultural skills which carry significance for real life”
Number of users: about 800,000 paying subscribers; nine million free subscriptions (supported by adverts)
Popular with: global following
Key feature: created in the UK by Andrew and Paul Gower, in a bedroom in their parents’ house

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