Divorce by MMORPG.
A sad collection of letters from partners of MMORPG addicts. Some of the behavior described is disturbing to say the least:
I am sitting here with tears running down my face. I have just printed the basic papers required to file for divorce.
Divorce, my 2nd. First from an abusive raging alcoholic. 2nd? From a once incredibly sweet, kind loving devoted husband who now spends every waking minute playing EQ. I try to think back on when it all went wrong… 2 years ago? 3 years ago? Probably even before that when he was playing other games where they had weekends away for their Quake tournaments.
That’s sad in that she wasted three years of her life hoping the guy would grown out of it. Hindsight is wonderful sometimes. On the other hand, the following excerpt is, well, a different type of sad:
My boyfriend has tried to suck me into his everquest hole before; sometimes it’s funny but other times it really hurts. He would bring this big everquest manual with him everywhere, even on our dates, I guess he thought he could get me to read it.
Yikes!
Been there, done that (nearly) — with Civilization. that game was _dangerous_!
I know its mad, I read during the week about a young woman who died after playing one of these games for three to four days non-stop, which is apparently not unusual.
There was even a funeral/memorial online in the game for her, bloody mad. She’s dead after playing a computer game, jaysus come on!
I know these things can be addictive, I am also currently logged into flickr, an addiction in itself. But real life, no matter what, no matter how bad, is real life, not virtual reality.
Absolutely, it is easy to loose touch with reality – blogging might be considered a similiar addiction! I’m sure the Everquest Daily Grind blog is only scraping the surface of how obsessive people get when playing these games – I can imagine most would not want their behaviour documented in any way.
Back when when I was in college in UL, we had keycode access to a couple of the computer systems labs. This was to allow us to work on our projects 24/7, obviously their way of training us to get used to the strange working hours of commercial software development!. This was back in ‘95 when MMORPGs didn’t even exist, back when MUDs were as sophisticated as it got (ah, Mortal Realms, I remember you well). But LAN based gaming was just becoming popular around that time. I’m pretty sure Quake (and Civilization, I know what you mean Justin) probably knocked a few points off my final QCA as a result. I still play a little Halo 2 online but it’s a real take-it-or-leave-it stress reliever for me – there is no plot or long-running theme – each game lasts 10 minutes and that’s it.
A decrease in national productivity is the only thing that will prompt governments to look at this, and I’m not even sure that is really a role we want our government to play. For example countries like China (where MMORPG usage is huge they are attempting to introduce fatige rules into the games that rewards the player less and less the longer they play. It will be interesting to watch where this all goes…
“My boyfriend has tried to suck me into his everquest hole before; sometimes it’s funny but other times it really hurts. ”
Sounds like the start of a Ricki Lake show
lol ronan, to bad that this thing is real