I reached level 80 in World of Warcraft today. This is the first time in any MMORPG that I’ve reached the level cap, and the character with whom I achieved it is the one I started playing on the day the game was released. My friend Tim also reached the milestone in the early hours of this morning, having originally started at the same time as me.

For those who have never got into an MMORPG, talk of reaching the level cap being “just the beginning” of the experience sounds like absolute nonsense. After all, reaching the level cap in a single-player RPG just means that you don’t need to grind any more and can zip through the rest of the story with ease. But reaching 80 in Warcraft, or 50 in City of Heroes, or the rather more casual-player friendly 20 in Guild Wars, is simply a sign of maturity.

In fact, the whole “levelling up as metaphor for life” idea is, on reflection, quite a potent one. Bear with me on this one.

You’re born. You come into the world knowing nothing about it. Everything is new to you. You spend your time exploring, finding out how to do things. Some things you find out for yourself, others you are taught. You’re weak and feeble. You often need help doing things. You make friends. You quickly learn the people to avoid. And all the time, you are learning, growing stronger.

As time goes on, you eventually reach a stage where you have outgrown your home. It doesn’t offer you any challenges any more, so you move on. You say a fond farewell to the familiar surroundings of your home and spread your wings, and during this time you continue to learn new things. Your challenges become greater, and you sometimes still need help, but at other times you can do things for yourself. On the occasions where you return home, everything suddenly feels much smaller. Things which once offered you a huge amount of challenge are now mere trifles to be knocked aside as you pass through.

Time passes. You continue to learn and grow. You move further and further away from your home until you eventually reach a stage where you feel like the world is your oyster. There are still some challenges which seem insurmountable, even with help, but you are feeling more independent. You still feel that you have a lot to learn, and you run into people who have more experience than you regularly, but you know that you are much more capable of finding things out for yourself.

Eventually, after what feels like an extremely long journey, you reach maturity. You are independent. You can go anywhere, you can do anything. You could co-operate with others for a common good. Or you could pursue your own personal goals. You could take possession of bigger and better things to help you become stronger, but there’s nothing more for you to learn. But there are still challenges to overcome. Challenges of your own deciding.

In Warcraft, reaching 80 is reaching maturity. You can go anywhere and do anything. There are no new skills or spells to learn, no way of working to become stronger. It’s all up to you and your possessions to prove your worth. And at this point, being an “adult”, other people start to look up to you. The people who are still at the beginning of their journey look at you, seemingly at the end of yours, and believe that you are someone who knows what they are doing. But you might not. Just because you’ve negotiated the perils of childhood, puberty, adolescence and young adulthood doesn’t mean that you know everything. You might not want to be a leader. You might still want someone to tell you what to do, even though you’re theoretically strong enough to make it on your own.

I often find that online games tend to reflect social values quite nicely. Past experiences with Second Life, in particular, have been interesting, but the same thing happens in Warcraft. I’m nearly thirty years old, but in my daily life I still don’t feel like a “leader”. I’d feel weird if I was placed in charge of a group of people, and it’s the same when I join a party in Warcraft. I don’t have the experience of leadership, though I do have other skills. So I wouldn’t want to be the one bossing a party or a raid around, but I’m happy to follow orders and give my own ideas. It’s the same in reality – I’m happy to follow someone else’s instructions and suggestions, and occasionally chip in myself, but were I to be in charge of a group of people? I’m not sure how I’d handle that.

I guess my past work in teaching is technically a “leadership” role, so I have done it in the past. And I’m completely comfortable showing people how to do things, or explaining things to them. I think the thing which I find most difficult is being decisive on behalf of other people. I fear looking stupid in front of others, or deciding something that turns out not to be of mutual benefit to everyone. So I defer to others. Now, admittedly, in real life you’re unlikely to suffer a “wipe” as a result of a bad decision you made. But there are other ways that things can go wrong. Feelings can be hurt. You can find yourself in a situation you’re not sure how to get out of. Worse, you can feel you’ve trapped other people in a situation you don’t know how to get out of.

Decisiveness is clearly an art to learn, whether you’re a level 80 mage or a level 0 everyman. And there’s no class trainer to help you with that one!