About MMORPGs

Accounts of the scourge pour in from around the globe. The University of Texas at Dallas offers advice for compulsive Internet users alongside information about eating disorders. In some countries, it has become an official matter, too. A government public-awareness campaign in Zurich cautions the Swiss: “Spending lots of time in virtual worlds, especially chat rooms, online games and sex sites, can lead to a dependence comparable to other addictions.”

Young people are most often said to be at risk for Internet-related disorders, especially those involved in MMORPGs, or Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, in which millions of subscribers world-wide can compete for virtual prizes. A Shanghai youth got life in prison last year after he killed someone in a dispute over a stolen “virtual” sword. A Korean man reportedly died after a 50-hour marathon game session. Yet we’re also told that no one is immune: kids, adults, rich, poor–you know the drill. At least one expert has identified a particular threat to lonely older women.

Her boyfriend first signed on to World of Warcraft in their Colorado Springs apartment on Dec. 27, 2004. Since then, he’s spent 17 days, 20 hours and 32 minutes in the game.

“He’s lost in it,” says Megan. “Nothing gets done.”

Megan’s boyfriend has dropped 14 pounds. He works nights, but instead of sleeping during the day, he sits in front of the computer, working on his warlock. His fingers are stained yellow from chain-smoking cigarettes. He’s played for 18 hours straight at times.

Before I realized it, it was 4pm the next day; I’d played for 11 hours straight and missed all my lectures.
This in itself I still don’t think was addictive behavior. It was a new shiny thing and I just wanted to see it. We started our guild up with all my old NS mates and had some fun. Over the term though, I started to become addicted. I’d get up out of my bed, play wow, go to a lecture (sometimes), come back and play wow.

That was to remind me how long I’d, well I’m gonna say wasted, on Warcraft. I say wasted because for the large part of it I wasn’t having fun. I was grinding as a prerequisite to getting to the dungeons to have fun.

It’s been a little over 3 years since I wrote this essay, and I wanted to put up a short note on how my thinking has since changed on the issue. While I believe that problematic usage is an important issue to discuss, I’ve come to feel that it is also a very distracting issue, much like the focus on violence and aggression in video game research. When the media incessantly claims that “EverCrack will eat your babies”, it traps us in the defensive and prevents us from talking about other much more interesting things happening in online games.